Half-Measure Brilliance

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The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music opened Friday night with its familiar sense of community and relaxed warmth much in evidence. There is a homey feel to it, with the high school gym ambience of the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, the composer comments before each piece, and many audience members who have attended for decades.

Under the leadership of longtime Music Director Marin Alsop, the Festival Orchestra’s performances of this all-new repertory were consistently committed, polished, and deeply musical. The night’s music brought both excitement and disappointments. It would have been more reassuring if this had come as a result of sampling the wide range of approaches among contemporary composers, rather than staying within the relatively safe limits suggested by the opening program.

The concert’s richest musical experience came through David Sanford’s Scherzo Grosso, a four-movement work created for cellist Matt Haimovitz and Sanford’s big band, the Pittsburgh Collective, in 2005, and rescored for orchestra the following year. Sanford inhabits an intriguing musical territory spanning contemporary concert music and jazz, and his wide vocabulary, as well as the inspiration of composing for Haimovitz, have produced a substantial musical statement filled with color, tension, and powerful gestures.

Swing That Cello

The work’s big band origins shone through, with plenty of punchy moments for the brass and winds, and a quality of ongoing dialogue and interjection among orchestra sections. Brief but compelling solo lines were distributed among the players, often in tandem with the solo cello. Haimovitz, playing amplified, dispatched Sanford’s powerful writing with passion, beautifully shaped lines, and flawless virtuosity.

Matt Haimovitz

Sanford clearly had the soloist’s seemingly limitless abilities in mind when composing, and so some of the most affecting music came in the work’s more pensive moments, especially the solo opening of the second movement. This section recalled the Bach cello suites with counterpoint between the instrument’s registers and use of fragmentary motives. The solo lines gradually invited the orchestra back into a dark and dramatic sound world, leading to a moody dialogue between the cello and a solo trumpet that was a highlight of the piece.

As always, the festival introduced new voices, and the program began with the first festival performances of music by Irish-born composer Stephen McNeff. His Sinfonia, from 2006, is intended to be a concert opener, and its three brief movements move quickly along in a fast-slow-fast scheme.

It’s hard to get a sense, from this work, of what McNeff is about as a composer. The piece, he explained in his notes and opening remarks, was written to be an inviting curtain-raiser, and it revealed a high degree of compositional craft but not much more. There are pretty tunes and pleasant orchestration here, but the work would have sounded tame 60 years ago. Aside from her familiarity with McNeff through their overlapping tenures as, respectively, principal conductor and ‘composer-in-the-house’ with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, there really doesn’t seem to be a strong reason why Alsop chose such a slight work to open the festival.

Things picked up a bit with Eric Lindsay’s Darkness Made Visible, the premiere of the revised version of this 2003 work. Lindsay, a rising star still in his 20s, wrote the piece to depict the tension between traditional concert hall fare and new works, and the reluctance of orchestra audiences to embrace both. This intriguing premise is played out through an Ivesian clash of competing voices, with tonal traditions shoved out of the way by modern dissonance, then the two forces each growing more assertive and overlapping, building to a chaotic climax, and coalescing a bit more in the work’s second half.

The work displays a lot of facility on Lindsay’s part, with convincing historic idioms — a bit of waltz, a bit of Russian grandeur, and so on — mixed with contemporary styles. Perhaps as a result of its narrative intentions, it doesn’t reveal much of Lindsay’s own compositional voice. The piece is intended to be humorous, but with the sounds of both musical forces alternating rapidly, the overall effect was more cartoonish than funny, and a little too thin in content to make a lasting impression.

Rouse in the House

Alsop brought the night to an exhilarating close with the premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Concerto for Orchestra, a festival commission. It’s clear from the opening minutes of this work that Rouse knows and loves the orchestra and its possibilities. This is an enormously accomplished and appealing work, marked by lush textures drawn from a lavish palette of instrumental colors, gestures that are alternately lyrical and jagged, but always carefully shaped, and a mode of expression that is sure and forceful throughout.

Marin Alsop

Photo by Grant Leighton

As expected, this work is a showcase for the entire ensemble, and Alsop and the Festival Orchestra were superbly prepared. Each section made the most of its opportunities to appear in the spotlight, but the overall effect was one of musical substance more than a show-off piece. The Concerto was received with a well-deserved standing ovation.

Rouse, in his preperformance, light repartee with Alsop, felt compelled to give a warning that the concerto was “a dissonant work rooted in the 12-tone system.” This seemed rather silly once the performance was under way, as the concerto’s rhythmic vitality, use of repetition, and somewhat traditional arcs of tension and release offered plenty to grab onto, especially for an audience used to new works, and after Alsop has made Rouse’s music integral to the festival’s programming for over 10 years. An audience that is presumably sympathetic doesn’t require this sort of disclaimer. It’s worrisome when this great festival’s sense of adventure gives way to a desire for accessibility, or when the two qualities start to seem mutually exclusive.

Benjamin Frandzel is a composer and writer living in the East Bay. He is also the managing director of Opera Piccola, an Oakland educational theater company.