La Jolla SummerFest Opens: A ‘Deal with the Devil’ Provides Heavenly Results

SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan opened this year’s festival on Friday, an evening of Satanic music cleverly titled A Deal with the Devil. And Saturday’s SummerFest offering will continue this devilish theme with his program Dance Macabre. Should Saturday’s performance equal the fervor and polish of opening night, Barnatan will have conclusively demonstrated that experiencing the Devil’s music can be—and there’s no other way to describe it: heavenly!

Barnatan set the stage Friday with a fiery account of Franz Liszt’s bravura solo piano transcription of his orchestral “Mephisto” Waltz No. 1, hurling brilliant fusillades that shook the staid Baker Baum Concert Hall. This revealed a welcome facet of Barnatan’s keyboard profile, since we are accustomed to his Apollonian cool accompanying cellist Alisa Weilerstein, carefully balancing and framing her Dionysian passion. Opening with this commanding Liszt opus, Barnatan set a high bar for the season.

Violinist Augustin Hadelich continued Barnatan’s high spirits with his vibrant interpretation of Giuseppe Tartini’s Baroque Violin Sonata known as The Devil’s Trill and then followed with Niccolò Paganini’s devilishly difficult Caprice No. 24 in A Minor for solo violin. Hadelich is well-known to the San Diego musical community. Not only has he frequently appeared on the SummerFest roster, he has also soloed with the San Diego Symphony and appeared with San Diego’s Mainly Mozart Festival. His sumptuous technical acumen makes even the complex ornamentation of the Tartini Sonata—hence its sobriquet The Devil’s Trill—sound as easy as a violinist running through warm-up scales. In the Tartini Sonata Hadelich was joined  with convivial skill by Barnatan on harpsichord and cellist Macintyre Taback.

In a way, these three pieces were just preparation for SummerFest’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 dramatic work L’Histoire du Soldat, usually translated The Soldier’s Tale, a clever dramatic escapade in which a hapless foot soldier foolishly attempts to outwit the Devil at every turn. Over the years I have experienced this Stravinsky gem several times, but never in as compelling a production as Friday’s resplendent SummerFest collaboration. Composer in residence Thomas  Adès conducted a virtuoso instrumental septet that featured violinist Alexi Kenney and clarinetist Mark Simpson, each a welcome returning SummerFest artist, in  crucial solo roles.

Complementing Adès’ ebullient direction and the scintillating response of his instrumental ensemble, narrator Danny Burstein recounted the tale with avuncular persuasion, while The Paper Cinema illustrated the dramatic action with clever, humorous visuals. Their puppets are actually two-dimensional black-and-white caricatures whose movements were projected on the giant screen on the back wall of the stage. The Paper Cinema’s artistic director Nicholas Rawling also added witty freehand sketches of the characters and events that quickly took shape on the screen as they continued to illustrate the narration in real time animation.

Music historians have always wondered how Stravinsky executed his 180-degree stylistic reversal from the massive, post-Romantic full orchestra ballets that culminated in the Rite of Spring prior to World War I to his lean, contrapuntal chamber style he revealed in L’Histoire du Soldat at the close of the Great War, an approach that launched the 20th Century’s Neoclassical musical revival. What struck me as the audience at The Conrad followed Stravinsky’s musical adventure on Friday was the composer’s ability to evoke the same rich emotional response from a simple duet between the violin and clarinet that he obtained from themes propelled by the full orchestra in his ballets.

This winning account of L’Histoire du Soldat was graced by alternately jubilant and soul-searching duets from violinist Alexi Kenney and clarinetist Mark Simpson; by soaring cornet forays by Chris Coletti; crisp, assertive percussion from Michael Yeung, as well as glowing bass support from bassoonist Eleni Katz, contrabass Anthony Manzo and trombone virtuoso  James Miller.

This SummerFest concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society in La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center on Friday, July 26, 2024.