REVIEW: Composer & Cellist Paul Wiancko Hosts an enchanting Evening at The JAI

August 17, 2026

Composer and virtuoso cellist Paul Wiancko curated Sunday evening’s SummerFest concert at The JAI. Appropriately, he opened the concert with his Cities of Air, a flute quintet, and closed the program with his String Quintet No. 1, Tiny Doors to Big Worlds, his cello quintet. He included other recent works: Angélica Negrón’s, Marejada, and Salina Fisher’s Mata-Au.

Revealing a perceptive sense of history, Wiancko also included in his program the final movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time: “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus” for cello and piano. Written almost a century ago, Messaien’s quartet for piano, violin, clarinet, and cello, not only provided a template of modernism in 1940, but its otherworldly lucidity still sounds completely unbound to time and place.

We were fortunate to hear cellist Coleman Itzkoff’s lustrous, transcendent interpretation of Messaien’s sibylline melodic inflections, impassioned lines that regularly verged on evanescence. Pianist Anthony Ratinov maintained a comforting, steady pulse of the composer’s precise chordal iterations, although his fortes sounded a bit strong for Itzkoff’s tempered fortes.

For the most part, Wiancko’s flute themes in Cities of Air gently float above succinctly tailored, consonant string textures, although towards the center of the piece, the flute emits several bright volleys over the more charged, angular strings. The tone of Cities of Air struck me as both joyful and anxious, which flutist Emi Ferguson clearly communicated with her well-focused, ingratiating sonority. For the performance of this single movement quintet, the violinists were Tessa Lark and Roger Shao, with violist Ayane Kozasa and the composer as cellist.

Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón wrote the single movement Marejada for the celebrated Kronos Quartet in 2020, and, for this concert, SummerFest’s resident Prometheus Quartet gave a convincing account of this exotic travelogue. Below a high-pitched digital ostinato based on Puerto Rican nature sounds, Negrón alternates between brittle strummed chords and short bowed flourishes from the strings, garnished by subtle percussion effects from a half-filled plastic water bottle and a small tin pie pan.

New Zealander Salina Fisher evokes a more spiritual ethos with her string trio Mata-Au, named after a river in her native country. In this compact tone poem, lithe, animated themes ascend from the lowest range of each instrument to form ingratiating, consonant flowing streams that could easily symbolize a river’s rushing current—as long as the listener knows the meaning of the work’s title. Violinist Tessa Lark, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Paul Wink performed Mata-Au.

Paul Wiancko’s three-movement cello quintet proved to be the most substantial piece on Sunday’s program. Wiancko favors broad, sweeping themes for the upper strings in his opening movement that allowed violinist Tessa Lark to indulge high-pitched, floating cantilenas and violist Ayane Kozasa to answer with rich themes in her instrument’s most endearing mid-range. For much of this movement the composer’s plucked cello lines—Wiancko performed in his own quintet—supplied the equivalent of a supportive basso continuo. The more relaxed middle movement’s lyrical themes, deftly played by second violin Elli Choi, suggest an enchanting ballad, and Wiancko’s final movement creates a delirious dance. Coleman Itzkoff provided the additional cello for this robust quintet.

This program was presented by the La Jolla Music Society as part of SummerFest 2026 on August 16, 2026, at The Conrad.