Financial Times

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Santa Cruz, California

by Allan Ulrich
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With few exceptions, the summertime landscape for serious music in northern California is dreary terrain. But for 48 years, Cabrillo has made news in and around the funky surfing mecca of Santa Cruz, serving as advocate for the music of today. The character of the repertoire has changed under the aegis of its music director of the moment. Marin Alsop, now in her 19th season, has always favoured Anglo-American fare and has built lasting relationships that have enabled her to trace a composer's career to maturity. Nine of the featured composers put in appearances.

Two honorees, Michael Hersch and Jennifer Higdon, were return visitors. Alsop, who has championed Hersch's first two symphonies, conducted the premiere of their much anticipated successor with her customary verve, but not enough to dispel the feeling that the piece required superhuman effort to get onto the page. Hersch seems to have carved his Symphony No 3 with granitic force. He has cast it in two large movements, surrounding five brief interludes; the dense harmonies, forbidding instrumental detail and sensation of inexorability seem not to have fazed the 83-member festival orchestra. The strings brood, the brass rages and, once in a while, you encounter a consonance with the sweetness of honey. Hersch provides a few moments of relief. Before he plunges into the tumultuous finale, he offers a short episode of broken phrases, and the silences between them leave you breathless.

Higdon proved her adroitness at upbeat theatrical gestures. The west coast premiere of On a Wire features the sextet of fine musicians who call themselves Eighth Blackbird and unfurls as an attempt to write a group concerto. The soloists begin by bowing a piano's innards, eliciting sounds both exotic and poetic; later, each player shines in a solo spot. Higdon writes with intense knowledge of the instruments, but the orchestral links seem a bit like marking time. You can sometimes have too much of a genial thing.

More impressive was Higdon's 2005 Percussion Concerto, written for the phenomenal Colin Currie and displaying his talent for drawing a wide spectrum of sounds from intractable instruments: in his hands, the marimba coos and a drum set thunders.

New to the festival was Mark-Anthony Turnage, whose three engaging orchestral essays (all West Coast premieres) spanned over a decade of his career. Schizoid, with its rhythmic élan, breakneck tempo changes and jazzy brass contributions suggest Bernstein with bitters. Chicago Remains cast an evocative spell in its tribute to the Midwestern metropolis, its vigour and in its offstage brass contribution, a nostalgia for a legendary past. Turnage's 1993 Drowned Out has weathered the years less successfully; whatever personal pain it recalls remains at the end unvanquished.

Anna Clyne's festival debut, a dance score called rewind, bubbled over with kinetic energy if a few effects may have seemed more significant in the writing than in the hearing. But the young English composer has Alsop's ear and she will doubtless return to Cabrillo in the future.

4 out of 5 stars