REVIEW: Chamber Fest Explores Dynamic Interactions Of Music, History’s Course

Paul Bodine
Classical Voice North America

August 30, 2026

LA JOLLA, Calif. — La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, founded in 1986, has long been one of California’s leading-edge presenting organizations. Powered by a winning formula of superb musicianship, imaginative programming, go-big, do-it-in-style leadership, and — since 2019 — a near-perfect venue (The Conrad), SummerFest has grown into a month-long firehose of (mostly) chamber-music concerts, plus coaching workshops, open rehearsals, “prelude” concerts, and lectures.

Two concerts in the festival’s second-to-last weekend illustrated the new standard set by pianist Inon Barnatan, SummerFest’s fourth music director. That model was reflected in both the imaginative repertoire (neglected works juxtaposed resonantly) and the bravura performances Barnatan and many other musicians deliver. Both the Aug. 21 “SummerFest at 40!” celebration and the exploration of early 20th-century British music two days later (“Old Country, New Age”) nicely fit Barnatan’s 2026 “Making History” theme: “music that changed the course of history [and] reflects the world from which it emerged.”

The Aug. 21 event featured SummerFest’s third music director, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, in a blend of self-celebration (John Williams’ intriguing Quartet La Jolla, composed in 2011 for the festival) and old-new contrasts: Witold Lutosławski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Steven Banks’ brand-new to be free (2026) and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence sextet, which had closed the first SummerFest concert on July 31, 1986.

Composed in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during his native Poland’s darkest days of World War II, Lutosławski’s Variations for two pianos is both an homage to the great Italian violin virtuoso’s best-known work and a declaration of compositional independence by the twenty-something composer. Barnatan and Jeremy Denk made spirited fun out of the difficult work though surrendered too easily to the temptation for virtuosic fireworks.

Quartet La Jolla is standalone evidence, if any were still needed, that John Williams is far from “only” a movie composer. Written for two of the musicians who performed it Aug. 21, Lin and clarinetist John Bruce Yeh, the quartet explores its inspired instrumentation — violin, cello, clarinet, harp — with an innovator’s instinct for possibilities of timbre and a spirit of compositional adventure.

Though Williams denies any “programmatic scheme,” the harp’s swirling textures and the composer’s fertile musical ideas continually conjured images of oceanic depths, wavelike shimmers, and the gawky tread of coastline life. San Diego Symphony harpist Julie Smith Phillips showcased her instrument’s soloistic charisma, and Yeh’s darting, searching journey in the fourth movement against furtive figures in the strings and harp cast a magnetic spell. With its Messiaen-like inflections, this tour de force belongs in the chamber repertoire.

One might expect a semiquincentennial classical piece celebrating America’s 250th birthday and Nina Simone to be a vexed or troubled work. Not only are these parlous times for the Republic, but Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, N.C.) was likely denied a classical career for reasons of race, gender, and perhaps socioeconomics. Yet North Carolina-born Banks’ 14-minute commemoration is, to its credit, all radiance and uplift.

Riding above the throbbing, swirling foundation created by violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, and piano, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano floated a wordless song of freedom that briefly included the audience (whom she’d earlier coached). Banks’ sweetly toned soprano saxophone (nicknamed “Nina”) duetted eloquently with Cano in this worthy addition to the limited repertoire for that instrument.

The birthday celebration concluded with a rousing, sometimes blistering, always unanimous take on Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence (1890-92), nicely dubbed by his English-language biographer as a “fine second-rate creation.”

Two days later, many of the musicians reconvened for something completely different: an afternoon of music composed across a 15-year span by three defining English composers: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, and William Walton. Each bore a different relation to the self-confident “glory” of Britain’s late-imperial age. Elgar personified it, Vaughan Williams channeled the folk and natural roots beneath it, and Walton, four years after the catastrophe of World War I, mocked it with modernist eyes.

On the surface, Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge (1908-9) — based on six poems from A. E. Housman’s wildly popular A Shropshire Lad — seems the pre-modern, pastoral antithesis of Walton and poet-librettist Edith Sitwell’s sardonic, cynical Façade: naturalistic imagery, church bells, and plough teams, quaint English place names, “simple” country folk. Even Vaughan Williams’ emotionally literal musical language seems to reinforce the surface meaning of Housman’s deceptively benign tales. But as tenor Robin Tritschlercommandingly projected Housman’s texts, they all gradually emerged as rather dark stories of loss and unnamed “trouble.” Was Vaughan Williams, five years before the Great War, already sensing in Housman’s haunting tales a looming cliff “edge” threatening England’s idyll?

Ten years later, Elgar composed his Piano Quintet in A minor as the full horror of the war sank in. Though pragmatically dedicated to a music critic (Ernest Newman), the piece was viewed by most reviewers as uneven. Had they heard the vigorous, dramatically paced, and unified performance given the work by Barnatan, violinists James Ehnes and Stephen Waarts, violist Timothy Ridout, and cellist Jonathan Swensen, their ambivalence might have dissolved.

This was Romantic-Era Elgar, with not a starched collar in sight. Yes, the Adagio flirts with sentimentality and the closing movement bears a slightly forced jolliness. But in wringing maximum emotion from this score, Barnatan and team threw questions of “historical perspective” aside: Elgar’s powerful, self-contained quintet is no comment on post- or prewar England, no apologies needed.

One of SummerFest’s charms is its willingness to take risks, not only in programming Walton’s distinctively English Façade at all but in casting one of our most important living (and very English) composers, Thomas Adès, as co-narrator of Sitwell’s venomous nonsense verse (think Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll with sharper teeth). Joining Adès as narrator was the up-and-coming conductor Stephanie Childress, another cross-cultural Brit. Alternating narration and conducting duties in the work’s 21 sections, Adès and Childress easily navigated Sitwell’s tongue-twisting, rapid-fire rap, the former favoring a dry, mordant delivery, the latter using facial expressions and well-timed gestures to land Sitwell’s zing.

Walton’s score and instrumentation (flute, cello, saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, and percussion) enhances Sitwell’s rhythmically inspired textual zest with musical equivalents: jazz, ragtime, foxtrots, tangos, waltzes, tarantellas, polkas, nautical music, Scottish dance, Swiss-flavored yodels, even Elgarian warmth, all inflected with the unmistakable modernist influence of Stravinsky and perhaps Schoenberg.

The La Jolla audience seemed to welcome the program’s novelty, but it was the musicians’ commitment and skill in putting it all across that inspired the afternoon’s standing ovation.