La Jolla SummerFest Celebrates the Music of Leoš Janáček

Although several of the operas by Czech composer Leoš Janáček have become part of opera’s standard repertory, his chamber music remains little known. SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan addressed this oversight by devoting half of Sunday’s program at The Conrad to Janáček’s instrumental contributions.

The quartet of SummerFest musicians who gave such a mesmerizing account of Schubert’s D Minor String Quartet Death and the Maiden on Saturday evening—violinists Alexi Kenny and Tessa Lark; violist Teng Li, and cellist Jonathan Swensen—returned Sunday to perform Janáček’s First String Quartet Kreutzer Sonata. To describe this string quartet as collision of extreme emotional states is to border on understatement, and these four musicians vigorously conjured the composer’s impassioned themes.

Janáček was inspired to write this String Quartet in 1923 by a novella written by Leo Tolstoy titled The Kreutzer Sonata, a dark story about a jealous husband who murders his wife, a concert pianist who is discovered having an affair with a violinist. The musicians’ signature work is Beethoven’s celebrated Kreutzer Sonata. The SummerFest quartet hovered quietly over Janáček’s mysterious opening, then quickly built the quartet’s fluttering themes into an onslaught of emotionally fraught cascades. After the quartet’s opening Adagio, the composer simply titles each successive movement Con Moto, dispensing with the string quartet’s typical andante, scherzo, rondo progression in favor of a continuous increase of dynamic and emotional intensity. The SummerFest musicians’ acute performance certainly disabused a common notion that chamber music is simply a pleasant diversion.

Thomas Adès and violinist Augustin Hadelich complemented this stirring account of Janáček’s First String Quartet with an adroit, elegantly articulated performance of his 1914 Sonata for Violin and Piano.  The Sonata’s opening movement suggested a duel between piano and violin rather than a polite chamber piece, especially considering Adès’ bold, assertive interpretation of the piano part. Hadelich chose a more nuanced approach, spinning out gentler cantabile themes, especially in the lyrical Ballada, the slow second movement that Janáček had originally written as a single-movement solo work.

Two volumes of Janáček’s solo keyboard pieces (written for either piano or harmonium) are titled On an Overgrown Path, and Adès offered three selections on this program. “They Chattered Like Swallows” from the First Book is probably the most frequently played composition from these collections, and Adès gave its clever programmatic subject a polished, scintillating performance. “Good Night,” a serene Adagio also from the First Book, benefitted from Adès’ inventive dynamic contrasts to its repeated four-note theme. Adès’ closing selection, a bright “Allegro” from the Second Book, capped his set of piano pieces with a flashy, almost operatic etude.

After the intermission, Hadelich and Adès returned to play an instrumental Suite drawn from Adès’ successful 2004 opera The Tempest, based on the Shakespeare play. In four movements Adès depicts three of the work’s main characters, Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda. Ariel’s elegy “full fathom five thy father lies” proved an unusually moving impressionist tableau, a marked contrast to Caliban’s sinuous, brash complaint “This island’s mine.”

This concert ended with a Beethoven work that was not written by Beethoven. The Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 47, No. 9, known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata played a symbolic role in Janáček’s First String Quartet that opened this concert. On Sunday, this particular Sonata was not performed as Beethoven wrote it, but rather it was presented in an uncredited arrangement for string quintet. Violinists Tessa Lark and Andrew Wan; violist Teng Li, and cellists Jay Campbell and Jonathan Swensen  played this arrangement with commendable artistry, but I was not impressed that it improved the original. I thought losing the percussive attack of the piano’s presence against the solo violin took the edge off this Sonata. The mellifluous string quintet sonority just seemed to noodle on forever.

This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society as part of the SummerFest 2024 festival on July 28, 2024, at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in downtown La Jolla.