SANTA CRUZ, CA—The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, founded in 1963, continues strong here, with 16 of its (living!!) composers on hand in person over the two weekends.

The opening concert featured new music emphasizing folk elements. The quartet of new pieces had Music Director Cristian Macelaru striving strenuously to bring off very unfamiliar works with an orchestra of some 65. The players impressed me the most, this youthful band in which less than 10 % showed any gray hair. Most impressive of all as a gauge of this talent from all over was a violinist I had just heard in recital with an eye-popping technical display—he was stuck in the back row of the second violins of the orchestra.

A work I want very much to hear again featured the woman composer Zosha di Castri, 32, from Canada invoking texts of the Nobel-Prize author Alice Munro, with the soprano (Mary Mackenzie) doing both avant-garde vocalise and word lyrics, upstage and downstage, while other narration texts were prerecorded. “Dear Life,” based on the similarly named book, absorbs the simplicity, warmth and enigmatic vagueness of a relaxed talk with, say, a loving mom in a rural life. Wind mouthpieces wail softly at one extreme, and shrieks of brass with heavy drumming erupt at the other. With references to church and death, a timeless brass chorale weighs in. In this era of women composers, di Castri’s 24-minute “Dear Life” is one to spotlight and propagate.

The commissioned world premiere was the Piano Concerto No. 2 by the Macedonian/French composer Pande Shahov. His pianist (Simon Trpceski) was less soloist than an ingredient of the orchestra pouring forth an array of Macedonian folk tunes and dance pieces. “I took the opportunity to be as crazy as I could,” Shahov explained about his through-composed concerto. If the livelier parts reminded you of roots of jazz or boogie, others were distinctly Eastern-Mediterranean in flavor, culminating in nice marimba-vibraphone duos by the crack Cabrillo percussion section.

Also featured was the luminous orchestration by Romanian-born Dan Dediu’s “Grana,” with a grand, bubbly clarinet solo by Bharat Chandra. Ruang Ruo’s arrangement of Chinese “Folk Songs,” was a routine affair, until the robust composer stood up in the third row and rang the rafters with his robust, show-stopping voice radiating the texts in Chinese.

Cabrillo Festival, orchestral concerts at the Santa Cruz (CA) Civic Auditorium Aug. 2-12. For info, please visit the Festival website.

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