ORCHESTRAL FEEL-GOOD LOVE-IN
SANTA CRUZ, CA—Nowhere in my (seems-like) centuries of reviewing is there closer bonding between audience, orchestra, conductor and live composer than at this Cabrillo Festival, now 56 years old. Despite playing in a scruffy former boxing palace with steep stairways, and with musicians thrown together from all over the map, the fest is a feel-good love-in night after night, year after year. Virtually all the composers performed appear in person to introduce their music, take a bow and hug everybody this side of the fourth percussionist. Joy reigns for these magical moments every summer. Can you imagine the impact if circa 1790, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Salieri had ever taken bows at the same Vienna concert? Or, say, Copland, Bernstein, Carter and Barber at a similar event in Manhattan?
Time for other performing groups to study the Cabrillo phenomenon and knit their disparate components closer together!
On the opening Saturday concert (Aug. 3), the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music offered something for every taste—two works harking back to earlier traditions, and two thoroughly contemporary pieces, with all four composers present and accounted for.
The English composer Anna Clyne surprised with her world-premiere cello concerto, recalling the style and era of countrymen Holst, Delius, R.V. Williams and above all Edward Elgar. Taking the reins was a close friend and cellist, Inbal Segev, who gave a profound reading of the highly demanding solo part. The title of Clyne’s opus was “Dance,” though the dancing was more embodied in a cited poem than in animated rhythms.
The cello carries the heavy burden with virtuoso runs, double-stops, ultra-high pitches (above a coloratura’s) and mellow interludes. In the stormy finale section, the orchestra produces a chorale, and the soloist comes back with a folksy rainbow-shaped theme.
This is a work that likely will get repeat hearings, and not just at the Baltimore Symphony, which was a co-commissioner. And the nimble Segev was masterful, with her tones carrying brightly through the amplification.
Thoroughly modern was “Kraken” by Du Yun, one of a host of female composers featured this year at the 14-day fest. Kraken is a mythological sea dragon who threatens to devour ships in this tone poem, prompting jarring fortissimos in the orchestra (dragons tend to devour just so, I’m told). The 14-minute work has a break-out ferocity, turning partly aleatoric, then featuring unstable trumpet yips. The whirlwind turns ever more violent, with brass going almost unstable, and percussion running wild, with gongs.
Equally explosive was Dan Dediu’s “Levante” (sunrise), which had me searching the halls’ ceiling for deep seismic cracks opening up. But instead of Asian influences, we got Dediu’s Romanian, just like the nationality of the dashing Music Director Cristian Macelaru, who maintains seamless control over the mountains of wet-ink scores crossing his podium. The brass section here is powerful enough to summon Gabriel in the boisterous sections, before the opus settles into a lively Dacian folk dance. It’s an earth-shaking Danubian world packed into 11 minutes.
Arguably the most sublime work ever from the prolific vocal pen of San Franciscan Jake Heggie is “Work at Hand,” a beguiling 22-minute feast for soprano and orchestra. With texts from the dying poet Laura Mansfield, this is a prime example of post-Mahlerian lied with a feathery orchestration, plus Segev’s cello obbligato to back it. A sonic sculpture with dazzling beauty, as sung ineffably by the ethereal mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton.
Once again, a Cabrillo concert is no mere event—it’s an experience.
THE SUPREME SPHERE OF SUPPORT—SC Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had weighed in with positive comments for the Cabrilloites on opening night Aug. 2, via a video. It was tied to Kristin Kuster’s song cycle “When There Are Nine,” a lengthy protest piece with texts adapted from Justice Ginsburg’s pronouncements and from her life. Mezzo Barton and the great East Coast chamber chorus Roomful of Teeth provided full voices. Ginsburg is the most fervent SCJ classical-music devotee since the late Justice Scalia.
CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC at the Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, orchestra under Cristian Macelaru. Through Aug. 11; heard Aug. 3. For Cabrillo info: (831)-420-5260 or go online.
