LINDSAY DEUTSCH SummerFest: Alumni Jam Session By Janice Steinberg Last night’s concert at SummerFest required no fewer than five radical stage makeovers, and these were carried off with a swift, stately, ritual aplomb by men and women dressed in black. In marked contrast to the human chaos stirred up by Friday’s electrical blackout in Sherwood Auditorium, the elegance of the prop people’s movements last night could easily have been savored in a totally silent environment – except that National Public Radio’s genial classical announcer, Fred Child, was busily filling us in on amusing details and essential facts regarding what we (and the future radio audience) were about to hear. The taped broadcasts, by the way, are something to look forward to in pleasurable expectation. The premise of this SummerFest 20th Anniversary season program was evident in the program’s title: Alumni Jam Session. With reference to those glamorous prix fixe plans now found in many upscale restaurants, Child promised us a “tasting menu” – and he challenged the audience with a riddle about the program: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” “Ah ha!” thought I. “Mendelssohn!” The first thing on the program was Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major for Strings, Opus 20. Mendelssohn also wrote that wedding march everyone loves -- the one from his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Not the“Here Comes the Bride” one; that’s from Wagner’s Lohengrin.) Anyhow, I was so wrong in this guess that I never did figure out Child’s riddle. Puzzle solvers among you take note. What the Octet did turn out to be, though, was a “bleeding chunk” – a single movement from the Octet, ripped ruthlessly out of full context. It was the first movement, marked Allegro moderato ma con fuoco. The soloists were Arnold Steinhardt, Sheryl Staples, Cho-Liang Lin, Lindsay Deutsch, violins; Heiichiro Ohyama, Shirley Ho, violas; and Felix Fan, Sumire Kudo, cellos. It’s a shame they did not play the entire thing! They were off to a wonderful start. This must have been the “tasting” thing Child had been talking about. But the Octet movement remained the only work merely “tasted” during the rest of the evening. Time constraints were clearly paramount. But here you had Steinhardt, famous for decades as the distinguished first violin in the great Guarneri String Quartet; Ohyama, a great violist and a former artistic director of SummerFest; Staples, principal associate concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and a wonderful artist and long-time SummerFest participant. And – well, one could go on. |