REVIEW: From Music’s Castoffs, Festival Puts Together Concert Of Discovery
Richard Ginell
Classical Voice North America
August 18, 2026
LA JOLLA, Calif. — In a summer overflowing with music festivals — I’ve attended seven in California alone — the La Jolla Summerfest comes near the end of the string. This year’s edition in this posh, sun-drenched community overlooking the Pacific commemorates its 40th anniversary, and the eighth to be held in the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, a long-awaited facility with Yasuhisa Toyota-designed acoustics worthy of the music being played within it.
On a warm Sunday afternoon (Aug. 9) a week after opening night, the Summerfest theme of the day was “Lost And Found,” a very intriguing concept for armchair sleuths who are fascinated by pieces hidden for eons that suddenly turn up and upend established narratives. The program didn’t always follow the premise, nor did it always produce masterpieces. But it was still a good listen, right from the opening lecture by composer-annotator Patrick Castillo, who managed to use the summer’s most-talked-about movie, The Odyssey, as a jumping-off point.
First up was a pair of J.S. Bach pieces — one a recent discovery, the other a well-known standard. A Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1178, surfaced in a Brussels library in 1992, but it took 20 years for it to be authenticated as a genuine Bach composition; the discoverer, Peter Wollny, is “99.99%” sure about it. Equipped with an attached Fugue, it sounds worthy of Bach, though not as ingeniously constructed as the famous Chaconne for solo violin.
The kicker is that we heard it on the accordion, arranged and played by Radu Ratoi, followed by the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, similarly arranged — not really an outlandish idea, for Bach is miraculously adaptable on virtually all instruments. The rich accordion textures came strikingly close in sound to the orchestral transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski and the rest, more so than if played on an organ. While the shifting of directions of the bellows can produce a tiny pause that breaks up the line, Ratoi smoothed over the limitations of his instrument admirably and passionately.
A big burst of news about a very tiny piece occurred in 2024, when a previously unknown Chopin waltz was unearthed at the Morgan Library in New York (how did it get there?). Written on a postcard, the waltz begins tempestuously but quickly settles into Chopin’s unmistakable harmonic world, repeats in toto, and it’s over in just 80 seconds. While Lang Lang got the first performance on a recording, pianist Henry Kramer lovingly did the honors here, then took the stage again as part of a Trout Quintet-like group playing an early, long-withdrawn Piano Quintet by Vaughan Williams.
A classic example of a late bloomer, Vaughan Williams had yet to find his individual sound and style when he wrote this at age 31. Speaking as a VW devotee, sadly I find it to be a tedious half-hour exercise in heavy Germanic textures, especially the imitation-Brahms rhetoric that launches the first movement. It veers away from the Brahms sound soon enough yet still doesn’t contain a hint of the modal, folksong-based Vaughan Williams of the future — or anything other than generic Romantic meandering. Granted, it was lusciously played by Kramer, violinist Blake Pouliot, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, cellist Efe Baltacigil, and double bassist Anthony Manzo.
Now, what was Mozart’s long-established Horn Concerto No. 1 doing on a “Lost And Found” program? Beats me — and not even Castillo, nor the program book, nor the introductory film narrated by La Jolla music director Inon Barnatan could explain. Nevertheless, this cheery, confident, never-lost music graces any program lucky enough to have it, played with bubbly high spirits in a reduction for string quintet and Stefan Dohr’s deftly navigating horn.
Last and most definitely not least, the real find of this “Lost And Found” affair was a splendid Octet for an unorthodox lineup of instruments by a lost composer, Charles Martin Loeffler. He was an important part of the American concert scene in his lifetime: born in Germany, a longtime assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, a regular presence on concert programs. Then, after his death in 1935, his music was quickly and misleadingly discarded as old-hat, a throwback to the bad old days when 19th-century Germanic music — Herr Brahms in particular — shaped American composers. There was a long period when the only Loeffler piece that had any kind of wide circulation was a recording of the extravagantly lush A Pagan Poem by that champion of lost causes, Stokowski.
The Octet received its first performance in 1897, apparently hailed by all, then another that year — and after that, silence. It lay in the Library of Congress archives, unpublished, until April 2020, when the young Texas clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson spotted the manuscript there. He looked at it, thought he had found a masterpiece, spent a year editing and reconstructing the manuscript, and led or instigated more than a dozen performances of it around the U.S. from March 2024 through this summer, with more to come. Two recordings of the Octet have been released already, one with Johnson on the album Forgotten Sounds (Delos), the other from ever-prolific Music@Menlo LIVE.
It’s a lovely piece, and it sounds like nothing else in the literature that I know of. Consisting of three movements totaling a bit over a half-hour, the instrumentation consists of two clarinets, standard string quartet, and a harp and double bass that contribute an enriched lower register. This mixture produces a luminous texture that embraces German Romanticism, the whole-tone scale, modal chord sequences, and other strains mashed up into its own voice. It closes with a scampering Allegro alla Zingara movement that draws blood from the finale of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 without sounding derivative of it.
Most gratefully of all, the Octet holds up well upon repeated hearings — and it received a performance at La Jolla that probed even more deeply and with bolder colors and rubatos than previous renditions heard on the recordings. Joining Johnson in the clarinet section was Osmo Vänskä, the esteemed conductor laureate of the Minnesota Orchestra moonlighting skillfully on the instrument. Vänskä’s wife, Erin Keefe, was the first violinist, joined by Andrew Wan (second violin), Matthew Lipman (viola), Sterling Elliott (cello), Manzo (double bass), and Julie Smith Phillips (harp). Given more committed performances like this, the Loeffler Octet will be forgotten no more.