La Jolla SummerFest’s Sizzling Franck Piano Quintet

If Wednesday’s provocative La Jolla SummerFest program title Notes on a Scandal failed to bolster the typically sagging midweek festival attendance, the musicians assembled on the The Conrad stage amply rewarded the loyal patrons who showed up.

The orchestral contours of César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F Minor predictably enthrall audiences, and the ensemble that featured by pianist Conrad Tao along with violinists Blake Pouliot and Simone Porter, violist Masumi Per Rostad, and cellist Paul Wiancko, gave a robust, emotionally probing account of this esteemed work.

Most chamber works from Mozart to the present endow each movement with a single contrasting character that gives a satisfying overall structure to the work. In his Piano Quintet, however, Franck traverses a wide emotional arc within each of his three substantial movements. The polite first themes of the opening “Molto moderato” quickly give way to a heady emotional torrent, unleashed by Tao with striking authority and complemented by exuberant forays from Pouliot and the other strings. The term moderato may aptly apply to this movement’s tempo, but the players’ character of the movement was nothing less than passionate. Pouliot and Tao communicated the elegiac mood of the slow middle movement while the lower strings expanded its undeniable Gallic lyricism, and the ensemble’s resplendent interpretation of the finale suitably honored the composer’s “con fuoco” designation.

Debussy’s late (1914) suite of Six épigraphes antiques for four-hand piano displays the cool abstraction of his second book of Piano Preludes, albeit with amusing picturesque titles for each movement that evoke his first prelude collection. Inon Barnatan and Conrad Tao brought the Zen ambience of this suite into sharp focus with immaculate articulation and an array of understated colors. I was enchanted by their dulcet arabesques in the opening “To Invoke Pan, God of the Summer Wind” as well as the mysterious beginning of “That the Night Might Be Propitious,” the one movement whose urgent progressions build to a brilliant final cadence. And the duo tossed off surly glissandos with ease in the “For the Dancer with Miniature Cymbals” movement.

Barnatan opened this program with the rarely encountered A Selection of Madrigals, a string quintet arrangement of three Carlo Gesualdo madrigals. While it helped to consult the text of each Italian Renaissance madrigal in SummerFest’s printed program, this chordal string music proved rather opaque. With the addition of violist Matthew Lipman, the same string ensemble heard in the Franck Piano Quintet performed these Gesualdo pieces.

This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society as part of its SummerFest 2024 festival on Wednesday, August 14, 2024, in La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center. SummerFest continues in this venue through August 24, 2024.