Jessie Montgomery, this season’s La Jolla SummerFest composer-in-residence, made her debut Thursday at The JAI. In this concert, we heard several of her works, enjoyed her performance on violin, and learned a bit about her style from her introductions from the stage of the JAI.
Montgomery’s Musings, an inventive catalogue of 12 duos for two violins, took center stage on Thursday’s program. Inspired by Béla Bartók’s classic 44 Duos for Two Violins, Montgomery has crafted short character pieces that frequently reflect dance and song traditions from the Central Europe and Africa, but each is set in her own bracing contrapuntal style. Although she does not renounce tonality, she is much more tolerant of dissonant clashes and wastes no time trying to resolve them to make everything come out “pretty.”
Noah Bendix-Balgley and Montgomery played her 12 duos with exuberant relish, exulting in her driving rhythms and, when her moods swings in the opposite direction, luxuriating in her dulcet melodies. Her final two duos make delightfully extravagant use of pizzicato technique, frequently outlining her themes with this vibrant technique and allowing the other three instruments to support these themes with gentle bowed accompaniment.
Montgomery’s 2008 Strum for string quartet is also structured around bright viola themes played with pizzicato, although the other quartet members occasionally get a change to pluck to their hearts’ content.
Hesper Quartet violist Shoji Yun made a splendid case for these plucked themes in Strum, and she was provided muscular collaboration from her Hesper Quartet colleagues first violinist Valerie Kim and cellist Connor Kim. For Strum, composer Montgomery took over the second violin part with gusto. She wrote those lines, so she knows precisely how the composer wants them delivered!
The complete Hesper Quartet played the “Allegro non troppo” movement from Antonín Dvořák’s beloved “American” Quartet, Op. 96. As this ensemble of young players demonstrated in their adroit performance of Patrick Castillo’s quartet Skyline Palimpsest on SummerFest’s opening weekend, their musical lines display a pellucid vitality while maintaining a shimmering balance among the voices. For a string quartet that is over programmed, Hesper made this movement of the “American” Quartet sound refreshingly buoyant and inviting.
The program opened with Montgomery’s single movement Peace for violin and piano, offered with ample heart and nuance by violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley and pianist Inon Barnatan. For the violin, the composer created long, languid themes that tended rhapsodic. The piano supplied rippling chords that paid homage to Impressionism without sounding derivative. The duo followed Dream with Claude Debussy’s song Beau soir in the customary Heifetz arrangement. Although more than a century separates the composition of these two pieces, they sounded as stylistically compatible as first cousins.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society as part of SummerFest 2025 on August 7, 2025, at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla.