SummerFest’s Barnatan seeks musical ‘defining moments’ in 2025 program

Among America’s great summer classical music festivals — think Tanglewood, Ravinia, Aspen— La Jolla Music Society’s 39-year-old SummerFest is still a comparative upstart. That an aura of momentum and promise still surrounds it has a lot to do with fresh leadership: CEO Todd Schulz joining in 2017, LJMS Artistic Director Leah Rosenthal promoted in 2020, and — critically — SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan appointed in 2018.

Born in Tel Aviv, schooled in Israel and London, and now a naturalized New Yorker, Barnatan’s instinct for creative programming seems to be bone deep, from his career’s earliest recitals and his thoughtfully curated recordings (Time Traveler’s Suite and Darknesse Visible) to his October Wigmore Hall recital: Brahms meets Jörg Widmann’s (born 1973) Brahms-inspired Intermezzi. 

This year’s SummerFest from July 25 to Aug. 23, though neither the longest or busiest, continues to push the envelope in the ways that define Barnatan’s reign: programming depth, innovative spirit, and virtuosic luminosity. It not only features cross- and anti-genre initiatives like the Synergy Series (Barnatan’s initiative) and July 27’s‘New York Takeover but also sustains SummerFest’s tradition of giving neglected composers (Carl Nielsen, Anton Arensky, Charles Koechlin, etc.) a day in the sun. And, building on last year’s residency by iconic composer Thomas Adès, SummerFest 2025 features star soprano Renée Fleming and ex-New York Phil conductor Alan Gilbert.  

Speaking recently from Aspen — where he performed Leonard Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety concerto-symphony — Barnatan took buck-stops-here responsibility for the festival’s twenty concerts, sixty-plus pieces and eighty or more musicians: “I’m not only the final, I’m the only arbiter. The only pushback I get is if I have an idea that’s unfeasible — if it’s something that’s so expensive that they can’t afford it.” 

Given SummerFest’s complexity and many moving parts, surely Barnatan relies on some system or process to minimize his programming work? “There’s not one way that this happens,” he demurs. “I try to allow it to happen organically. Most of the time, there’ll be a list of pieces that I really want to do, some kind of a short list, and then I’ll start to think about what threads, combine some of those, and then the whole thing starts to flesh out.”

As for themes, this year’s is Milestones: “defining moments in a creative life.” Formulas are out: “Usually at some point I change and adapt the theme. My idea of it kind of changes over the months. It’s an organizing principle. But I don’t want any music to be there just because of the theme,” he said.

“The theme is more of a way to encourage creativity rather than stifle it. I try to come up with a theme that’s interesting and engaging enough, but also broad enough that I don’t have to program thematic music. If there’s a piece of music that I really want to do and it doesn’t fit, it shouldn’t be excluded.”

Barnatan also denies that SummerFest’s long history of resurrecting non-canonical works is a guiding principle. “I don’t think about it as a formula of, okay, I need to have something old, something new, something blue, you know. Trying to do a balanced program, trying to balance different elements of it, the newness of it, or when it was written, is less important to me.” 

Still, Barnatan’s interest in the neglected shows. “The Great Unknown” was the theme of his 2023 SummerFest — “one of my favorite” — which featured underperformed composers like Boulanger, Crumb, Szymanowski, Beach, Dohnanyi, and Schulhoff. “It’s interesting for me to discover things that are new to the audience, new to me,” he said. “And for me, new music is not necessarily new music, doesn’t necessarily have to be by a living composer.”

“It could be something that’s not often heard, not often played. But I do try to look out for pieces that have somehow been neglected but are still great,” he explained, adding “I won’t do something just because it’s adventurous. I will do something that I think the audience would love because it’s adventurous.” 

Barnatan follows the same intuitive, anti-formulaic approach when recruiting each festival’s musicians. “One of the fun things about a festival is going back year after year and seeing people that you love come back. It’s kind of like a family reunion. But I think it’s also so important to have constantly fresh ideas, fresh faces, fresh energy,” he said. “Variety is important to keep it fresh, both throughout the festival and from one to another, and also to give other players, either younger players, or from Europe that don’t get to often play in the States.

“The people that I choose are very much related to what I want them to play and with whom. Not everybody who’s great works with everybody else who’s great. The alchemy of that is important. Usually people come for about a week, and they do three out of the four concerts. So every week has a completely different vibe to it, both musically and personally.”

That constant musician turnover across the festival creates it own challenge – when should Barnatan himself perform? “Every year I tell myself I’m going to play less. Running the festival and being there for the full four and a half weeks is challenging (and joyful), but my mission is to create programs that I would want to attend if I didn’t plan it. [But] that creates an environment in which I tell myself, ‘Oh, I gotta be a part of this!’”

In its first year, 1986, SummerFest presented eight concerts over ten days. In 2025, it’s nudging against the month mark yet “already … breaking sales records,” Barnatan discloses. Is its growth potential unlimited? Not necessarily. “We’ve done the expansion partly because I felt when I joined, it was three weeks but there were five concerts a week. I felt that that was too crowded. People needed some time to recover, but also to rehearse.

“Every year has been growing, which of course, I’m thrilled to see, [but] one of the things I’ve been trying to do is to not overstuff the concerts. There’s so many great [musicians] and so many great pieces, you want to just take advantage of all these people when they’re there. But then you realize that sometimes less is more. When you get to a certain level, it’s more about what not to do, rather than what to do.”

Barnatan’s gnomic phrasing here hints at the ineffable quality of his SummerFest programming. It’s about “balance,” “push and pull,” an “interesting journey,” “how things, when put together, illuminate one another.” Or it’s like a restaurant or dinner party: “if you were creating a menu, you’d want to have something that you know people will love, and you want to push them, to contrast… a balance of ingredients.”

But underlying everything is trust. “I’m very aware that programming and the festival is there for the people that are coming to listen to it, not for me. The thing that I’m most keen on is to build a trust with the audience. That trust is something I really work for. Every successful relationship between a festival and audience has that.”

Paul Bodine has been writing about music – from classical to pop/rock — for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Classical Music Daily, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, David Benoit, Laura Claycomb, Jon Nakamatsu, Paul Chihara, the Ahn Trio, Lucas Debargue, and John Thiessen.