LA JOLLA -- The public here can hear them at night, but their days belong
to the young musicians they are coaching.

Who are they? Festival directors David Finckel and Wu Han; pianists Gary
Graffman, Gilbert Kalish, Christopher O'Riley; violinists including Benny
Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Robert McDuffie, Kyoko Takezawa, Julie Rosenfeld;
cellists Carter Brey, Felix Fan, Janos Starker (honored by the festival
on his 75th birthday); many more.

The young people they coach in daily workshops are mostly
just-out-of-school musicians who have formed their own ensembles:
the Xando and Coolidge Quartets, and the Goffriller Trio.

(Also in attendance this year, but not as part of the coaching effort:
the St.  Lawrence String Quartet -- a group providing both youth and a
great deal of acclaimed professional experience.)

"The Workshop at SummerFest" is a tuition-free program -- coached by the
festival's featured artists without compensation.  From the beginning of
the festival, each of the three workshop ensembles has one coaching session
every day (with different coaches every time), and then they participate
in a regular evening concert, playing the work they have prepared.  All
of this -- except the concert itself, for which tickets are sold -- is
open to the public, free.

The workshops (master class/open rehearsal sessions) are fascinating
because they reveal not only the development of the works (a conservative
fare this year, of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Stravinsky) and of the
young musicians, but they show and contrast the sometimes widely varying
approaches by the coaches.

Going over the same work with the same musicians, each session is radically
different.  Last year, violist Toby Hoffman was patient and kind, Rosenfeld
was forceful and rather dramatic, Lin employed the socratic method:  `What
would you do differently?' Those three and Wu Han, the venerable pianist
Menahem Pressler, the Kavafian sisters, all "teachers" stressed that their
interpretation of the music is a matter of individual preference, not `the
law.'

Then, there is the "graduation concert," near the end of the 16-day-long
festival, where worshops and performances converge.

But that's later.  For tonight's opening concert, featuring the
`'teachers," there is Starker celebrating his own birthday with the Bach
Suite No.  3 for Unaccompanied Cello; the St.  Lawrence performing the
Haydn String Quartet in D Major, and then the Mendelssohn Octet, with help
from Philip Setzer, Kim, Cynthia Phelps, and Brey.

Janos Gereben/SF
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