Father’s Legacy Flows In New Turtle Island Quartet Piece

The fiddling composer David Balakrishnan couldn’t begin to decipher “the hieroglyphics” that make up 95 percent of the writings of his mathematician father, A.V. Balakrishnan, a UCLA engineering professor and onetime director of the school’s Flight Systems Laboratory who died last year at 92. [...] the younger Balakrishnan, who co-founded the fertile Turtle Island Quartet, loved the title and general subject of his father’s 2012 book, “Aeroelasticity.” Balakrishnan sees something of his own interacting musical streams in the turbulence and mesh of “Aeroelasticity,” which is also the title of the new 20-minute piece his Grammy Award-winning quartet will premiere May 20 at a free public performance at the San Francisco Presidio Trust to cap its 30th anniversary season. Written with a commissioning grant from Chamber Music America and presented by San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, the work is dedicated to Balakrishnan’s father and taps into his sphere while reflecting on the composer’s life. The lurching opening movement of this piece is called “Backlash,” a term used by people like the elder Balakrishnan to describe the flight anomalies of jets buffeted by turbulent currents, the composer notes. “Lonesome George,” a loping jazz ditty flavored with blues and hoedown fiddling, refers to the last giant Galapagos tortoise (and winks to Balakrishnan’s status as the only original Turtle in the group since cellist Mark Summer left last year). Balakrishnan and violist Benny Von Gutzeit will play that and other pieces with the quartet’s newest members, Alex Hargreaves, whom Balakrishnan calls “one of the great young lions on the jazz fiddle scene,” and cellist Malcolm Parson from the celebrated Carolina Chocolate Drops. San Francisco Playhouse’s six-show 2016-17 season opens Sept.