Orchestra with Music to be Seen not Heard
REDWOOD CITY, CA—If you want to hear the symphonic sounds of today, in summer you go to the Santa Cruz Cabrillo Festival. In the rest of the year, you’d do very well with the Redwood City Symphony, an (unpaid) community orchestra that bites off contemporary scores with relish, chutzpah and fearlessness. And an audience of some 250 can be counted on to turn out for their adventures, with senior citizens at the forefront in patronage, drinking in all those moderns. You figure.
The current go-round here featured four living composers, two of each gender. The scores by the 32-year-old Mason Bates—now, nearly a household name—-and Cynthia Lee Wong featured an audacious kind of controlled orchestral chaos—–If it wasn’t very chaotic, it probably wasn’t being done right.
All this Redwood audacity stems from the veteran music director here, Dr. Eric K., who founded the group in 1985 and has never slowed down a whit since.
Bates’ 21-minute “B Sides” (2009) features five unrelated brainstorms cobbled together, the most popular one being “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” conversations of astronauts with Mission Control, reflecting in music the turbulence of outer space and the sensation of ascending to the heavens. Other segments, more apt to be seen than heard, involve the mundane, with brooms sweeping and typewriters clattering: a thoroughly American genre of Hausmusik.
Wong’s brief “Carnival Fever” goes off merrily in an unorthodox way, with ultra-high and ultra-low notes, assorted rumbles, and parallel harmonies. It’s a happy chaos, and the brass has a field day.
Of the movie suites, you had to be drawn to the serene submerged music to the stellar movie “Shape of Water” (2017), masterfully created by the tone painter Alexandre Desplat.
The most familiar selection was Aaron Copland’s time-tested “El Salón México,” an incredibly atmospheric achievement for that “kid from Brooklyn” venturing briefly south of the border and catching those off-beat rhythms like a bona-fide caballero. Portraying music in a Mexican nightspot on the other side of the tracks, Copland has a couple of bassoons playing out of pitch with one another in delectable dissonance, putting music critics to a huge test. Unless the two played perfectly in pitch with each another, how could you critique that??
All in all, you came away sensing the profound esprit de corps of the Redwood players and their evident bond with the audience in this upbeat Peninsula community between San Jose and San Francisco. And the dedication to the no-fuss-no-muss maestro Eric Kujawsky (who now goes simply by Eric K.) was palpable, while the artistic achievement on a mere $100,000/year budget bordered on the incredible.
Redwood Symphony at La Cañada College, Redwood City, CA on Nov. 23. For info: www.redwoodsymphony.org.
