Kicking Off La Jolla SummerFest With Contrast in Style

LA JOLLA — The Jewel City’s 14th annual SummerFest, sponsored by the La Jolla Chamber Music Society and directed by the husband-and-wife cello/piano team of David Finckel and Wu Han, opened this year with a Janos Starker weekend. The eminent Hungarian cellist, who turned 75 on July 5, played Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with a roster of eminent guests as well as emerging artists, at Sherwood Auditorium.

The next two weeks will bring to La Jolla a welter of interesting chamber players, and not one but two composers in residence (Bruce Adolphe and Osvaldo Golijov), so what is it about Starker’s playing that arrests attention and deserves so much honor over the opening weekend?

Let’s focus on just one of his many laudable characteristics: a Zen-like efficiency.

Starker makes no superfluous movement. There was no wasted energy, there was no visual kinesthetic “noise” in his playing. There was not a lot to watch except the beauty and seeming simplicity of his bowing and his fingering.

But there was a lot to savor in the sound. In Bach’s Suite No. 3 for Unaccompanied Cello, which he played on Friday, he made melodic lines grow and blossom. He drew upon a nuanced palette of dark, amber and transparent colors. He revealed an inner song, an inner joy. And he understood the virtue of not hurrying, of not having to fill time with anything but the intentions and spirit of the composer.

In all this, he seemed a center of calm and focus, which, he told the audience in a pre-concert question-and-answer session, didn’t rule out regular stomachaches before every appearance, even after 60 years of playing.

In contrast, consider the highly kinesthetic playing of Jeff Nuttal, first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which opened the Friday program with Haydn’s Opus 76, No. 2, the “Fifths” Quartet. Nuttal gave the audience a lot to watch.

He didn’t merely tap his foot to keep time or emphasize a beat. He seemed to be jumping hurdles. His arms and upper body swung into sympathetic action. He was getting into the music.

Haydn can withstand this kind of muscular performance. But it was not a nuanced one. It was vivid and aggressive, conflicted and driven. Dynamic shifts took place not within lines, but in succession of lines. Nuttal dominated his colleagues, violinist Barry Shiffman, violist Lesley Robertson and cellist Marina Hoover, although some allowance needs to be made because perception does vary depending on where one sits in Sherwood Auditorium.

But when the St. Lawrence was joined by violinists Philip Setzer and Benny Kim, violist Cynthia Phelps and cellist Carter Brey for Mendelssohn’s Octet, which closed the Friday program, the same speed and hard-driven approach pressured the composer’s distinctive lyricism into extinction, although the audience cheered the steeplechase race the musicians made of the final movement.

The Saturday night programming jumped eras and styles presumably to showcase Starker’s Central European roots as well as highlight his instrument. It began with Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello (Starker and his son-in-law, William Preucil), then moving to Enesco’s Violin Sonata No. 3 (violinist Robert McDuffie and pianist Christopher O’Riley), with Starker and a 15-member cello consort playing Couperin’s “Pieces en concert” and Frescobaldi’s Toccata. The anachronistic arrangements of Couperin and Frescobaldi, by Paul Bazelaire and Gaspar Cassado respectively, proved tuneful and remarkably unmuddied. But meatier was McDuffie and O’Riley playing Enesco’s thorny and challenging Sonata with dramatic authority.

At the end of the Saturday concert, Starker was treated to a surprise performance by Han of pianist Leonid Hambro’s variations on the “Happy Birthday” song and presented with a chocolate cake in the shape of a cello.

The next afternoon, violinist Cho-Liang Lin perhaps came closest to matching Starker’s focused stillness and intensity, while adding a unique warmth. He and Han played Strauss’ early Violin Sonata in E-flat.

Though Erich Korngold is sometimes called the last romantic, violinists Kim and Setzer, cellist Hoffman and pianist Gary Graffman seemed determined to challenge that assessment Sunday with a wiry, unsongful and toughly modernistic performance of his Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left-Hand. It wasn’t entirely persuasive.

Felix Fan finely mirrored Starker’s playing in Boccherini’s modest Sonata in C for Two Cellos.

But the Sunday program ended in a special blaze of glory with Lin, Phelps, Brey and Han giving an impassioned performance of Dvorak’s Piano Quartet in E-flat.

* SummerFest La Jolla ’99 continues through Aug. 21 at Sherwood Auditorium, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. (619) 459-3728.