NEW MUSIC, NOVEL ESPRIT  ENERGIZING CABRILLO
                    And Something Resembling an Appendix Operation 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Aug.  6-13, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 1
            SANTA CRUZ, CA---Orchestra, and plein-air food, and wine, and composer panels. The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is a little of everything bucolic, stirring up  the laid-back California scene with very modern music that fascinates and delights the audiences congregating here since 1963. This is anything but easy listening: it is demanding, dissonant, and even nonlinear; yet the crowds turn out, listen, and absorb. For two weeks a year, Cabrillo comes to life like a Shangri-La, and vanishes just as abruptly.  The rest of the year, this seaside county has nothing comparable; presumably festival fans find their sustenance in very different fashion during  the remaining 50 weeks.
            The dynamo for this fest for the past two decades has been Marin Alsop, bringing her wit and insight to the podium in a unique manner; the rest of the year, on the East Coast and in Europe, her conducting repertory suggests a generalist far more than a modernist.
            And Cabrillo is surprises galore—and not just the on-stage lighting effects, the animated crowd and the colorful musicians’ attire. At one point six musicians are crowded around the innards of a piano, like surgeons collaborating on an appendix operation. This is the festival co-commission of Jennifer Higdon’s “On a Wire,” with a kind of musical dental floss drawn over piano strings to produce nebulous sounds.
            It was a clever start. But Higdon’s clever 25-minute invention went far beyond it in a rhythmic, buoyant and jovial vein, with all six instrumentalists of the ensemble eighth blackbird getting solos and culminating in a jam session. The orchestra played a subordinate role in this; I suspect it could be excess baggage, easily jettisoned for any  solo gig by eighth blackbird (which, despite the title, is a sextet).
            The half-hour-long Symphony No. 3 of Michael Hersch, 38, began with an organized chaos, out of which a music evolved that was a restless, ravenous beast given to intermittent repose. Elements of the orchestra clash with each other, with an immense level of activity. From the ominous undercurrent there grows a mood of torment, aguish and fury, ever darker, finally coming to a dirge with low strings and bass trombone in prominence. Hersch's world premiere provided some of the darkest music I have heard since Christopher Rouse.
            The English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, 50, mingled “scherzo” with “schizoid” to come up with the title “Scherzoid,” a set of fast-running and often spasmodic scherzos featuring sharp percussion accents and syncopation, all with high energy. There were some off-pitch winds which seemed curiously to add rather than subtract from the piece, giving it a slight instability. It ends with a series of sweeping glissandi in the strings and is suddenly gone.
            The orchestra was not up to past proficiency, hobbled not only by difficult repertory, but also by the diffuse acoustics of the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, which impedes musicians hearing and fine-tuning to one other.
            NOTES, ADDENDA---The composers attended, providing some on-stage badinage with conductor Alsop which the audience relished…The eighth blackbird ensemble also performed as an encore a movement from Thomas Albert’s “Thirteen Ways.” It was inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which also originally inspired the group’s name. Several of the blackbird players played in the orchestra during the rest of the opening-night program…The major Cabrillo concerts  will be broadcast on KUSP FM 88.9 radio on Aug. 17 and beyond.
            Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Marin Alsop, music director, Aug. 1-15, Santa Cruz & other sites. With eighth blackbird ensemble as soloists Aug. 6. For info: 831-420-5260, or go online.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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