09 August 2010
Sunny highs, murky lows at Cabrillo music fest
by Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
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One of the awkward injustices of life is the fact that misery's fabled love for company often goes unrequited. Put on a happy face, and watch everyone gather around you; weep, and they run in the other direction.
This point was driven home once again Friday night during the opening concert of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, led by music director Marin Alsop.
The program included "On a Wire," Jennifer Higdon's exuberantly beautiful and inventive group concerto for the new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird, which left the audience exhilarated and tickled. It also included the world premiere of Michael Hersch's Symphony No. 3, a 30-minute yowl of unremitting pain and an all-around bummer.
A shallow, unfeeling response, you say? Maybe so - but hardly inexplicable.
Hersch had a few words to say before the performance, admitting that the piece had grown out of a "traumatic" event in his life, but declining - both wittily and appropriately - to say what it was. That was irrelevant.
The relevant detail is that the symphony, a symmetrical arrangement of seven movements, traffics almost exclusively in gray orchestral colors, turbid rhythms and slashing, angular phrases. The brass blares in agony, the strings writhe, the percussion thumps menacingly.
The anguish that went into the composition is palpable, but it's scarcely transmuted into anything a listener can react to. What we get instead is bleak despair, ratcheted up to an extreme level.
Higdon's concerto - sunny, imaginative, endlessly surprising - could hardly have been more different. It's both a resourceful response to a vexing logistical problem and an eloquent statement in its own right.
The logistical challenge was how to write a concerto with a soloist as ensemble, a combination that almost never works (see Beethoven's clunky Triple Concerto). But Higdon harnesses the distinctive strengths of Eighth Blackbird, particularly its ability to play as one while maintaining six individual character profiles.
This ethos is established in the opening minutes, when all six players cluster around the inside of the grand piano and create a shimmery collage of bowed strings, and continues with thematic material based on rapid scales that ascend and descend simultaneously.
Eventually, each of the group's members - flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan - takes a turn in the spotlight, but the focus remains solidly on the ensemble.
The performance was as zesty and ingratiating as the score demanded. It was followed by a gorgeous encore from Thomas Albert's "13 Ways," a gentle fantasia on Lennon and McCartney's "Blackbird" that is the ensemble's signature piece. The program opened with "Scherzoid," an orchestral essay by English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage whose stated goal was to be fast throughout. That it was.
