02 November 2010
Cabrillo Festival: Where Contemporary Music Is a Raging Success
by Jeff Dunn
Music Director Marin Alsop touted her August 6-15 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music as "the only place where the composer isn't dead". Not only that, the composers were there—12 of them, including
luminaries like John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, Philip Glass, and Mark Anthony Turnage. For this year's run at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium and on the final day at the old Spanish mission San Juan Bautista (two performances), creators of 15 of the 16 pieces programmed glowed in the typical enthusiastic audience reception of Alsop's performances. In addition to regular concerts, the festival offered free concerts: one a workshop for emerging composers, another a Sunday afternoon family event using Nathaniel Stookey's murder-mystery music, The Composer Is Dead, to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. Finally, acknowledging the increasing role ensembles play in the new-music scene, Alsop relinquished her baton and let Eighth Blackbird and the Kronos Quartet split a Sunday evening concert. The opening program began with Turnage's Scherzoid (2003-04), a lively piece of swaggering energy reminiscent of the "Jets and Sharks" prologue to Bernstein's West Side Story. Particularly striking was Turnage's writing for
woodwinds, augmented by a soprano saxophone. The next piece, Jennifer Higdon's On a Wire, written as a concerto for the sextet, Eighth Blackbird, was a high point of the festival. It began with the six players gathered around a grand piano like a bunch of doctors doing a heart transplant, drawing horsehairs around piano strings to "bow" the piano. Following the composer's careful choreography, the group eventually moved over to their own instruments, each performing solo sections, some of great beauty. Alsop brought the orchestra in occasionally for subdued commentary, but the sextet music was so mesmerizing that the accompaniment hardly seemed necessary.
Sunday evening's concert was the one split between Eighth Blackbird in one half and the Kronos Quartet in the other. Of the two, Blackbird was more impressive both in the quality of compositions and overall musicianship. Missy Mazzoli's Still Life with Avalanche was an infectious dance piece in 12/8 time with nothing still about it. They also played Thomas Ades's tricky Catch and Stephen Hartke's attractive Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays.
