Even before pianist Inon Barnatan became the La Jolla SummerFest Music Director in 2019, regular patrons of the La Jolla Music Society’s programming experienced the electric combination of cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Barnatan. This formidable duo offered sonatas by Debussy and Rachmaninoff on a La Jolla Music Society concert in January of 2014, and they played the Brahms Clarinet Trio with Anthony McGill at a 2017 SummerFest concert. Clarinetist McGill, BTW, returns to the current SummerFest in three programs next week.
Expectations were understandably high for the musical reunion of Weilerstein and Barnatan playing the Brahms Sonata for Cello and Piano in E Minor that opened Wednesday’s SummerFest program at The Conrad. I have learned over the years, however, that my own high expectations for this duo will always be exceeded, and this was certainly the case with their stellar account of the Brahms Cello Sonata.
Although the Cello Sonata is one of the composer’s earlier works, it displays the profound depth and structural rigor we associate with his later works such as his four symphonies. Weilerstein and Barnatan easily traversed the composer’s divergent demands of his first movement, with Weilerstein’s dark umber hue gracing the nobly restrained opening theme, followed by the duo’s exhilarating declamation of Brahms’ rhapsodic second theme. They sustained the movement’s invigorating dramatic contrasts while maintaining the balance of its imposing structural architecture.
Brahms destroyed the slow movement he originally composed for this sonata, but his middle movement, “Allegretto quasi Menuetto,” provides the contrast of a typical slow movement with its flighty minor-mode motifs that suggest to me a playful Mendelssohnian elfin escapade. After some more serious development, Brahms returns to his opening theme, but with a more earnest slant that Weilerstein and Barnatan suavely projected.
Most scholars agree that the theme of the final movement’s commanding fugue comes from J.S. Bach’s “Contrapunctus XIII” in his mighty final composition The Art of Fugue. Brahms’ brilliant fugue certainly honors his teutonic forebear, and Weilerstein and Barnatan gave the fugue—as well as the rest of the bracing concluding movement—a fervent yet immaculately constructed performance.
Following the Brahms Cello Sonata with Charles Koechin’s charming Four Little Pieces, Op. 32, proved wise. Written for and deftly orchestrated for horn, violin, and piano, these short sketches are minimal in the sense that they are tellingly condensed, but certainly not minimalist in the contemporary sense of endlessly repeating structures. Written at the turn of the 20th Century, they sound like something Anton Webern would have written had he been French rather than Austrian. Kudos to violinist Erin Keefe, horn virtuoso Stefan Dohr and pianist non Barnatan for giving these works a sensitive presentation.
Alexander Glazunov’s String Quintet in A Major, Op. 39, was written only a few years before Koechlin’s Four Little Pieces, but its retrograde style clearly looks back to the height of late 19th-century Russian Romanticism and to that century’s notion of text-book, four movement sonata form. The animated pizzicato motifs of the second movement, the easy-going “Scherzo,” and the Finale’s minor-mode Russian folk tune display the Quintet’s most charming moments. Although, to be frank, the Quintet exudes far too much charm and too little musical substance to make it a staple of the repertory.
Violinists Tessa Lark and Erin Keefe; violist Teng Li, and cellists Sterling Elliott and Nicolas Altstaedt gave a rousing, fluent performance of the Quintet.
This program was presented by the La Jolla Music Society as part of SummerFest 2025 at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla on August 13, 2025.