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FESTIVAL REVIEW
August 15, 2004
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By Scott MacClelland
Anchoring the 2004 Cabrillo Festival review team for SFCV affords the writer a unique perspective, especially after running every leg of this annual new-music relay in Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista. Five orchestral concerts under the visionary leadership of music director Marin Alsop brought into focus the artistic issues confronting composers of new music no less than shedding fresh light on their latest achievements.
By now, Alsop's audiences know they are in for adventure, be it of discovery, experiment, triumph or failure. While they may not print their critiques, they hesitate not a moment to register their opinions verbally and vigorously. Cabrillo's concertgoers often reveal unusual sophistication in their reactions to music they have just heard for the first time. Many of them, myself included, have attended the annual pageant for three decades, and more. During that time, twelve-tone technique has generally gone to its grave, and minimalism has all but faded from the scene. Today's American composers are mostly writing in a tonal language, using classical forms and painting with a vivacious, often dizzying, palette of colors. Trying to balance these components into coherence, with style and originality, is the task every composer must tackle with every new work. Moreover, within the realms of classic forms and tonality, they are competing with the great masters of the past. History shows that twelve-tone technique and minimalism were temporary, if tenacious, safe harbors that no longer offer shelter.
During Alsop's thirteen seasons at Cabrillo's helm, the programming focus has shifted toward the East Coast, introducing to local audiences such leading lights as Christopher Rouse, John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard Danielpour and Jennifer Higden, plus a smattering of acclaimed Brits, like James MacMillan and Thomas Adès. Among Alsop's stats can be found home runs, strikeouts and base hits, the latter responsible for winning the most games. This season included home runs (Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra, with bases loaded) a strikeout (Julia Wolfe's My Beautiful Scream) and plentiful base hits. Less-than-bases-loaded home runs included Kernis' Color Wheel, Adès' Asyla, MacMillan's Tryst, Higdon's Blue Cathedral and Rouse's Concert de Gaudi and Concerto per Corde (based on the Shostakovich monogram, D-E-flat-C-B.) Among base hits were Clarice Assad's Violin Concerto, Kevin Puts' Vespertine Symphonies, Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Screaming Popes and John Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur. While these four works all entertained, the Puts got lower marks for content and the Turnage, another Brit, for form. Assad and Adams gave it up by sacrificing their original voices to externals, in Assad's case to a composition jury, and in Adams' case to deferential homages to Lou Harrison, Terry Riley and the electric violinist Tracy Silverman.
Sunday's program at Mission San Juan Bautista was one of very few at Cabrillo of whose works all have been previously recorded, MacMillan's Tryst twice. This marvelous piece, dating from 1989, draws on two themes, the first an angular fanfare introduced within five minutes of the start, then reprising obstinately on violins during the half-hour work's last five minutes. Between them expands a haunting melody recycled from an original setting by MacMillan of The Tryst, a poem by William Souter. With the tune, the composer creates sensual, often dissonant, harmonies for extended periods, not unlike similar practices by Roy Harris and Olivier Messiaen, a neat trick to say the least. And like them, he manages to keep his obsessions interesting over the long haul, in both intimate and stentorian passages. Alsop got good intensity from her orchestra in the overripe acoustics of the old mission church. The program opened with the orchestrally opulent Blue Cathedral of 1999 by Higdon, a lushy and colorful edifice that rises from the intimate and personal to a high-flying fireworks show suggesting Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Higdon's music underscores a dilemma facing many of today's composers, namely, when does color overwhelm the listener at the expense of the other components of composition? So far, Higdon has answered the question better than many of her contemporaries, especially given the glitter of her jewels. Rouse's guitar concerto, Concert de Gaudi, absorbs the solo part into the orchestral fabric, not unlike Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole and Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Rouse, after all, is a quintessential orchestral composer, though he does allow the soloist here a few standout moments, notably in the slow movements and a cadenza just before the end of the finale. The work revealed guitarist Sharon Isbin as a competent and responsive player, reading her part and visibly counting measures notwithstanding. (She recorded the work in 2000 for Teldec.) But Rouse gave his best material to the orchestra in an atmospheric, impressionistic rhapsody laced with Spanish flamenco and romantic shadows. One supposes that Gaudi, the Barcelona architect, inspired its fantastic moments. Amplification boosted Isbin's soft-spoken instrument against the orchestra, a necessary if distorting compromise in the acoustic circumstance.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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Sharon Isbin