Mercury News

Review: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music kicks off fantastic 48th season

For adventurous listeners, the search for new music can be an exercise in frustration. Even the most forward-thinking orchestras tend to relegate contemporary works to opening-act status: a single piece at the start of a concert as a kind of aural appetizer.

At the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, new works are always the main course. Under music director Marin Alsop, the annual event offers a total immersion experience, exploring a full range of stylistic concerns and often presenting young composers before they become household names. In the process, Cabrillo has become a summer mecca for musicians and a premier musical destination for audiences.

This year's festival — Cabrillo's 48th — got underway Friday evening at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. The opening concert, featuring works by Jennifer Higdon, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Michael Hersch, was characteristically vibrant; if the rest of the festival, which runs through Aug., is this exciting, it's going to be a very good year for new music.

The highlight of Friday's concert was an appearance by the new music sextet eighth blackbird, who joined Alsop and her 70-piece orchestra in the West Coast premiere of Higdon's "On a Wire."

The sextet, which has an intentionally lowercase name and a phenomenally high-energy performance style, stayed in constant motion throughout this unusual and beguiling 25-minute concerto. The six — Tim Munro (flute), MichaelJ. Maccaferri (clarinet), Matt Albert (violin/viola), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Matthew Duvall (percussion) and Lisa Kaplan (piano) — started by gathering around an open piano, bowing the strings to draw out keening notes.

From there, they arrayed themselves at the front of the stage, playing traditional solos against the backdrop of the orchestra: one lovely melody after another, dispatched with dazzling flair. Higdon, one of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners, is a master colorist; she blended her two ensembles well, introducing lines within the sextet and dispersing them throughout the orchestra. The result was a brilliant soundscape: fluent and fast-paced, brimming with individual voices and rhythmic variation. "On a Wire" was composed for eighth blackbird, and it's hard to imagine another sextet playing it with such energy and precision. And Alsop guided the performance with dynamism. Eighth blackbird returned for a brief encore, a jaunty excerpt from "Thirteen Ways" by Thomas Albert.

For sheer sonic thrills, though, the evening's top honors went to Turnage's "Scherzoid," a pulsing, fast-paced piece that grabs the listener from the outset. After a jolting introduction, the British composer spreads the adrenaline throughout the orchestra, activating the sound of tightly wound strings, bellicose brass, insistent woodwinds and a hyperactive percussion battery. In his preconcert remarks, Turnage said he took his inspiration from the scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but "Scherzoid" seems to owe a greater debt to Leonard Bernstein; the score is all witty episodes and theatrical outbursts, a wild spree of forward momentum punctuated by stretches of dreamlike foreboding. Alsop and the orchestra clearly relished every turn, giving the work's West Coast premiere a bang-up performance.

Hersch's Symphony No. 3, presented after intermission, evoked a considerably darker atmosphere. Cast in seven short movements, the score introduces a chilly, often harrowing palette, with brooding strings, glowering brass and anguished cries from the woodwinds deployed in formidable blocks of sound. The effect is both mechanized and deeply human and the use of melody is limited. Yet, Hersch impresses with sheer sonic weight and intensity. Alsop, a longtime advocate of the composer — this is his fourth visit to Cabrillo — lavished considerable care on the score's world premiere.

That sense of advocacy is a key element of Cabrillo's success. Alsop, who also serves as music director of the Baltimore Symphony, is an outstanding conductor: thoroughly versed in the standard repertoire, and ever committed to developing the music of tomorrow. It's always rewarding to see her in action, and Friday's concert was a fine example of the kind of results she achieves at Cabrillo.