SummerFest music director Cho-Liang ‘Jimmy’ Lin will bow out with poise and panache

La Jolla Music Society SummerFest music director Cho-Liang “Jimmy” Lin vows to pull out all the stops in August when he concludes his final season as the heart and soul of the La Jolla Music Society’s acclaimed chamber-music celebration.

“I’m kind of ditching the musical parameters I usually have,” said Lin, who has expertly guided SummerFest as its music director for the past 18 years.

“I thought: ‘OK, I’ll just do whatever I want.’ And, hopefully, the audience will walk away happy. Even if they’re not happy, they’ll be rid of me!”

Lin, one of the classical-music world’s most acclaimed violinists since the 1980s, laughed heartily.

“I’m being facetious, of course,” he hastened to add. “I want the audience to be pleased and satisfied every year.”

That’s a goal Lin has handily achieved since becoming SummerFest’s music director in late 2000. He assumed that role 16 years after making his audacious 1985 San Diego concert debut at a La Jolla Music Society-produced concert in Balboa Park.

“It was at the Old Globe,” Lin said. “The stage was set up for ‘Of Mice and Men,’ so there were bales of hay set up all over the stage. It was really neat to thread my way through haystacks as I came on stage.”

Might he have some hay on stage for this year’s SummerFest finale concert at the Balboa Theater, where Lin will perform with Emanuel Ax, David Zinman and the San Diego Master Chorale?

“That would be very funny,” Lin replied with a chortle. “I wonder if the audience would get the humor in that?”

SummerFest’s storied reputation as a preeminent annual chamber-music festival predates Lin becoming its music director. As far back as 1992, esteemed pianist Andre Previn hailed the La Jolla event as “the best-run chamber-music festival I’ve ever seen.”

That is still the case, according to other musicians who have performed here, including rising piano star Inon Barnatan, who next year succeeds Lin as SummerFest’s music director.

For his next musical chapter, Cho-Liang “Jimmy” Lin will launch his nonprofit Taipei Festival & Academy in his native Taiwan.

(Photo by K.C. Alfred/ San Diego Union-Tribune )

‘Jimmy has done such a great job’

“It’s essential for a successful festival to get the chemistry going, so that it translates to the audience,” Barnatan told the Union-Tribune prior to his 2017 SummerFest performance.

“In La Jolla, Jimmy has done such a great job at inviting musicians, people who host them and workers behind the scenes. It creates a great sense of family, and the audience is part of it. Coming to La Jolla is like coming home for Thanksgiving. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, you start right where you left off. It’s that excitement and feeling of joy.”

Cellist Felix Fan, whose family hosts Lin each year at their home for SummerFest, agreed.

“Jimmy has been both one of the best musicians to play at SummerFest and one of its best music directors,” said Fan, 42, who was a teenager when he first met Lin and cites him as a key mentor. “It’s not easy to keep a great festival great, but Jimmy has.”

Lin’s praises are also sung by percussion marvel Steven Schick and pipa virtuoso Wu Man. The two will perform a new duo piece by San Diego composer Lei Liang, a 2015 Pulitzer Prize nominee, at the Aug. 14 SummerFest concert.

Titled “My Favorite Playlist,” the concert is being curated by Lin and will also feature some of his favorite works by Debussy, Mahler and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera. The combination of music by composers from different countries and centuries has long been a Lin trademark.

At the 2003 SummerFest, to cite just one example, he not only showcased classics by Beethoven, Bach and Mahler but by vital contemporary composers from China (Tan Dun), Cambodia (Chinary Ung) and Michigan (Pulitzer Prize winner William Bolcom). During Lin’s tenure, SummerFest has also reached out to commission new compositions by former Police drummer Stewart Copeland and jazz greats Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea.

“Under Jimmy, the festival has commissioned several dozen important new works that bring a variety of cultures together,” said Wu Man, a North County resident who performs June 20 in London with the Kronos Quartet, then launches her latest North American concert tour.

“I have had great opportunities to share Chinese traditional music with SummerFest audiences, as well as to premiere several new chamber pieces, do workshops and collaborate with young musicians.”

Schick, who is the artistic director of the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus, credits Lin for SummerFest’s broad reach and for not overlooking artists literally in the festival’s backyard.

‘Extraordinary stewardship’

“Jimmy’s stewardship of SummerFest has been extraordinary,” said Schick, a veteran music professor at UC San Diego. “He’s brought together really great musicians from far beyond here, while also involving San Diego musicians. I’ve always been very appreciative of that.

“The programs he has presented have been profound, and — quite often — also witty and ingenious. He broadened the palate of SummerFest and showcased composers from all over the world and from our present firmament, not just Europe. That diversity has been gratifying.”

Given his background, Lin’s eclectic approach seems all but inevitable.

Born in Taiwan in 1960, he began playing violin at the age of 5. When he was 12, a year after the death of his nuclear physicist father, Lin moved to Australia to study music in earnest. At 13, he played in a master class for violin legend Itzhak Perlman.

Two years later, Lin auditioned at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. He spent the following six years there studying with Perlman’s teacher, Dorothy DeLay. In early 1977, when he was not quite 17, Lin earned rave reviews after he performed as a soloist at President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration-day concert. Later that same year, he won first prize at the Queen Sofia International Violin Competition in Madrid.

Lin was only 21 when he made his debut as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. He was soon being lauded as the equal of such violin legends as Perlman, Isaac Stern and David Oistrakh.

In 1984, Columbia Records released Lin’s debut album, followed by another two albums by him the same year and at least 20 more since then. Through the consistent excellence of his violin playing, his stewardship of SummerFest and his many other artistic achievements, Lin — along with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and, more recently, pianist Yuja Wang — has been instrumental in dispelling myopic notions that Asian-born musicians can’t handily master Western classical music.

“I’m glad to say that, nowadays, that stereotype is really rare,” Lin said, speaking from his home in Houston. He lives there with his family and teaches at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, when not away on concert tours.

“It’s fantastic when you look at the progress,” Lin continued.

“I was watching a video of the New York Philharmonic in 1975 and it was all men and all Caucasian. Now, most of the violinists in the Philharmonic are women. And, among those ladies, many, if not half, are Asian and the concertmaster, Frank Huang, is Chinese-born. At SummerFest, we have Michelle Kim returning on violin, Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu on viola and Liang Wang is our principal oboist this year. So there has been huge change.”

Musical savvy

SummerFest concludes each year in late August. Not one to waste time, Lin usually finishes planning the following year’s festival program and artists by mid-October of each year. Except, that is, in 2000. That was when he suddenly leaped from being a performer at SummerFest to becoming its music director, following the abrupt resignation of his two predecessors, the husband-and-wife team of pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel.

“I didn’t even ask Neale Perl (the then-CEO of the La Jolla Music Society) what David and Wu had drafted,” Lin recalled. “Because I assumed I would have been told if they had. So I thought: ‘I’ll start with a blank piece of paper,’ and that’s how I did it.”

Before long, Lin was armed with spread sheets that list every artist and piece of music featured at each edition of SummerFest he has overseen. Those statistics are stored in his computer and updated for him every year by Ted McKinney, a longtime festival attendee and supporter.

“I throw the ideas around in my head for quite some time, for anywhere from a week to a month, and see how they fit,” Lin said. “I have to like it and I have to feel natural about the players and compositions involved. Sometimes, that can become complicated really quickly and that’s a pleasure when it does. It’s like a chess game. You have to think four or five moves ahead. One can only learn from trial and error by doing it.

“SummerFest has a core of fantastic musicians and we keep extending that extended family roster, year after year. I think musicians genuinely like being re-invited and I often tell my colleagues that, if they are not on the roster the following summer, don’t be offended. It’s just that I really needed to rotate somebody else in. ...

“With every music director, the core is always slightly different, so I have no idea what Inon will do once he takes over. The point is, there are really good musicians who come year after year, and really good new musicians, too.”

Lin is now working intently to raise funds for the 2018 debut of his nonprofit Taipei Academy & Festival, which will be held in his native Taiwan.

To ensure there would be ample time for his Summerfest successor to be found, Lin quietly informed the La Jolla Music Society board in 2016 that he would step down after this year’s festival. He was told by the society’s president, Kristin Lancino — who abruptly resigned in January — to do whatever he wanted for his final SummerFest.

Lin has had similar creative carte blanche at the 17 previous editions of the festival. But, this time, he was told not to worry about budgetary constraints and let his muse run free.

“For years, I wanted to do Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Carnival of the Animals’ and always had (renowned sportscaster) Dick Enberg in mind to narrate,” Lin said. “Finally, he told me he was going to retire and would be available. So I jumped at the opportunity, only to very sadly lose him when he died late last year. That was the whole inspiration to dedicating our 2018 SummerFest opening night to Dick Enberg.

“And I always wanted to do the Beethoven triple-concerto somewhere along the way. We did it many, many years ago with the San Diego Symphony at Copley Auditorium. But I’ve never played it myself at SummerFest, and now I will — with two of my favorite musicians.”

As his SummerFest tenure nears its conclusion, only months before the 2019 opening of the La Jolla Music Society’s $78 million Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, Lin paused to reflect.

“One can always dream big,” he said. “And I dreamed big for SummerFest, because it’s such a beautiful festival. I want it to continue to grow and I hope it will take on new dimensions when the new concert hall opens.

“I really wish Inon great success as the new music director. I want the festival to blossom anew, so that people say: ‘We have a great, great festival in San Diego and we are so proud of it.”

La Jolla Music Society SummerFest 2018

When: Aug. 3-24 (performance times vary)

Where: All but two of the concerts are at Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla

Tickets: $45-$89

Phone: (858) 459-3728

Online: ljms.com

george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga