La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest narrows to six concerts, live-streamed

“The 2020 edition of SummerFest, the La Jolla Music Society’s 35-year-old chamber music celebration, has been reconfigured three times since being announced in March as a marathon event spanning 22 days and 18 concerts,” writes George Varga in Sunday’s (8/16) San Diego Union-Tribune. “On Aug. 5, the resurgent pandemic forced SummerFest to shelve its ambitious plans to host a reduced-capacity, socially distanced audience of 130 in The Conrad’s 513-seat Baker-Baum Concert Hall. ‘We held out to the last possible moment to see if anything changed that would have allowed us to have a live audience,’ [pianist and music director Inon] Barnatan said…. The six 2020 SummerFest concerts will be livestreamed, with only the musicians and production crew present. In addition to Barnatan and [cellist Alisa] Weilerstein, the performers include violinists James Ehnes and Tessa Lark, cellist Clive Greensmith, violinist/violist Yura Lee and contrabassist Michael Thurber…. Each concert will last about an hour, with no intermission…. The festival will conclude, offline, with a sold-out Aug. 30 gala at the Lodge at Torrey Pines, where the performers will be on the lawn as attendees listen and watch from their hotel room balconies.”