Cardenes Returns--This Time to La Jolla

LA JOLLA —  Coy is probably the last attribute anyone would assign former San Diego Symphony concertmaster Andres Cardenes. With violin in hand, he is a commanding, assertive performer, and on a personal level he is nothing short of gregarious.

But professionally, Cardenes has learned the virtue of playing hard to get, a trait he acquired during the 1986-87 symphony crisis. Experiencing firsthand the instability of the American orchestral scene, he retreated into the fiscal security of academia, accepting a teaching position at the University of Michigan.

Cardenes is back in the area to play six of the eight concerts in SummerFest ‘88, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s annual festival, which opens tonight at Sherwood Auditorium. Over a leisurely lunch this week, he expressed his ambivalence about resigning from the orchestra in April, 1987.

“As soon as I got (back) here, I started feeling so sad,” said Cardenes. “I just loved living here. It was fantastic, although the commuting was starting to kill me--going to the East Coast for concert engagements. But I felt that the commute was worth it.”

Former symphony music director David Atherton had lured Cardenes away from his concertmaster post at the Utah Symphony to join the local orchestra during its aggressive expansion period. Cardenes got out of his Utah contract in time to play with San Diego during the 1985-86 season, the orchestra’s inaugural year in Symphony Hall. Then he watched his San Diego dream turn to a nightmare as the orchestra management flirted with bankruptcy and canceled the 1986-87 season.

When the San Diego Symphony resumed playing last fall, Cardenes wrote Executive Director Wesley Brustad a letter to wish him well on the opening of the season.

“I really felt that I should have been there,” Cardenes said. “It was making me mad to sit (at home) knowing the orchestra would play their first concert in a year without me. I was really upset about it. Of course, it wouldn’t have been the same without David (Atherton) conducting.”

Cardenes said that although he had always done some university teaching as an adjunct to his orchestra playing, university life does not offer much community for a gregarious musician.

“The one thing I truly miss about orchestra playing is the camaraderie with the guys,” he said. “We used to play basketball all the time, hang out and exchange ideas, talk about concerts, and get excited about a season. Now I find myself a lot more on my own in the academic world.”

Cardenes’ university position--he is responsible for 11 advanced violin students--has allowed him the luxury of orchestral performing without being involved in orchestra politics. Last year, he was a frequent guest concertmaster with the Pittsburgh Symphony and did a 10-day guest stint in China with the Shanghai Philharmonic. The China connection emerged after he discovered that a Chinese student he had tutored on and off over three years was the daughter of the Shanghai orchestra’s conductor.

Next season he will play 15 weeks as Pittsburgh’s interim concertmaster and play the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto with that orchestra on its two-week tour. After his San Diego traumas, however, he was reluctant to take on Pittsburgh even on an interim basis. He rebuffed offers from the Pittsburgh management until music director Lorin Maazel--noted for his aloof, dictatorial demeanor on and off the podium--implored him directly.

By this time, Cardenes was accustomed to negotiating with Pittsburgh and keeping his suitor at bay.

“They had offered me the (concertmaster) job while I was here two years ago,” Cardenes explained, “but I decided then that I didn’t want it. I had been in up to my ears in muck” in San Diego.

As Cardenes sees it, the current economic uncertainty of American orchestras is discouraging, and the prognosis is not good. Having played this past year with several orchestras, he said he has no intention of leaving the security of the University of Michigan.

“Academic institutions of that magnitude usually don’t have financial troubles,” he said. “The new contract for the Utah Symphony, for example, calls for a three-year pay freeze and expansion freeze. With a base salary of $26,000 a year, that’s not good. And for the second year in a row, even the Pittsburgh Symphony has had to dip into its endowment to cover its deficit. When the orchestra with the largest endowment in the country does that, it scares you a little.”

A connoisseur of summer music festivals from Upstate New York to Alaska and Hawaii, Cardenes has performed in each SummerFest since it began in 1986. He observed that like SummerFest, most festivals are perched in agreeable locations, but La Jolla’s outstanding trait is its organization, a virtue that Andre Previn also noted while praising SummerFest earlier this year in an address to Chamber Music America’s annual conference in Los Angeles.

“The La Jolla organization is really phenomenal,” Cardenes said. “For the performer, every conceivable thing he might want or need, they’ve planned for. You can sit down and play without any worries about your personal life while you’re here, and the level of camaraderie among the players is high. It’s great to get to play with (cellists) Gary Hoffman and Ralph Kirshbaum again.”

Cardenes will perform in both of Sunday’s Sherwood Auditorium concerts, playing in the Mendelssohn Piano Quartet at 3 p.m. and soloing in the “Winter” concerto from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” during the all-Vivaldi concert at 7 p.m.

Festival artistic director Heiichiro Ohyama has lined up an enviable complement of soloists for the other seasons--Ani Kavafian will play “Spring,” Eugene Drucker “Summer,” and Frank Almond “Autumn.” Kit Goldman, managing producer of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, will provide the poetic narration that accompanies the “Four Seasons.”