The fifteen strings of the SummerFest Chamber Orchestra opened Saturday’s La Jolla SummerFest concert with Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst for string orchestra. Montgomery served as the festival’s 2025 Composer-in-Residence, and it was rewarding to experience this vibrant short overture that launched cascades of ebullient melodic arcs from the stage of The Conrad.
This string ensemble remained onstage for Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Strings in D Minor, the program’s second offering, featuring guest violinist Benjamin Beilman and SummerFest Music Director and pianist Inon Barnatan as soloists in this seldom encountered concerto.
Mendelssohn wrote this substantial three-movement concerto at age 14, and it is a glowing testament to youthful exuberance. And inexperience. In terms of captivating melodic invention, the young composer is generous to a fault, but the actual fault is a weak musical structure. Perhaps the young composer was too impatient to be bothered with those traditional devices such as sonata form, theme and variation, and rondo, but a sturdy structure helps to focus the listener’s perception of a musical work. And although a few of the opening ideas do re-appear later in the concerto’s episodic succession of themes, this proved modest compensation for a work that stretches over 40 minutes. I would suggest that the reason this concerto has not found a place in the standard repertory is because of this structural weakness.
Beilman and Barnatan supplied the perfect mix of brio and technical finesse to the concerto’s sparkling solo passages. Beilman’s dulcet, polished sonority and graceful phrasing suited Mendelssohn’s propulsive figurations, and he evidenced appropriate muscle when the score required it. Barnatan’s effervescent touch and unfailing warmth complemented Beilman at every turn, helping to transcend the concerto’s structural limitations.
Johannes Brahms’ first successful orchestral work, the Serenade in D Major, Op. 11, initially took shape as a much smaller chamber work before the final orchestral version was premiered in 1860. Although the score of that 1857 octet for winds and strings has not survived, in 1987 the Argentinian composer and conductor Jorge Rotter made an arrangement of the Serenade for four strings and five winds that he thought would recreate Brahms’ original chamber work, and SummerFest 2025 closed the season with a winning performance of Rotter’s chamber version of the Brahms Serenade in D Major.
From Mark Almod’s burnished horn calls that opened the “Allegro molto,” the Serenade provided a wealth of star turns for the SummerFest musicians. Clarinetist Anthony McGill answered Almond with radiant antiphonal phrases, and bassoonist Peter Kolkay propelled the first “Scherzo” with his elegant solo lead. In the “Adagio non troppo,” the Serenade’s most expansive movement, violinist Andrew Wan and contrabassist Samuel Hager led the strings with calm authority and incisive direction. Flutist Rose Lombardo also provided this movement with glowing accounts of its choice melodic turns.
In the second “Menuetto” the elegant pizzicato bass of cellist Zlatomir Fung supported the joyous, mellifluent wind ensemble. Violist Misha Amory and clarinetist Jay Shankar completed this brilliant ensemble whose vigorous “Rondo” brought both the evening and the festival to an appropriately rousing finale.
Given the traditional programming of this SummerFest concert, I was glad that I attended the short pre-concert recital that was given in The Conrad’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall an hour prior to the final concert. The Larinae Ensemble—pianist Stephanie Tang, violinist Jake Dongyoung Shim, violist Joseph Skerik, and cellist Jacob Giovanni Tayler— gave sophisticated, rewarding accounts of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s “Thousandth Orange” and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello.
The young musicians of the Larinae Ensemble as well as those of the Hesper Quartet that performed on the SummerFest August 7 concert served as this season’s Farfy Foundation Fellowship Artist Ensembles. It is always thrilling to hear younger ensembles of such achievement and promise at SummerFest.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on August 23, 2025, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.