Why do so many pop musicians aspire to write classical music? The hunger for critical recognition is not apparent in other artistic endeavors. How many action film directors use their Hollywood prestige to make a probing drama of the human condition? Tom Clancy doesn’t try to expand his genre to produce insightful novels about human relationships in contemporary society. Neil Simon doesn’t attempt to write brainy mind-bending fantasies dense with allusions. They’re content to work successfully within their own fields.

For some reason, popular composers want the approval of classical critics and audiences. This may have had some validity 80 years ago, when the “music critic” at the paper only reviewed classical concerts; in fact, the designation “classical music critic” is a fairly recent title in journalism. In our era of cultural relativism, where professors get tenure publishing books on Madonna or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the hankering for classical acceptance is unnecessary, an anachronistic throwback to the days when the only music that was taken seriously, that was considered respectable, was classical music.

Yet they keep trying: Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, David Byrne. For whatever personal reason, they keep assaulting the ivory tower. And unfortunately, they keep failing—aesthetically, anyway. This doesn’t bother classical music producers; they love (or at least view as a necessary evil) the ticket and CD sales that crossover music generates.

San Diego is the home of a distinguished crossover composer. After establishing himself in his field, he wrote classical compositions, which were recorded and well reviewed. He has blurred the boundaries between his genre and classical music, so much so that it is often impossible to pigeonhole him as belonging to one or the other. Despite his national and international reputation, San Diego does not actually get that many opportunities to hear him or his pieces performed. His name is Anthony Davis, and it’s too bad La Jolla Summerfest didn’t commission a string quartet from him instead of Mark O’Connor.

It’s unclear what Summerfest’s motives were in commissioning O’Connor. If they wanted to sell more tickets, they certainly succeeded. People had to be seated on stage behind the performers to accommodate the demand. If violinist and festival director Cho-Liang Lin wanted to showcase his bluegrass chops, then he was successful in that regard as well. But if they wanted someone to write a potential addition to the chamber music repertoire, they asked the wrong gentleman.

Mark O’Connor is one of the big classical crossover successes. Classical music audiences first paid attention to his Appalachia Waltz project with Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma. To this day, I don’t know what all the fuss was about. The compositions and arrangements are pleasant enough, and O’Connor is a remarkable violinist, but they do little more than sound pretty. It’s a kind of classical music fool’s gold--bright, glittering, and shiny, but of little actual value.

His String Quartet no. 2 is subtitled Bluegrass, and it delivers on that subtitle. Bluegrass licks permeate the entire work. O’Connor’s initial melodic ideas are usually attractive, the creative ways he harmonized some of these ideas is appealing, and he has a knack for writing for string instruments. What his music lacks, as it does so often in most pop composers crossing over to the classical domain, is a convincing structure. Specifically, O’Connor really needs to work on his transitions. An idea is developed, then the section peters out, and hey! a new idea suddenly springs out of nowhere. No amount of pleasant melodies can be strung together like this in a large-scale form, without proper development and transitions. Otherwise, you get a kind of musical train that keeps stopping at different stations, picking up again, only to grind to a halt at the next station. When the musical scenery (in this case, the bluegrass flavoring) doesn’t vary, well, it’s like staring out a train window rolling through Nebraska—all those wheat fields look the same, and it gets pretty boring.

I do think O’Connor has raw compositional talent, but it needs to be trained and developed. To put it bluntly, he needs composition lessons. Perhaps after a few years of such study, he’ll be able to produce a work that can unabashedly be programmed with Ravel and Dohnanyi.

In performing his Quartet no. 2, O’Connor played second fiddle to Cho-Liang Lin’s first violin. Lin surprisingly adopted a bluegrass sound, demonstrating real flair. He performed O’Connor’s part with care and sincerity. Violist Carol Cook and cellist Natalie Haas are the current members of O’Connor’s Appalachia Trio, and they brought to their performances an ease between country/bluegrass and classical music styles.

The concert opened with two selections by O’Connor’s trio. The first was a kind of fantasia on the folk tune Blackberry Blossom. The second was the Caprice for Three from the Appalachian Journey CD. Luckily, the problematic forms were not so disturbing here, due to the shorter lengths of the pieces. Again, the performances were beyond reproach, but the actual musical merit of the compositions? One is puzzled why O’Connor, in these works, shuns the simple forms such as theme and variations that country/folk music inhabits, when it would serve his material so much better.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about classical music melding with popular music. There are two generations of composers born after 1955 or so who think nothing of incorporating rock, country, or folk music into their concert music, and are accessible to boot. What was frustrating about O’Connor’s commission was that these composers, all more capable than O’Connor, toil in relative obscurity. I hope that Cho-Liang Lin investigates and programs these pop-influenced ladies and gentlemen with the same acumen that he has shown in bringing ethnic-classical-hybrid composers such as Chinary Ung, Tan Dun, and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh to Summerfest.

The wonderful cellist Lynn Harrell appeared in the remaining two works with his wife, violinist Helen Nightengale. Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello was the first genuine masterpiece for violin and cello duet. Formerly, contributions to this genre consisted largely of works composed for the pleasure of amateurs to play in their own homes (or in the case of Master and Commander, at sea). Ravel lifted this lowly combination up to the level of the string quartet or violin sonata, a serious, profound piece of music.

One of the amazing things about this duet is the way it’s scored to suggest that more than two instruments are playing at once. They rapidly switch between high and low registers, or between plucking and bowing the strings, to create the illusion of more instruments joining in. Such writing is necessarily virtuosic, and Harrell and Nightengale performed the Sonata as effortlessly as if it were a string method duet. With such formidable technique, they were able to focus on the passion that lies beneath the thorny surface of Ravel’s rhetoric.

Harrell and Nightengale were joined by Paul Neubauer for a performance of Dohnanyi’s String Serenade for violin, viola, and cello. String trios, while rare enough in the 19^th century, are not quite as scarce in the 20^th as Eric Bromberger’s otherwise excellent program notes would have readers believe. A partial list of string trio composers not mentioned by Bromberger includes Webern, Krenek, Schnittke, Gubaidalina, Scelsi, Xenakis, Fine, Wuorinen, and Ferneyhough. These trios are better pieces than Dohnanyi’s string trio, but they’re also much more challenging to listen to, making Dohnanyi a safer bet.

His String Serenade sounds like something a student of Brahms or Dvorak might produce; even though it was composed in 1902, there’s little evidence of the chromaticism that challenged listeners in Germany at the time, or the nonfunctional harmonies that Parisian audiences pondered over (although the third movement of the Serenade is a fugue with a slipperly, Straussian subject for its theme). If the String Serenade does not scale the heights that Ravel’s Sonata inhabits, it nonetheless is a well written piece which merits occasional programming. As one might expect, Harrell, Nightengale, and Neubauer gave the String Serenade as great a performance as one is likely to hear.

Click here for program.