La Jolla SummerFest Returns to Recount Music’s inside Stories
SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan has chosen “Inside Stories” for the theme of this year’s annual La Jolla music festival.
Inon Barnatan [Photo (c.) Marco Borggreve]
“We aim to unveil the tales that composers have embedded in their works, from the dramatic to the whimsical, the heart-wrenching to the uplifting,” he explained.
So it is no surprise, then, that on SummerFest’s opening night (July 26) Barnatan has programmed Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat from 1918, an hour-long chamber drama that literally is ‘The Soldier’s Story,’ although its usual English title is the slightly more poetic ‘The Soldier’s Tale.’
In addition to the score’s seven instrumentalists, Tony Award-winning actor Danny Burstein will recite the work’s narration of a hapless soldier’s ill-fated bargain with the Devil, and the creative British ensemble The Paper Company will provide hand-drawn animation and live puppetry to illustrate the work’s dramatic plot.
“I have seen The Paper Company’s work online,” Barnatan explained, “and they normally do complex stories like MacBeth and The Odyssey. This is all accomplished without words, using instead film, illustration, and puppetry. I should add this is not the cute sort of puppetry associated with children’s entertainment, but puppetry created for adults that is imaginative but dark, capturing the serious theme of the piece.”
British composer Thomas Adès, returning to SummerFest for his second year as composer-in-residence, will conduct the Stravinsky. Adès so enjoyed his inaugural stint as composer-in-residence last season that he was eager to return, Barnatan noted. Over the first week of SummerFest several Adès’ works will be performed, including his Suite from Tempest, featuring violinist Augustin Hadelich, Catch, featuring clarinetist Mark Simpson, and Forgotten Dances, an American première performed by guitarist Sean Shibe.
Thomas Adès [photo (c.) Mathias Benguigui]
For the first time SummerFest will feature a resident vocal ensemble, VOCES8, the well-known eight-voice English group that has made its name as an a cappella octet, although their major contribution to SummerFest will be Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem with full chamber ensemble on Sunday, August 11. On the August 9 program titled Gratitude, VOCES8 will perform J. S. Bach’s Cantata 150 and a catalogue of a cappella works that span the gamut of composers from the Renaissance master Orlando Gibbons to contemporary luminaries such as Caroline Shaw and Jake Runestad. Shaw was SummerFest’s composer-in-residence at the 2022 festival.
“My manager is also a singer, so he brought this vocal group to my attention and urged me to consider them. They are in great demand and have a full performance schedule in Europe, so I feel we are fortunate they they are willing to make a special trip to the U.S. to be part of our festival,” Barnatan said.
VOCES8 [Photo (c.) Andy Staples]
VOCES8 will make its SummerFest debut opening the August 7 concert with Arvo Pärt’s Solfeggio, a meditative a cappella work opens with an unusual solo scale that is strikingly similar to the opening of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet in C major, K. 465. So these two works have been paired on this concert devoted solely to works by Mozart and Pärt.
“Pärt has stated that Mozart has been one of his biggest influences,” Barnatan explained, “so it made sense to plan this concert alternating compositions by Pärt and Mozart.” Cellist Alisa Weilerstein will finish this concert with Pärt’s Fratres, a solo work which is arguably his most recognizable and frequently programmed work.
As part of SummerFest’s Synergy Series, the duo of pianist Conrad Tao and tap-dancer Caleb Teicher will return to La Jolla on August 16 to give the première of their program Counterpoint II, the sequel to their first Counterpoint program performed at The Conrad for the La Jolla Music Society in February of 2022. The following night Tao returns on SummerFest’s California Dreamin’ program with a portfolio of solo works by Sergei Rachmaninoff that reflect the composer’s final years living in California, noting the influences on the composer by the Great American Songbook. On August 14 Tao and Barnatan will perform Claude Debussy’s rarely encountered Six épigraphes antiques for Piano Four-hands.
Clarinetist Anthony McGill appears so regularly on SummerFest programs that it’s only news when he is not on the season’s roster. This season on August 21 he returns to play Béla Bartók’s Contrasts, that stunning trio the composer wrote for the great Benny Goodman and in which McGill gave such a winning account on a SummerFest 2018 program. On August 21 McGill will also participate in contemporary composer Michi Wiancko’s Lullaby for the Transient and on the SummerFest Finale (August 24) in Paul Schoenfield’s Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano.
La Jolla SummerFest is present by the La Jolla Music Society at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center from July 26 to August 24, 2024.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…