La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest 2008 (Aug. 1-24) is more accessible than ever this season. In addition to eight open rehearsals, 17 coaching workshops and three meet-the-artist encounters, SummerFest music director Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin and Music Society president and artistic director Christopher Beach are throwing a free party, and you are invited.
Titled SummerFest Under the Stars, the bash begins at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 14 at Scripps Park, La Jolla Cove.
“I’ve traveled all around the world, and all the summer festivals I know do concerts outdoors. They worry about whether it’s going to rain or not. We don’t,” Beach said.
Initially, Beach considered erecting a fence and charging admission, and then on second thought decided, “This ought to be an opportunity for us to thank the community. The essence of the evening is to bring a picnic and the kids.”
Lin said that the musical essence of the outdoor concert is as follows: “The first half will be chamber music”fun and lively pieces, Brahms’ Hungarian Dances and the Mendelssohn Octet’s first movement, the ‘Carmen’ Fantasy. Then La Jolla Symphony will come on stage with Steven Schick conducting and John Yeh as clarinet soloist to perform the first movement of the Copland Clarinet Concerto and end the program with Bartok’s Rumanian Dances. Hopefully, it will be a starry night.”
The rest of SummerFest features a brilliant array of stars, including pianists galore, resident composers, jazz, dance, string ensembles, a fledgling piano trio, cutting-edge new music and more traditional fare. Most performances take place at Sherwood Auditorium, 750 Prospect St.; the dance, jazz and new music may be seen/heard at Birch North Park Theatre, 2891 University Ave., San Diego.
This particular listener is thrilled with the return of violinist Leila Josefowicz, who performed in June aboard a Baltic cruise and throughout the week proved herself on a personal level to be effervescent, indefatigable and utterly delightful, to say nothing of the brilliant recital she played with composer/pianist Jake Heggie. On that shipboard program she performed music by pianist/composer John Novacek, her longtime recital collaborator, who appears with her Wednesday, Aug. 6 in An Evening With Leila Josefowicz (7:30 p.m. at Sherwood). They are joined by violinist Steven Copes, once upon a time a SummerFest Rising Star and now concertmaster of the Minnesota Chamber Orchestra, in performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata in C Major for Two Violins. According to Lin, the work is virtuosic and beautiful.
Reached in an East Coast airport while awaiting a plane bound for Chicago, Josefowicz seems ecstatic about her SummerFest progam, which also includes Igor Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant for Violin and Piano and Concertino for String Quartet (add violist Hsin-Yun Huang and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata for Violin and Piano and Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Josefowicz said. “The most interesting thing is we’re going to hear a schizophrenic depiction of Shostakovich, first one of the darkest pieces he ever wrote and, to end the program, one of the lightest pieces he ever wrote. I don’t think many composers have quite that stark a change in terms of their tonal palette. The Concertino is like going on a roller coaster. We’ll have a good time.”
Other programs not to be missed by the adventuresome are Commissions: Music of Our Time Friday, Aug. 8, at Birch North Park Theatre, which includes the West Coast premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s “Serenatas” and Steven Mackey’s “Groundswell”; and the (Olivier) Messiaen Centennial Saturday, Aug. 16, at Sherwood Auditorium, which includes the composer’s amazing “Quartet for the End of Time” played by Lin, cellist Hai-Ye Ni, Yeh and pianist Christopher Taylor, who returns in December to play the composer’s amazing and Herculean “Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus.”
Lovers of more traditional chamber music fare will find programs featuring music by Brahms, Beethoven and Schumann, and, for fans of the piano literature, some great programs featuring 80-year-old Leon Fleisher and youngsters Shai Wosner and Orion Weiss, who play the two-piano version of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” at 3 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 17 at Sherwood.
All concerts are preceded by get-acquainted lectures or performances. For a complete schedule, visit www.lajollamusicsociety.org or call (858) 459-3728.