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KPBS Midday Edition

SummerFest Brings (Chamber) Music To The People

SummerFest is a celebration of chamber music that kicked off with a free, outdoor performance.
Courtesy of La Jolla Music Society
SummerFest is a celebration of chamber music that kicked off with a free, outdoor performance.
SummerFest Brings (Chamber) Music To The People
SummerFest Celebrates 30 Years of Chamber Music in La Jolla GUEST:Cho-Liang Lin, SummerFest Music Director Beacon Street Trio, chamber music trio

I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. Summerfest is celebrating the 30th anniversary this year and also the beginning of a new phase in the life of the La Jolla music society. As the Festival always the building of the first very own performance space, joining me is Cho-Liang Lin . Is also known as Jimmy. The members of the Beacon Street Trio will be performing for us in just a moment ago welcome to the program. Thank you. You been leading Summerfest for half of his existence for 15 years. How have you seen it grow? I love so many aspects of this Festival or go it is devoted to chamber music but broaden horizons by having Incorporated dance, jazz, and we have commission works from composers. We have a very wide range of various fronts that we always are pursuing. The ultimate aim is to bring the best music in the best musicians to San Diego here after year and to that extent, I think we've done a pretty good job and we will continue to strive for the future. At the same time, hoping that the general audience can understand that Summerfest stands for many things perhaps stimulating but an event that you can embers yourself in every summer. Summerfest was designed to be a different kind of musical experience for both the performers and for the audiences. People can really see the passion and enthusiasm of these performances. The thing is we want to shorten the distance between the performers in the audience. So just about all the artists that come to Summerfest they in private homes. We all have hosts. They all become lifelong friends. We open our rehearsals to the public. We also run a fantastic young artists program whose members you will hear shortly. There coaching sessions on every weekday morning is open to the public free of charge as are open rehearsals. We welcome the audience to be a mongers. It is like opening our living room and sing come on it a watch us play and make music and see how we are. Sometimes we are very open to the public about how we are working and how our thought process works. At the same time, we are very much in the community. I think that is a unique thing. Tell us what are some of the highlights still ahead in this your Summerfest. For instance, we have the performer Rainer Crossett Tom Bye. -- Come by. He is going to come into the Mount Everest of Tello records. It's going to be our first. We never presented it. These events I think are enormously exciting, but also on the different side of the coin, we are going to % the great Latino jazz legend and in the Festival with James call-in working with a fantastic orchestra. Let's turn now to the Beacon Street Trio. It is a made up of Luke Hsu , Rainer Crossett , and Sophie Scolnik-Brower . They will be performing Beethoven's song. [ Music ] I once going -- I am once again joined by Cho-Liang Lin . We heard from Jimmy that members of the public come in and they watch you in your coaching sessions and so forth. What is it like having people want to create works I have to say all of us were really amazed will walked into the first coaching session and so awful house of fans there waiting to listen to us and watch the interaction between our group and a wonderful musician there. so many great artist were here to coaches and work with us. I think it is exciting because it turns into more of a performance opportunity for us and also allows us to get to know so many Summerfest fans and concertgoers. We have already developed relationships with so many of them. Some come with scores in with questions for us in ideas and they love to see how our interpretations evolved over the course of the Festival and as we have work coaching and viewpoints. Bets been a special and unique thing about this special. Jimmy, your about to break ground on the building of Summerfest on a performance space. It will be called the Conrad after Conrad Prebys. What does this mean for Summerfest expect it offers a huge array of possibilities. We want to have acoustically great content Hall in San Diego. I'm very confident it will be so. The Festival needs different spaces for different purposes. We have a smaller theater and it will be wonderful that we can set smaller offense and we can turn them into educational centers. We can invite young people to come in and watch or perform and then we will have rehearsal spaces. It will be a very beautiful home for many decades to come. That is expected to open in 2018? I am counting on it because I am planning and programming Summerfest 2018 already based on that entire concept that it will be the grand opening of the new Conrad. I've been speaking with Cho-Liang Lin and we heard from the members of the Beacon Street Trio. Thank you all very much. Thank you. The La Jolla music Summerfest continues through August 26. Stay tuned for KPBS roundtable ahead and have a great weekend.

La Jolla Music Society's SummerFest was built on the idea of making classical music more intimate and accessible.

And for the last 30 years, audiences have watched everyone from world-renowned composers to upstart musicians perform small concerts throughout downtown La Jolla.

This year's 30th anniversary also marks a new phase for SummerFest. Ground will soon break on the La Jolla Music Society's performance space, The Conrad, named after the late philanthropist Conrad Prebys.

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On Midday Friday, SummerFest Music Director Cho-Liang Lin shared his plans for the new space, which is scheduled to open in 2018.

He was joined by Boston's Beacon Street Trio, a young chamber music trio that features Luke Hsu on violin, Rainer Crossett on cello and Sophie Scolnik-Brower on piano.

The trio is participating in SummerFest's Fellowship Artists program, where coaching sessions are free to watch and open to the public.

You can find the complete SummerFest schedule here.