Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

The Nature Of Things: Cabrillo Premieres Glass LIFE: A Journey Through Time

Summer means different things to different people. But to most of us it means reading books that everyone's reading, going to the beach, and definitely not doing all those way too serious things that weigh our spirits down. Like contemporary music? But contemprary music of all kinds is thriving these days, especially in places like the Santa Cruz, California-based Cabrillo Festival, which kicked off its 44rd season this July 29th with a big, fancy new collaboration between Philip Glass and two other artists of international repute, National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting, and Cabrillo music director and conductor Marin Alsop. Called LIFE: A Journey Through Time, with Lanting's remarkable images projected on a 48 foot screen, the piece was given three performances -- I caught the last, on July 30th -- by Alsop and her orchestra in The Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, just a few blocks from the beach.

Contemporary music was a hard sell when its first music director, Gerhard Samuel (1963-1968 ), conducted Cabrillo's first large scale concert in 1963, for that was a time when the hardline modernism of the New Vienna School and its disciples, and the multi-stylistic work of Stravinsky were the main facts on the ground. But times have changed and new music now seems to bring more pleasure and visceral excitement, which many credit to Americans like Steve Reich, whohe turns 70 this year with great fanfare, and Philip Glass, who reaches that "milestone" in 2007. Alsop's Cabrillo predecessor, Dennis Russell Davies (1974-1990), programmed several major Glass works during his tenure here--the Violin Concerto (1986), in 1988, and two big orchestral pieces, The Canyon (1988), and The Light (1987), in 1990. Alsop continued this fruitful association with an evocative and superbly played remounting of his hard-to-pin down music theatre work with Dutch director, Rob Malasch, The Photographer (1982), in 2001, and LIFE... finds her teaming with another Dutchman, Lanting.

The photographer approached Alsop with an idea for his project in 2004; they met with Glass in New York in ealy 2005 to discuss his participation, and the deal was firmed. "But it wasn't until later," says his music director, Michael Riesman, "that Philip realized he would be unable to fulfill the commission (by writing new music), and I was enlisted." The composer, busy writing other works, and with a monster tour schedule here and across the globe left it up to Riesman to pull together parts from previous pieces. And though Glass proposed that he arrange some of his piano etudes or seminal pieces like Music in Simliar Motion (1969) or Music in 12 Parts (1971-1974), Riesman rejected these "as not being sufficiently dramatic" for a piece about the evolution of life on earth, electing instead "to combine parts of different works into a single movement," of which there are seven, in this just under an hour piece.

This of course raises many questions about the relationship of music to image and vice versa, and theatre composers are always wrestling with these problems. Film composers are particularly vexed by insensitive directors and music editors, and Glass has had his problems with these, as did Alex North, who scored Hollywood pictures full-time. But Glass is more than fortunate to have Riesman, who's been on board as both player and conductor of his ensemble, chamber, and orchestral pieces since 1974, and understands his music from the inside out. His choices as well as hs orchestrations for LIFE: are apposite and telling.

Movement 1: Elements uses bits from the main and end titles of Glass' delicate and powerful score for Christopher Hampton's film The Secret Agent (1996), as well as two largely poignant cues from his 1999 wraparound score, for Kronos, to Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula. They're perfectly dovetailed, and suggest man's ghostly -- and often destructive presence on our tiny planet. Movement 3: Out of the Sea uses parts of the "Brazil" section from Glass' 2004 Athens Summer Olympics commission, Orion, and its complex, interlocking rhythms work very well with Lanting's spectacular celebratory images. Riesman's choices for Movement 5: Into the Air, and Movement 6: Out of the Dark--drawn from two of Glass' three Cocteau-based operas--Les Enfants Terribles (1996), originally for three played in the pit electric upright pianos in the first and La Belle et La Bete (1994), in the second, for Glass' wind-cum-keyboards ensemble, are dramatic, shadowed, and haunting -- the rapid, inevitably advancing music of the Les Enfants' overture plays, if memory rightly serves, against an angled mass of birds seeming to fly across the screen. "Promenade in the Garden" and "Belle Goes to the Chateau" give a curiously human, even romantic warmth to Lanting's sometimes aseptically clinical, albeit very beautiful images.

The closer, Planet of Life, uses parts of Glass' 10 minute for his ensemble score for Peter Greenaway's beautifully eccentric silent short, The Man in the Bath (2001, as well as a short coda by Riesman. It's wonderfully rambuctious music full of lightning fast metric changes which Alsop and her 58-piece band handled superbly.

The MacArthur grantee and soon to be head of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra achieved the amazing feat of co-ordinating the orchestra with the images without recourse to a clicktrack, the metronomically precise guide which Max Steiner invented to keep studio film musicians in synch. Her orchestra was superbly responsive throughout, with great work from all choirs, and especially effective and affecting work from English horn Amy Goeser Kolb, piccolo trumpet Andrew Gignac, and cello principal Lee Duckles. The large percussion battery--a principal player in many Glass pieces from Akhnaten (1984) onward -- gave the music added drama, but the high-ceilinged Civic's hard surfaces seemed to mitigate against really hearing the quiet, subtle part-writing especially in the strings and winds, which Glass is such a master of. These beauties were perfecty audible at Davies' live performances of Glass' 6th and 8th Symphonies with his Bruckner Orchester Linz, at BAM's Opera House last Novembeer.

But the good news is that LIFE will be performed by Alsop and the BSO at what looks like a super hall at Swarthmore 22 February 2007, with subsequent performances at the orchestra's home hall, 23 - 25 February, and plans in the making to tour it here and abroad. Cabrillo continues its varied 2007 summer season till 13 Aug.

posted by Michael McDonagh 8/05/2006