Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Notes from the boardwalk

If you have the time and inclination (and an interest in modern music) I cannot imagine a better way to spend the first two weekends of August than at the Cabrillo Music Festival. Truly. Such vibrant life is rare in a modern music festival, and people actually come to everything. Nearly every concert is sold out or almost sold out, and everyone has a good time. Last year, the first concert received a standing ovation before the first note was played. Seriously.

For those of you who do not know, The Cabrillo Music Festival takes place over the first two weekends of August, in Santa Cruz, California. It is a festival of new music, with a special emphasis on orchestral music. The music director is Maestro Marin Alsop (Baltimore Symphony) and this is her fifteenth year with the festival. Her devotion to modern music and her love of the orchestra makes her an ideal candidate to run this festival. In addition to having this wonderful music director and conductor the festival also has a magnificent set of musicians. Oh, sure, the festival gets excellent soloists but I was referring to the orchestra itself. The musicians come from Santa Cruz, Baltimore, Hong Kong, and Nova Scotia (to name a few) and this is a non-paying gig, done entirely on a volunteer basis. That means that every person in the orchestra, every single one, is dedicated to playing modern music. How rarely does that happen?

Friday afternoon was the culmination of the Cabrillo Music Festival student program. The program selects seven conductors and three composers who are drilled and grilled over the previous week. Their diligent work leads to a concert of the young composers orchestral music conducted by the young conductors. Because there are only three composers vs. the seven conductors, every piece is heard at least twice, and one is heard three times. Everyone who has taken part in this marvelous experience deserves much credit.

The first piece was by Lembit Beecher. He is working towards his D.M.A at Michigan University, studying with Bright Sheng. His piece, entitled Strange Flowering, was based upon the many nature movies he has seen. He fell in love with the growth of flowers and loved how nature movies would show this in fast-forward. He loved the dichotomy between the natural growth of flowers and these sped up versions, and so he made his piece based upon that. He has two primary sets of material, a slower, elegant nature music in the style of Takemitsu, and a faster, rhythmic, dance in the style of Julia Wolfe or John Zorn. He morphs between the two in stages so smooth as to remind us of the natural growth that he evokes.

The second piece was by Mark Danciger, a Yale graduate student. His piece, Liquid Song, was for reduced orchestra, as he was attempting to show the more intimate textures of the orchestral experience. He opened with a light groove, both playful and song-like. The material throughout the piece felt much like crystalline children’s toys, dancing and glittering in the sun. While the beginning sparkled with beauty and the ending was superbly elegant, the material in the middle was reconfigurations of the same material that, at times, seemed to drag on slightly too much. However, the overall effect was of light shining through a liquid prism.

The final piece, by Chia-Yu Hsu (A teacher at Duke), was by far the most grandiose in style and conception, using broad, extreme strokes of the emotional brush to depict towering mountains. The piece, entitled Hard Roads, is based on a Chinese poem by the same title. The poem is about crossing into one part of China, but there are rivers on one side and on the other are mountains so high that even birds must rest many a time before they reach the other side. While I felt that the emotional language was limited to only extremes and lacked a certain subtlety, the piece itself certainly painted the portrait of those tall mountains that are so difficult to climb.

And, I have to admit, the best thing about the concert is that it is just the first...
—Matthew Cmiel out—

posted by Matthew Cmiel 8/05/2006