Music Reviews : SummerFest Start Is Effectively Eclectic

LA JOLLA —  One of the minor wonders of contemporary music is the emergence of Terry Riley--the notoriously slow-working creator of “In C” and devout improviser--as one of our most prolific makers of string quartets. Predictably, perhaps, they are marvels of contradiction.

The multiple dichotomies of a work such as Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” might serve as a paradigm for the program heard Tuesday at the Sherwood Auditorium.

Artistic director Heiichiro Ohyama assembled a comfortably contrasting agenda and a diverse array of performers for the event, opening the first full week of concerts for the sixth SummerFest presented by the La Jolla Chamber Music Society.

“Sunrise” is a 10-year-old product of the fruitful collaboration between Riley and the Kronos Quartet. Tuesday found the piece in the young hands of the Ridge String Quartet.

This is modular music, expressly malleable in ways great and small. Violinists Krista Feeney and Robert Rinehart, violist Maria Kannen and cellist Peter Wyrick gave it an intensely kinetic reading, one tighter in both time and temperament than those of Kronos.

The former Marlboro Festival musicians merged lyric grace and obsessive pulse into an elevated dance ritual. Their arrangement of the cellular components suggested traditional forms alien to the composer’s thought, but it did no violence to the material and added yet another layer of subtle tension to the tuneful workings.

The experience proved complementary to the more lengthy musings of Brahms in the Quintet in F, Opus 88. There the elegantly impassioned, perfectly matched instrumental song of violinist Cho-Liang Lin and violist Toby Hoffman anchored a virtuosic ensemble that also included violinist Roger Wilkie, violist Ohyama and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum.

Collegial interdependence has been one of the happy hallmarks of other ad-hoc SummerFest ensembles, and it distinguished this playing, too. The performance had all the interpretive unanimity of many a longstanding ensemble, and more heat than most.

The concert began with yet another take on the expressive potency of fully interactive chamber music. Lin and Yuzuko Horigome wove beautifully balanced--at times virtually indistinguishable--strands of sound into an astonishingly seamless cloth for the Suite in G minor for two violins and piano by Moritz Moszkowski.

This seldom-heard work is four compact, ingratiating movements of undecayed, late-Romanticism. Athletic determination and melodic ease mitigate the sentiment, enhanced by an unexpectedly austere slow movement and even more surprising proto-jazz intimations in the finale, at least as played with swinging poise by Lin and Horigome.

The pianist was 19-year-old Max Levinson, one of the contingent of young musicians fostered every year by SummerFest in its Rising Stars program. He brought solid skills and a rather deferential attitude to the task, accompanying rather than collaborating--not that Moszkowski give him much to assert.