Chamber music -- hip and, yes, packing 'em in

SAN DIEGO -- Chamber music, all the rage a decade or two ago, has lost cachet of late. Presenters, trying to sell high-priced tickets for small ensembles in huge halls, now complain of empty seats. Doomsaying critics and consultants find no shortage of rowdy, hard-rocking young willing to decry the fey elitism of funereal gray-haired audiences snoring through dour, sour string quartets.

Naysayers -- say SummerFest, the annual August chamber music festival sponsored by La Jolla Music Society -- are said to be burying their heads in the sand. And La Jolla obviously has some pretty nice sand for the high-society patrons of this festival to use. But how, then, to explain Friday's concert of new chamber music by Joan Tower and Marc Neikrug, along with reprises of recent festival commissions by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Chen Yi?

The concert was held not in the festival's usual Sherwood Auditorium in tony La Jolla but in the acoustically lively Stephen and Mary Birch North Park Theatre in an urban, funky and gradually gentrifying San Diego district. The 730-seat reconditioned movie palace was practically full. The audience, casually dressed, included seniors in the center (the more expensive seats) and what looked like many hip North Park denizens on the fringes.

Onstage, several players were young and with it. The music was engaging. The performances were all terrific. The listeners were alert and enthusiastic. Violinist Cho-Liang Lin, now in his seventh year as the festival's director, said in his opening remarks that the only way to keep chamber music alive is by continually replenishing it with new work. That was the point of the program. To doubt it, you'd have to argue with success.

Tower's music began and ended the evening. First came "Wild Purple" for solo viola and "Big Sky," a seven-minute piano trio commissioned for SummerFest 2000. The last piece was the premiere of "Trio La Jolla" -- also for piano, violin and cello but more than twice as long.

Tower's work always ingratiates, but on first hearing (and all these pieces were new to me), I find it difficult to locate the substance. All three works could be characterized as relying on big gestures. Tower requires string players to dig in. The bow grapples with the string. The tone is thick, sumptuous. The piano in her trios adds a quotient of glitter. Her pieces often start out soft and build gradually, and that was the case with the new score, which also included a preponderance of solos for each of the three instruments. Lin, André-Michel Schub (piano) and Gary Hoffman (cello) -- all seasoned chamber players -- held the house in thrall.