La Jolla Music Society’s marathon concert featured 400 years of musical compositions that each referenced other music
BY LUKE SCHULZE
JULY 30, 202310:29 AM PT
The musicologist Paul Henry Lang wrote, “A musician is a historian.” He meant that musical works and their performances connect, implicitly or explicitly, to other music — that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
La Jolla Music Society’s concert Friday night at the Baker-Baum Concert Hall took this idea and ran an elegant marathon with it, launching this year’s season of Summerfest, whose monthlong offerings boast a diverse group of performers and imaginative programming.
Director Inon Barnatan’s selections for the concert were savvy and smart, perfect for Summerfest’s opening salvo, in that all the works, interesting in themselves, referred in some way to other music, creating a narrative fabric that wove together chronology, genre, and geography in a promising stylistic overture to the entire series.
Opening night serves as a grand announcement of the festival as a whole, and so it was fitting to begin with an offstage brass ensemble fanfare with 17th-century music by Thomas Simpson and Bastian Chilese. Trumpeters Brandon Ridenour and Eduardo Ruiz brought late-Renaissance transparency and support to melodic lines.
György Ligeti’s early “Bagatelles for Wind Quintet” date from 1953. Nos. 1, 3 and 6, heard Friday, are a bit different from the wild essays in sonority most listeners associate with the mature works, focusing instead on reference, rhetorical gesture, and style. Even at this stage in his career, Ligeti shows his ability to do just about anything, and the deft, knowing stylistic nods in his language were matched by shining, visceral performances by Rose Lombardo, flute; Marc Lachat, oboe; Anton Rist, clarinet; Eleni Katz, bassoon; and Kaylet Torrez, horn, whose upper-register playing was especially impressive.