“Music,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the only sensual pleasure without vice.” It occurred to me that much avant garde music of the last century was shunned because it exuded so little sensual pleasure. It reeked of cold calculation and mathematical formulas, especially the works of the serial and “who cares if they listen” schools.

A trio of new works—all commissioned (or co-commissioned) by the La Jolla Music Society—received a vivid presentation Friday (August 19) at SummerFest. More rewarding than the astute performances and caliber of these chamber works was the warm reception given to each new opus. It is safe to say that the Sherwood Auditorium audience had no trouble extracting a modicum of sensual pleasure from these widely contrasting compositions, which also provided in equal measure stimulation for the mind and the imagination.

Sean Shepherd’s fresh, scintillating “Oboe Quartet” opened the concert, setting a high bar for the veteran composers who followed. At age 32, the Reno, Nevada, native’s idiom is surprisingly deft and penetrating, bristling with energy, even in tranquil moments. In his compact, 12-minute essay, Shepherd keeps the listener eager for the next development, making each new idea seem both surprising and inevitable.

It is not surprising that at age 30 he received a major commission from the New York Philharmonic and this coming season will be resident composer with the Cleveland Symphony. He is clearly a major league player, although his program bio cheekily boasts that he will continue as “the composer-in-residence for his hometown orchestra, the Reno Philharmonic.”

Shepherd’s single movement “Oboe Quartet” (it does cry for a more memorable title!) mirrors the same instrumentation as Mozart’s celebrated “Oboe Quartet in F,” K. 370: oboe, violin, viola and cello, and like Mozart, it gives pride of place to the oboe. Liang Wang burnished the oboe line with plaintive intensity in the cantabile sections, yet displayed a decisive, biting edge in the composer’s aggressive moods. Both Wang and cellist Felix Wang played in the well-received world premiere of this work on August 11 at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the co-commissioner of the piece. Here in La Jolla they were joined by violinist Jennifer Koh and violist Cynthia Phelps in as finely balanced and sensitive an ensemble as could be imagined.

For her new Piano Quartet, Joan Tower chose the name “White Granite,” an apt description of the dense, chordal structures that majestically move through the 17-minute work, as well as a fitting tribute to her influential, minerologist father. Tower may have four decades of experience over young Shepherd—and the intricacy of her tightly layered instrumental lines demonstrated that proficiency—but her sound is every bit as fresh and invigorating.

I liked the way Tower used trills in the piano and violin—typically flashy, decorative melodic elements—as solid building blocks by sustaining them in long passages at high volume. Instead of using the four instruments to cover the widest possible span of pitch levels, she tended to compress them into a single, dense level, moving up or down together in parallel motion: solid and granite-like, but never plodding or impassive. Like her fellow American composer John Adams, Tower works with constantly shifting tonal and modal centers, a trait that avoids the predictability of traditional tonality as well as the unsettling quality of atonality.

Trained as a pianist, it is not surprising that she gave the keyboard the integrating and grounding role in the ensemble, executed Friday by André-Michel Schub with depth and authoirity. Cellist Joshua Roman gave his solos improvisational flare and a suitably warm color, while violinist Margaret Batjer and violist Paul Neubauer added a shimmer that suggested light glinting on the granite surface. “White Granite” received its world premiere last summer at St. Timothy’s Summer Music Festival in rural Montana, one of the three festivals including La Jolla SummerFest that commissioned this work.

Is there any living composer with more universal name recognition than John Williams? Stop nearly anyone on the street, and they will name their favorite movies with a notable Williams sound track. Yet, how many know of his significant orchestral catalogue, including 15 instrumental concertos? Fortunately, the San Diego Symphony has programmed a few of these excellent works, including his Bassoon Concerto “The Five Sacred Trees,” heard a few seasons ago.

Williams’ “Quartet La Jolla” for violin, cello, clarinet and harp made an impressive debut Friday, channeling symphonic aspirations in an astutely structured 30-minute, five-movement chamber work. Commissioned by SummerFest Music Director Cho-Liang Lin, the title “Quartet La Jolla” echoes Bohuslav Martinu’s 1950 “Sinfonietta La Jolla,” a composition written for the young La Jolla Chamber Orchestra, the organization that evolved into today’s La Jolla Music Society.

Williams’ serious (for lack of a better term) style is more linear and less dense than that of either compositional colleague heard on Friday. His textures tend to be more flowing, although the demands he makes on his instrumentalists are just as formidable and varied. He avoided the cliche of slick harp glissandos, favoring instead high-pitched ostinatos that meshed with the violin and cello pizzicatos, executed with finesse by harpist Deborah Hoffman.

Taking the violin part, Lin soared eloquently, especially in the final movement where Williams exposed that Romantic soul he so resolutely restrained in the other four movements. In the fourth movement, clarinetist John Bruce Yeh gave voice to some of those repressed emotions, allowing them to bloom cautiously until he unleashed them in a splendid cadenza. Joshua Roman again provided top-drawer cello underpinning of the work.

Looking at SummerFest programming overall, certainly contemporary music is not a defining characteristic of the festival. Yet Lin and LJMS President and Artistic Director Christopher Beach have kept alive and well that niche in which new music can thrive and is honored. This 25^th anniversary year has made a worthy contribution to the cause.

PRESS HERE for PROGRAM and BIOS