Getting Wet with the Festival Orchestra
SANTA CRUZ, CA—“Astonish us!”
That was the clarion call from Serge Diaghilev, the great impresario of a century ago, to his creative team of composers, choreographers and designers.
It could also be the motto of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and its fans, focusing on assimilating new music for its long-established orchestral concerts on this bucolic seaside site some 75 miles south of San Francisco. The astonishing piece Aug. 10 was the overachieving Tan Dun’s Chinese opus. His commission had asked for a 25-minute harp concerto. Instead, he turned out a 42-minute multimedia piece “Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women” featuring anthropological film in Hunan Province featuring unknown, untrained grandmas singing arcane lullaby-like songs many thought lost.
Here was a Chinese counterpart to masters like John Jacob Niles in America, and to Bela Bartok in Eastern Europe.
Tan Dun, 62, loves water bowls in his music—this was not the first time. He brings vigorous amplified sloshing/splashing by soaking-wet percussionists reading a score into his concert halls. He is a mystic as much as an anthropologist. He filmed numerous Hunan-Chinese women who remembered those secretive Nu Shu songs in a strange tongue, never written down and caught them at home, out on the river, even doing embroidery.
But why make such a point of “secret songs” without revealing a single one?
His intriguing hybrid composition not only helps save a half-gone culture. But it also marries his modern Chinese sound spectrum with a Western orchestra and virtuosic harp soloist (Sarah Fuller). Fuller at center stage attacked the harp with a vengeance, simulating some of the strummed outbursts in Chinese music. The small-format films took in historic Hunan sites, facades, homesteads and stone work.
The rest of the program was much less astonishing. In “Earworms” Vivian Fung produced a mashup work quoting Ravel’s “La valse” and Ives’ brilliant innovation “The Unanswered Question,” a century-old work far ahead of its time, one that every American orchestra should play and feature.
Hannah Lash’s “God Music Bug Music” features very antsy brass, with restless trumpets in their highest register, chattering uneasily, then dripping down to the horns, all built around five-note cells.
Preben Antonsen’s world premiere “Psalm without Words” was a short, subtle and meandering religious work in seven parts, without much sense of contrast, progress or direction.
The oldest work on the program was from 2011. All the composers except Tan Dun appeared in person to take bows and introduce their pieces. Music Director Cristian Macelaru maintained customary informality in festival attire, but not in conducting. He led with his customary gusto and authority.
This is a novel and highly innovative festival I dearly love to attend annually, even when it entails perching in the steep bleacher seats, where the descent to the floor can be compared to leaving Mt. Everest’s summit without ropes. You might need a seat belt to handle all the jolts from new music, but you never doze off, guaranteed!
CABRILLO OSMOSIS—The modest, off-beat Cabrillo Festival should get good big-city exposure by osmosis October 17-19, when its conductor Macelaru will be podium guest leading the San Francisco Symphony in Adam Schoenberg’s concerto, a world premiere.
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (Aug. 10), running through Aug. 11. Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, CA. For Cabrillo info: (831)-420-5260 or go online.
