SPIRITS ARE HIGH AT COURTYARD CONCERT
There wasn’t a cloud visible above the Wu Tsai Courtyard at the La Jolla Music Society’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center on Saturday morning when Inon Barnatan and Alisa Weilerstein began their sublime performance of Cesar Franck’s Sonata in A Major for Cello and Piano.
Yet, as the two began the gentle opening movement of Franck’s efficacious 1866 composition, it felt and sounded like the calm after a storm — or, at the very least, a much-needed prelude to the calm after a storm.
The storm in this case is the coronavirus pandemic, which has shuttered concert halls and live event venues of all kinds across the nation and around the world for the past 13 months.
At least for now, happily, San Diego County appears to be incrementally emerging from the pandemic. On April 5, county health officials announced a move into the second-least-restrictive orange tier of COVID-fueled restrictions. If hospitalization rates decline sufficiently and vaccination availability is ample enough, all restrictions will be lifted in California on June 15.
These signs of hope and progress provided a celebratory air at Saturday’s concert in La Jolla. It was the nonprofit society’s first event of 2021 to be held in front of a live audience, and attendance was limited to 99 masked and socially distanced attendees.
“You are the first audience in a very long time,” Todd J. Schultz, the society’s new president and CEO, said in his welcoming remarks. “You are the reason we’ve been able to sustain ourselves over the past year.”
Esteemed cellist Weilerstein and pianist Barnatan — who is also the music director of the society’s annual SummerFest — then took the stage and launched into Franck’s luminous sonata.
The two longtime collaborators deftly shifted from slow, graceful passages into rapid-fire melodies, gentle ruminations, ebulliently cascading lines and back again. Each was delivered with seamless élan and deeply felt conviction to create a triumphant musical pas de deux. Weilerstein’s gloriously vibrant tone and pinpoint execution were matched by Barnatan’s alternately supple and soaring piano work. Both listened as intently as they played, the better to imbue the music with grace and exhilaration.
The unamplified music was full and rich, with the large canopy over the courtyard producing a welcome reverberation. The periodic calls of sea gulls gliding overhead and cars driving by might have been a distraction under different circumstances. On Saturday morning — a second courtyard concert was held that afternoon and also drew a near-capacity crowd — the ambient sounds were a welcome reminder that performances can (and should) exist outside concert halls and that the courtyard is the gateway to a return to indoor concerts.
“I can’t tell you how good it is to hear applause,” Barnatan told the appreciative audience after the sonata concluded. “It’s so moving to me that we’re all here experiencing this music for the first time in so long.”
A similar degree of instrumental excellence and wonderfully empathic interplay were showcased during the second half of the concert, for which Weilerstein and Barnatan were joined by Russian-born violinist Philippe Quint. Together, they delivered a compelling performance of Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio in D Minor, Opus 32.
One of Russia’s least revered composers, both during and after his brief lifetime (1861-1906), Arensky reached his apex with his 1894 piano trio.
While the composition is not a major work — the lack of harmonic adventure is especially pronounced — Barnatan, Weilerstein and Quint dove into it with infectious verve and skill. What resulted was a master class in how exemplary musicianship can elevate and transform a so-so piece into something special.
With 11 more courtyard concerts scheduled between April 24 and June 24, the La Jolla Music Society is clearly — to invoke the title of a 1964 Herman’s Hermits hit — into something good as it readies a return to indoor concerts. Until then, its courtyard is a welcome interim destination worth visiting more than once.