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FESTIVAL REVIEW
Leila Josefowicz Gale Fuller August 12-13, 2006
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Battle of the Composers By Scott MacClelland
The last weekend of the 44th Cabrillo Music Festival offered a concourse of composers — a revelry of discovery for most and an elimination derby for those still holding out for the next big thing. Having seven composers each give a major statement over one weekend invites inevitable, if unfair, comparisons — unfair, because every artist is his own greatest competition, after all.
Five of the seven composers were heard at the festival for the first time. However, only Aaron Jay Kernis made a repeat live appearance to witness the West Coast premiere of his delectable, nostalgic Newly Drawn Sky, which opened the Sunday afternoon program at Mission San Juan Bautista. The 17-minute childhood recollection began with rich string sonorities that grew in volume until they were topped off with shimmering metallic percussion. The work's real climax, setting aside the big noisy ones, was a gorgeous melody that, à la Samuel Barber, expanded in the strings section and floated alone in a lonely trumpet solo.
Kernis' piece was followed by a concert suite from the new opera Sophie's Choice by Nicolas Maw, who was also in the audience for a West Coast premiere. Maw reworked the orchestral interludes from his opera, which will receive its first American production next month in Washington, D.C. The suite complemented the Kernis, and it even contained a similarly lonely trumpet solo.
"It's one of the arrogances of the 20th century that art has to contain only the new," the 70-year-old Maw said in a 1999 interview. "Previously it contained something people knew and something they didn't know — and I suppose that's what I'm aiming at." Whatever his intent, here was a lushly orchestrated, moodily expressive half-hour of something that would have worked well in a movie calling for Straussian, post-Romantic atmosphere. Seamlessly played, the interludes managed to disclose themselves discretely. The next-to-last interlude was imbued with frightful anxiety. In the closing moment, mezzo-soprano Gale Fuller sang the only text, Sophie's affecting farewell letter to Stingo, the first-person character of William Styron's harrowing novel.
Esa-Pekka Salonen's L.A. Variations came next. Salonen wrote his piece to celebrate the talents and power of his Los Angeles Philharmonic. It is brilliant — a virtual concerto for orchestra whose greatest virtue is perhaps its conciseness. Salonen says exactly what needs to be said, and then moves on without dawdling. (His written outline, reproduced in the program book, was a snap to track.) The piece makes clear use of its two hexachords (which together account for all 12 tones of the chromatic scale) and its terse "mantra" motto. These were the quickly recognizable fingerprints of a distinctive musical personality, a rare occurrence in today's new music.
High elevations |
Leila Josefowicz
