The Soldier’s Tale: Gorgeous Music and Devilish Visuals in La Jolla

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt.  Performance photographs by Ken Jacques.

A brilliant trio, playing The Devil’s Trill by Giuseppi Tartini, and even the harpsichord is gorgeous. Augustin Hadelich, violin; Inon Barnatan, harpsichord; Mackintyre Taback, cello.

It’s not often that there are major visual components to the concerts at The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, home of La Jolla Music Society. But on July 26^th, opening night of their month-long SummerFest 2024, the performance of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier’s Tale), featuring Tony-award-winning actor Danny Burstein as the Narrator, included riveting visuals from a British group called The PaperCinema that added an extra dimension to the program’s theme: “A Deal with the Devil”.

There were terrific performances of all the musical pieces that evening, starting off with SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnaton at the piano and his thrilling rendition of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. Violinist Augustin Hadelich brought the audience to their feet with a Paganini Caprice, but L’Histoire du Soldat (an old favorite of mine) was the pièce de résistance.

The Paper Cinema, with Nicholas Rawling as illustrator and artistic director, has made a reputation creating animated pen-and-ink puppets that turn music, film, and theater performances into special events. You can’t really get a sense of their darkly comic “moving drawings” in print, but here are the two main characters:

 

The Soldier. 

The Devil

Written in 1918 as a theater piece with a French libretto by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, L’Histoire was meant to be performed by actors and dancers as well as musicians. It was based on a Russian folktale about a poor, tired soldier who trades his violin to the Devil for the promise of great fortune.

 

The Soldier and the Devil making a deal.

Needless to say, though the soldier gets plenty of riches and even gets to wed a princess, nothing lasts, and the Devil triumphs in the end. The lesson is: Don’t be lured into making deals with the Devil. Be happy with what you have.

 

Behind the scenes: the “puppeteers” at work.

Personally, I’m happy to have SummerFest here, and to have been at this wondrous opening. For more about SummerFest 2024, which includes many free events, see https://theconrad.org/summerfest

 

Even their brochure is terrific…with lots of interesting information and a cover photo of a Head with Flowers by artist Fred Tomaselli, from the MCASD collection. You can see it all at the link above.

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net