MONTEREY, Calif. — While the rest of California was roasting unusually early in June, folks on the Monterey Peninsula were still wearing their winter coats. Just a few numbers on the same day — 59 degrees in Pebble Beach, 97 in Paso Robles to the south, and Walnut Creek to the north — tell the story. Yes, it usually stays this way year-round, and it makes me wonder whether, as a result of global warming elsewhere, the cultural scene in this neck of the woods is on the upswing as music travelers seek relief from summer heat.
One relatively new festival in the area is Sunkiss’d Mozart’s Summerfest, now in its third season. The sparkplug of this enterprise is a diminutive dynamo from Taiwan named Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu — or you can just call her Cindy Wu. After establishing herself in this country as a formidable violinist, she and her husband moved in 2020 from New York to the Monterey Peninsula, where she got the idea of a roving chamber-music festival in spaces where you would not expect to hear music. The series reminds me of the Da Camera Society’s long-running Chamber Music in Historic Sites series in L.A., which should come as no surprise since Wu created programs for Da Camera earlier in her career. Until this year, Wu put together everything herself — organizing, fundraising, programming, rehearsing, the works; now she has a staff helping out.
Wu sees Summerfest 2026 as the culmination of a trilogy of themed festivals. The first was “Seeds,” which explored beginnings; the second was “Metamorphosis,” which dealt with change. This one is entitled “Destined”: Are things fated in advance by some unknown power, or does serendipity play a part on how things turn out? Food for thought, which manifested itself over the first two installments of the festival I attended June 9 and 10.
The first event in the festival took place in the Mayo Hayes O’Donnell Library close by downtown Monterey. The tiny 19th-century building is a one-room library with Gothic-shaped windows, a vaulted ceiling, and knotty pine interior walls. It had never been used as a music performance space until Summerfest 2026, yet it seems like a natural due to its materials and modified shoebox shape.
Entitled “Into the Heart of Art 1: A Cellist’s Calling,” the event wasn’t so much a concert as an informal interview-discussion session led by Wu with brief musical demonstrations by two noted cellists, Tanya Tomkins and Felix Fan. That caused a little bit of consternation among a few overheard patrons who thought they were going to hear a full-fledged concert (although the blurbs about the event made it pretty clear that it was something else).
As it unfolded, the session turned out to be an informative journey into the weeds of performing, partly planned and partly figured out on the fly. Both Tomkins and Fan were articulate and, at times, humorous raconteurs and educators.
Wu’s discussion with Tomkins at first was supposed to be a meditation on the word “destined” but soon veered off course into an absorbing discourse by Tomkins on the period performance-practice movement with regard to the cello. She played the Sarabande from J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 as an introduction and demonstrated the differences in what the suite’s Bourrée sounded like with modern and baroque bows. She was honest enough to conclude, “I have no idea what it sounded like back then.”
The session went off in another direction with Fan, who has been involved with new music for the last 15-20 years by his count. He said that of the 17 years in which he was with the Flux Quartet, maybe five percent of the music the foursome commissioned had been played more than once. He also reminisced about pioneers of minimalism like Terry Riley (“The original hippie”) and Philip Glass (“A total vegan guy”).
Fan performed Lei Liang’s Mongolian Suite as his solo number (just its second performance), a piece strewn with the sliding pitches of indigenous music, with a fourth movement (“Shadow Dance”) in which the cello makes yowling sounds that resemble electronic intermodulation distortion. He and Tomkins also performed a brief, jolly Canon by Domenico Gabrielli.
The next concert, “Kismet” (“Fate’), took place in a stunning setting — the Seascape Room in the Asilomar Conference Grounds just outside Pacific Grove. Surrounded on all sides by glass window panes, the room has no walls per se; as a result, the sound has no place to resonate except on the vaulted wood ceiling. Nevertheless, the scenic delights of the room went a long way toward making up for any sonic shortcomings.
The concert opened with a novel selection, “Plakala” (“Cry”) by the Ukrainian folk/electric band KAZKA, an international hit song in 2018 as arranged by Clancy Newman for cello eight-hands. Say what? Here’s how it worked: Fan was the central figure bowing the strings, while cellist Andres Sanchez played pizzicato, violinist Owen Dalby patted the sound board, and violist Samuel Rosenthal tapped his bow on the strings col legno.
The result was a romp that went clackety-clack like the sound of a San Francisco trolley in “Judah to Ocean” from John Adams’ John’s Book of Alleged Dances. Unfortunately, about half a minute before the finish line, the four hard-working fellows broke a string on Fan’s cello and the performance had to stop. They took it in good humor with a few quips and managed a complete performance after a string quartet performed the second piece on the program, Ella Kaale’s The Recitation, which built to a confrontational fury à la Shostakovich in five minutes.
With Schubert’s sprawling, eloquently foreboding, and joyful String Quintet in C, Wu addressed the issue of destiny: Was Schubert aware that his life was about to come to an end at 31 just two months after its composition? There’s no definitive proof of that, but Wu’s reading of a despairing, self-pitying letter Schubert wrote at the time was used as an indication that maybe destiny, rather than serendipity, motivated the composer.
It was a tremendously intense performance, with Wu and Jacques Forestier on violins, Laura Liu on viola, and Fan and Tomkins on cellos generating galvanized thrust in the joyous passages and existential dread in others, particularly the ominous, slightly held-out, penultimate D-flat at the end. Any slight defects in intonation and ensemble were easily overwhelmed by the zest and electricity of the performance, qualities that had marked the electric rendering of the Mendelssohn Octet in the barrel room of a local winery at last year’s festival.
With a fireball like Wu sharpening her programming skills and lighting the fuse, Sunkiss’d Mozart bears watching.
