Sound

By David Gregson

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GETTING, read the label carefully. There’s an awfully big difference between Summer Pops and SummerFest, although this year the San Diego Symphony has something to do with both. August marks our local orchestra’s first-ever collaboration with SummerFest, La Jolla Music Society’s world-class chamber music festival, now a venerable 19 years old and spreading its warm embrace to include major jazz artists and full symphonic programs. While the symphony’s annual alfresco festivities at Embarcadero Marina South (July 2 through September 5) are targeted for laid-back audiences in search of casual summer fun, SummerFest (August 5-22) has a distinctly more serious-minded listener in mind. Even Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is getting in on the act—literally. Music doesn’t always obey the law, but historically it has conformed to any number of rigid principles and theoretical systems. Perhaps this is the thought behind O’Connor’s special August 12 Sherwood Auditorium concert, titled “Music of the Law,” one of several SummerFest highlights. The three-week festival begins August 5 with noted U.S. conductor Andrew Litton joining violinists Cho-Liang Lin and Leila Josefowicz and soprano Heidi Grant Murphy in a Symphony Hall program of Bach, Wagner, Mozart, Gershwin and Stravinsky. The same venue also hosts the famous Chick Corea Jazz Trio on August 17. The next evening, 12-time Grammy winner Corea joins the Sherwood audience for the West Coast premiere of his String Quartet, one of three LJMS co-commissions with the National Endowment for the Arts. Performed by the Orion Quartet, the new Corea work is flanked by established masterpieces from Bartók and Dvorák.

With admirable audacity, the LJMS has increasingly encouraged the performance of new music, and this month brings three additional visiting composers to town—Chen Yi, Robert Kapilow and Bright Sheng. Performed by the Miami String Quartet, Chen’s Night Thoughts makes its West Coast premiere in Sherwood August 7, with his Ancient Dances making its coastal debut the preceding evening. Sheng presents and performs two of his compositions, Four Movements for Piano Trio August 20 and Tibetan Dances August 21 and 22.

Kapilow performs Green Eggs and Hamadeus August 14. This Seuss text-to-music project is the first to receive the official blessing of the Seuss estate.

A festival in every sense of the word, SummerFest also includes an enormous number of ancillary events: preconcert lectures, coaching workshops, private parties and receptions, plus public Encounters sessions that take the audience behind the scenes (all recorded live and aired on KPBS Radio, 89.5 FM, as part of host Dirk Sutro’s The Lounge). The SummerFest concerts themselves are amazingly rich and varied, and despite their generally high tone, they truly do offer the proverbial something for everyone (858-459-3728; www. ljcms.org).

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