REVIEW: SummerFest Hosts Contemporary Chamber Music from New York Composers

For Sunday evening’s SummerFest program New York Takeover @ the JAI, SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan invited three New York composers—Timo Andres, Patrick Castillo, and Matthew Aucoin—to present a few of their recent works. Although Sunday’s compositions were new to San Diego audiences, we have enjoyed the music and presence of both Andres and Aucoin in recent years.

Timo Andres brought his impressive Piano Trio to La Jolla SummerFest in 2019, and earlier that year Matthew Aucoin served as the Festival Curator for the San Diego Symphony’s Hearing the Futurefestival. On one of those festival programs we heard baritone Rod Gilfry sing arias from Aucoin’s opera about Walt Whitman Crossing. Their return to the San Diego music scene is welcome.

Andres opened Sunday’s concert with a blockbuster piano solo, his 2023 Fiddlehead, titled to suggest the energy new ferns display when the first shoots break the earth as winter fades. This bold showpiece jolts the listener with fusillades of fortissimo perpetuum mobile explosions as the performer tests the extreme sonic possibilities of a concert grand. Eventually Andres relents and offers a more relaxed contrasting “B” section that settles into a quiet chorale and then a demure final cadence.

In the middle movement from Andres’ 2010 piano solo It takes a Long Time to Become a Good Composer, we experience the mechanics of the other side of his brain in this beautifully structured passacaglia. Upon an austere theme of deliberate quarter notes expressed in the movement’s opening measures, Andres constructs a series of progressively complex elaborations. His program notes cite Robert Schumann as the inspiration for this movement, and while the harmonic style is clearly Andres, the structural architecture suggests homage to Schumann.

In the first half of the last century, Neoclassical composers such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Britten were attracted to the manifold possibilities of the string quartet. But the serialists and minimalists who came after the Neoclassical movement said “no thanks,” so it proved a pleasant surprise to hear the Korean-American Hesper Quartet play Patrick Castillo’s 2020 single movement string quartet SkylinePalimpsest.

Castillo gets a good deal of mileage from intense antiphonal dialogues between the cellist and the three upper strings; he favors short, darting motifs rather than full-blown melodie,s and his dynamic range rarely ascends above mezzo forte. Kudos to the Hesper Quartet for making the composer’s understatement consistently engaging, especially in deft solo passages by violinists Valerie Kim and Yejin Yoon, who set an admirable standard for this approach. The rich timbre of violist Sohui Yun proved ideal for her impassioned solo, and Connor Kim gave his cello cadenza equal flair, even though his dynamic range never rose above mezzo forte. And although I just returned from a visit to New York City, I cannot say I perceived the invocation of the city’s skyline that Castillo’s title describes.

Each of the three movements of Matthew Aucoin’s 2024 Sources of Lift for Two Pianos also claims programmatic description, as well as inspiration from the poetry of Ben Lerner. At least on first hearing, such allusions eluded me, but Aucoin’s adroit, transparent structures and his consistently engaging dialogue between the two pianos won my eager attention. He is not afraid to write a melody, and he employs the two pianos not for their powerful dynamic potential, but rather to give an orchestral depth and complexity to his score. In this performance, he was ably assisted by Conor Hanick on the second piano.

This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society at the Conrad Prebys Center for the Performing Arts in downtown La Jolla on July 27, 2025.