Review: Rarely played Scandinavia music shines at SummerFest ‘Northern Lights’

One of the glories of La Jolla Music Society’s annual SummerFest is its perennial embrace of neglected music (leaving aside its equally long embrace of brand-new music via commissions). Even the very first SummerFest in 1986 featured the music of Carl Nielsen, Arnold Bax, and lesser-known works by canonical composers like Bartok.

Friday’s nothing-but-strings program at La Jolla’s Conrad, “Northern Lights,” nicely illustrated that embrace. The evening’s closing mainstay was Jean Sibelius’ Voces Intimae string quartet in D minor (1909), not as well-known as his symphonies but without doubt his most frequently performed chamber work (Finland’s Meta4 quartet played it here in April).

But the evening’s first half was pure SummerFest iconoclasm: an early string quintet by the late great Danish composer Nielsen (1865-1931) and the second nonet by the very-much-living Finnish pianist/composer Ollie Mustonen (born 1967). How neglected are they? Nielsen’s quintet has received all of two performances worldwide in the past decade (both this month); Mustonen’s Nonet No. 2 has been recorded exactly once in the past quarter century.

Only the Nielsen offered any purchase on claims that neglected music is neglected for a reason. Nielsen himself never published this quintet and even withdrew it (as his Opus 3) until late in his life. Eric Bromberger notes in SummerFest’s program that Nielsen’s comment after hearing it performed 37 years later was “How like Brahms it is!” How like Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen it is too. In withdrawing another piece he wrote the same year as the quintet, Nielsen admitted Svendsen’s obvious influence was the cause.

All-star violinists Blake Pouliot and Alan Gilbert (the New York Phil’s former music director); violists Kyle Armbrust and Sohui Yun; and cellist Kajsa William-Olsson gave the quintet its star turn. Pouliot’s keening lyricism, Armbrust’s soaring gestures, and the quintet’s cohesion behind a piece “nobody in the group has played before,” according to Gilbert in the concert’s prelude video, drew applause after every movement.

But textural muddiness marred the second and third movements, and only in the last could one hear the muscular, vigorous voice that Nielsen began, three years later, to make his own with his first symphony. In other words, this early work perfectly fit SummerFest music director Inon Barnatan’s “Milestones” theme: “defining moments in a creative life.”

Judging by Friday’s performance, any neglect Mustonen’s fascinating and likable second nonet has suffered is simply because no one’s heard it. Barnatan shared in the festival’s opening-night interview that when he first heard the nonet’s brooding, slashing opening it “blew my mind.” The rhythmic energy, originality, and dramatic instinct of the first two movements do grab by the lapels.

But the nonet’s hypnotic soul is its eight-minute adagio. Built on simple, repeated musical ideas, punctuated by the violins’ darting descending figures, it casts a haunting spell, somehow elegiac and hopeful. The racing rhythms, thrumming pizzicato, and vaguely Sibelian shimmer of the closing vivacissimo culminated in a thrilling cliff leap that drew a roar from the Conrad audience.  

Though two of the four musicians seating themselves for Sibelius’s Voces Intimae — violinists Stefan Jackiw and Liza Ferschtman — had played in the first half, the step change in sonic magnetism and virtuosic force post intermission was unmistakable. True, the D minor string quartet was the night’s only work of genius, and cellist Clive Greensmith and violist Jonathan Vinocur brought rested virtuosity on stage. But the detectable character shift likely came down to these musicians’ rapport and the good fortune all canonic repertoire enjoys: players have had years to probe their mysteries.

This was a riveting performance. Wielding his 1704 Vincenzo Rugeri, first violinist Jackiw injected an electric urgency into his top-voice role. With his precise, spiderlike fingering, Goldsmith brought a dark, throbbing burnish to his anchoring line. Locked tightly in, Ferschtman and Vinocur channeled the quartet’s blistering energy. Counterintuitively, these four created a more massive sonic presence than the combined four violins, two violas, two cellos and bass of Mustonen’s nonet.

In the prelude video, Goldsmith hinted at the quartet’s secret sauce: “For me it’s much more about the character of each instrument” than it is the players’ ability to blend “in a technically accomplished way.” Finland’s Meta4 succeeded with Voces in April through telepathic unanimity and a psychological conception of the work. The visceral success of Friday’s quartet came down to the sheer intensity and virtuosity of their playing.

Paul Bodine has been writing about music – from classical to pop/rock — for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Classical Music Daily, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, David Benoit, Laura Claycomb, Jon Nakamatsu, Paul Chihara, the Ahn Trio, Lucas Debargue, and John Thiessen.