REVIEW: La Jolla Music Society SummerFest: Broadening Horizons

But not until 2019 did the La Jolla Music Society, which presents SummerFest, possess a dedicated venue. The opening of the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center right in the heart of this “village” gave music lovers a nearly 500-seat theater with excellent sightlines and sublime acoustics, the latter courtesy of Yasuhisa Toyota, best known in the U.S. for helping refine the sound at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

That year also marked the arrival of a new music director for SummerFest, the Israeli-American pianist Inon Barnatan, a gifted and imaginative artist with a taste for broadening horizons. He also possesses a talent for drawing like-minded musicians of the first rank to join this venture—21 concerts through Aug. 24 this time. Just as important, he crafts cleverly juxtaposed programs that challenge audiences without alienating them.

This season’s first concert, on Friday evening, distilled Mr. Barnatan’s approach, with the devil as chief conceit. The pianist’s own fierce reading of Liszt’s “Mephisto” Waltz No. 1 opened the bill, followed by Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill,” with Mr. Barnatan, now at the harpsichord, joined by Macintyre Taback on cello and, in the central role, the celebrated German-American violinist Augustin Hadelich, a SummerFest regular since 2010. After winningly disguising that work’s obstacles, Mr. Hadelich returned to the stage alone with an impeccable account, technically and stylistically, of Paganini’s familiar Caprice No. 24.

But it was a performance of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” cogently conducted by the English composer and musical polymath Thomas Adès, that stole the show. Written for septet and narrator (in this case, the Broadway actor Danny Burstein, affecting a Paul Giamatti-ish demeanor), the piece is frequently augmented by additional artistry, which on this occasion fell to a small outfit called the Paper Cinema, whose work, all executed live opposite the musicians, was projected onto a large screen at the rear of the stage. Had Messrs. Adès and Burstein and the band proved any less compelling, most people’s attention would have been focused entirely on the paper puppets and the pen-and-ink drawing of Nicholas Rawling, the outfit’s co-founder and artistic director.

With the exception of another work requiring a narrator—Martin Butler’s settings of three of Roald Dahl’s wry verses from “Dirty Beasts” (marred by poor amplification pitting Mr. Burstein against the musicians)—the remainder of the weekend’s programming was pure music. On Saturday, the scores varied widely. Some were almost atavistic: Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” featuring Messrs. Hadelich and Barnatan; Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, performed by four artists—Andrew Wan and Tessa Lark, violins; Teng Li, viola; and Jonathan Swensen, cello—who complemented each other marvelously. Others were novel: Mr. Adès’s cheeky early work for four players, “Catch,” with its literally, and hilariously, wandering clarinetist, a game Mark Simpson; Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 2 for solo violin, written for the great French violinist Jacques Thibaud and played with gripping immediacy and apt soulfulness by Mr. Hadelich. Mr. Adès himself performed the piano part of his piece, augmented by, in addition to Mr. Simpson, two younger artists emerging as leading musical lights, the cellist Jay Campbell and the violinist Alexi Kenney. He then immediately followed it by joining Mr. Barnatan for an intoxicating account of the two-piano version of Ravel’s “La Valse,” a work close to Mr. Adès’s heart, as anyone who has heard him conduct the orchestral version can attest.

Sunday’s concert concluded with a puzzling string-quintet recasting of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, originally for violin and piano. It was preceded by a recent Adès effort, reworking material in suite form from his Shakespeare-inspired opera “The Tempest,” with Mr. Adès and Mr. Hadelich making a case for music I have yet to appreciate. But the bill’s all-Janáček first half was the sort of thing one usually just dreams of experiencing, consisting of three masterpieces: the String Quartet No. 1 (titled “Kreutzer Sonata” after the Tolstoy novella), selections from the haunting solo-piano work “On an Overgrown Path,” and the Sonata for Violin and Piano. All were played with the utmost conviction and concentration by Messrs. Kenney and Swensen and Mses. Lark and Li (the string quartet); Mr. Adès (the short piano pieces); and Messrs. Hadelich and Adès (the sonata). I found myself deeply moved multiple times. (May I never forget Mr. Adès’s transporting, time-stopping account of the Allegro from Book II of “Overgrown Path.”)

Several musicians from the opening weekend (beyond Mr. Barnatan, who appears throughout SummerFest) return in the coming days, including Messrs. Adès, Campbell and Kenney. They will be joined by various others, among them the pianist Joyce Yang and the rising Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe, in programs no less inventive than those that have passed. The remainder of the season offers yet more enticements: the violinists James Ehnes, Erin Keefe, Stefan Jackiw, Simone Porter and Blake Pouliot; the cellists Alisa Weilerstein and Paul Wiancko; the pianist Conrad Tao; the clarinetist Anthony McGill; and the conductor Ludovic Morlot—all in programs certain to stimulate even jaded ears.