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No other local classical music event boasts such a remarkable variety of venues: the Spreckels Theater downtown; the Cathedral Church of St. Paul uptown; the California Center for the Arts in Escondido; St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Coronado; the Ruth Chapman Performing Arts Center in Chula Vista; the Centro Cultural and the Catedral de Guadalupe in Tijuana; the New Port Beach Hotel in Rosarito; and the Bodegas de Santo Tomás winery in Ensenada.
The MMF, now in its eighth year, is the brainchild of David Atherton, current musical director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Yoav Talmi’s predecessor as conductor of the San Diego Symphony. Today, Atherton’s festival is healthier and more peripatetic than ever, packing more than 18 performances of 10 programs into nine venues over a period of 13 days (May 28 to June 9).
But do not be fooled by the event’s shuttling around the southland like a carnival. With a roster of the finest musicians in the world, the Mainly Mozart Festival is truly the connoisseurs’ choice. These are musicians’ musicians playing programs of uncompromising quality.
To prove my point, I could pen mini-dissertations on the subject of violinist William Preucil, now concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra; or his rival in audience popularity in seasons past, Martin Chalifour, now concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; or clarinetist Sheryl Renk, violist Cynthia Phelps and a host of others. Instead I’ll focus on a personal favorite, a group of relative newcomers who call themselves the Mendelssohn String Quartet—violinists Nick Eanet and Nicholas Mann, violist Maria Lambros and cellist Marcy Rosen.
Formerly “quartet in residence” at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, this crack outfit of New York–based players recently offered stunning performances here of works by Mozart, Janá`´cek and Mendelssohn in an MMF-sponsored recital at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. They brought off Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet (K. 458) with spirit and style, made an unusually strong case for Mendelssohn’s often inscrutable F Minor Quartet, Opus 80, and plunged into Janá`´cek’s Quartet No. 2 (Intimate Pages), somehow maintaining a superb balance of passionate involvement and detail-conscious perfectionism.
Despite its stolid 19th-century moniker, the Mendelssohn String Quartet champions new music. The group’s festival performance of Russian master Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3 (Spreckels, June 2) is one of the few 20th-century islands in a sea of Mozart. They have performed all four Arnold Schoenberg quartets in Los Angeles, and recently continued their Santa Fe connection by recording Tobias Picker’s “New Memories” for String Quartet. (The world premiere of Picker’s opera Emmeline will be a highlight of the Santa Fe Opera’s 40th season, which begins June 28 and runs through August 24.)
WHILE IT IS GOOD TO SEE Schnittke’s pieces popping up more and more on programs for local chamber music series, it would be nice to hear more works by 20th-century American composers, especially before the 20th century is over and done with. Almost every nation promotes and performs the work of its own modern masters, but we Americans—usually sanguine about the home team, often to the point of chauvinism (as many foreigners have cynically noted from our television coverage of the Olympic Games)—ignore our best serious composers. I am almost (but not completely) resigned to the fact that I will die never having heard most of the major 20th-century American symphonic and chamber music works played in live performances.
That is one reason the recent La Jolla Chamber Music Society–sponsored visit of the St. Louis Symphony was such a thrill. Unwilling to pander to prevailing audience preferences for nothing but 19th-century European composers, conductor Leonard Slatkin dedicated the first hour of the evening to an all-American program of Samuel Barber’s romantic Symphony No. 1 and Joseph Schwantner’s severe and elegiac “Evening Land” Symphony.
Hearing these works played with such commitment and polish was, I fear, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Schwantner, by the way, is that greatest of rarities on our concert programs: a living composer.
Following the intermission, Slatkin served up the Beethoven everyone usually hopes for—in this case, a taut, explosive reading of the Seventh Symphony. But the final fillip of a memorable evening was spoken, not musical. From the podium, Slatkin expressed gratitude for the enthusiastic reception afforded him and his orchestra but admonished us to support our own excellent San Diego Symphony.
La Jolla–based musical groups do more for new music than anyone else. The Athenaeum’s enlightened “Noise at the Library” series continues June 10 with a program featuring Judith Gordon playing Roger Sessions’ First Piano Sonata.
Belying the LJCMS’ much-noted musical conservatism, it has been sneaking more and more 20th-century music into programs of late. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio recently jolted a Parker Auditorium audience out of its Brahms-and-Mozart complacency with the newly composed Trio No. 2 for Piano, Violin and Cello of New York composer Leon Kirchner (also living, by gosh!). And violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis highlighted their stunning Celebrity Series recital at the Civic Theatre with an intriguingly idiosyncratic performance of Bartók’s difficult Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano.
Meanwhile, Coronado’s leading resident opera diva, soprano Carol Neblett, has just fought her finest fight on behalf of American music with her convincing portrayal of the rapacious ice-goddess, Regina Giddens, in Opera Pacific’s important revival of Regina. This is Marc Blitzstein’s seldom-performed near-masterpiece based on the play The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman. Though the demands of the score seemed to split Neblett’s voice into two distinctly separate registers, she sank her teeth into the part with gusto.
It’s a shame this unique performance, lovingly reconstructed from Blitzstein’s original notes and brilliantly conducted by John Mauceri, was not videographed for posterity. Unfortunately, Mauceri’s brand-new London CD release of Regina, recorded with the Scottish Opera, has already been deleted from the catalogues. Like the works of so many other fine 20th-century composers, Regina will most certainly drop back into the shadowy abyss.
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