Some local classical music presenters, both traditional and new, seem to struggle for audiences and financial support. Yet, others flourish. Imagine a formula that would impart equal success to all such worthies. Likewise, imagine a formula that would deliver the promised “unlimited” energy of controlled nuclear fusion.
Articles by Scott MacClelland
Music in May Turns 5
For its fifth season, this weekend, Music in May festival founder Rebecca Jackson will celebrate her muse. David Arben, the musician whose life experience affirmed and empowered Jackson’s dedication to her art, extended his influence to the festival from the days when Jackson was an undergraduate at the Juilliard School in New York and his pupil in Philadelphia. Arben, the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust, played with the Philadelphia Orchestra for 34 seasons, many of them as associate concertmaster.
New Music Works Goes Mad for Mandolins
In a performance at Cabrillo College, guest composer Mark Kilstofte’s Ballistic Etude 3.1 will run riot across six members of the NMW Ensemble. The seven-minute piece, in the form of a “hunting” ritornello, paints a now-frantic, now-darkly-insinuating film noir image while its hero attempts to rescue his girl from evil clutches.
Maestro Granger Remembers
“It’s not about doing a job,” says Santa Cruz County Symphony music director Larry Granger. “It’s about dedication.” Even the fully subscribed ticketholder who sees a conductor at one concert a month probably can’t comprehend the full extent of the work Granger does.
Cabrillo Music Fest: Closing Weekend
Imagine a symphony orchestra playing a complex score that does not require melody, harmony or rhythm. So it was with Zosha di Castri’s Alba, which opened the Cabrillo Festival’s program last Saturday, Aug. 13, in Santa Cruz. This eight-minute world premiere was all about the “stark quilted silence and stunning flatness” of a wintry dawn in Northern Alberta, birthplace of its composer. Composer John Adams commissioned the talented Canadian to celebrate Marin Alsop’s 20th anniversary at Cabrillo. Of course harmony and rhythm are found abundantly in the work’s musical notation, but those elements disappeared for the audience in an atmospheric tour de force.
Cabrillo Music Fest: The Magic of Mizuno
Marin Alsop claims variety is a goal of her Cabrillo Festival programming. Plenty of that was heard in the festival’s two full orchestra programs last weekend. Nine of 10 works performed Friday and Saturday nights at Civic Auditorium were composed since 2003, while one of the best, Shuko Mizuno’s Natsu, dates from 1988. Born in 1934, the shy Mizuno seemed a bit shell-shocked by the Cabrillo orchestra’s brilliant performance and the boisterous audience response that followed. From the podium, Alsop described the work—the title of which means “summer” in Japanese—as “harmonically dense” and its composer as the “Japanese Rouse,” referring to one of the Americans she has long championed at Cabrillo.
Mighty Marin Alsop
In 1930, a pioneering American, Antonia Brico, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, and to critical acclaim. It was a fluke. No woman musician played in that famous orchestra until 1982. Of virtually equal stature, the Vienna Philharmonic opened the door to a female musician, a harpist, only in 1997. This was the world Swiss-born orchestra conductor Gustav Meier grew up in.
In Soquel, A Luthier’s Mystery Solved
The violin was not David Morse’s first calling. Between 1978 and 1993, he made fine guitars for clients worldwide at the rate of two to three per year. His foray into the world of violins began in 1984 when he collected damaged and discarded instruments from public schools in Tucson and reconditioned them for students and amateur players at The Soundpost, his shop in Santa Cruz. He began building his own violins around 1986, closed The Soundpost in 1991, and has produced fine instruments from his Soquel workshop ever since.
Summer Classical Music Preview
Is tango toxic? Take a chance at Primo Congo (May 28) when Cadenza ODs on the “pessimistic, fatalistic…deeply dramatic…particularly dark vision of life and death” (as critic Juan Arturo Brennan describes the musical soul of Argentina). Alchemist and conductor Maya Barsacq cooks up Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, featuring violinist Cynthia Baehr plus Mesut Ozgen in a guitar concerto by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, along with other works, whetting an appetite for this summer’s music festivals. (www.scmusic.org).
Yevgeny Sudbin Inaugurates Concert Grand At Cabrillo
Available for purchase only since early 2010, the new Yamaha CFX 9-foot grand piano has already won wide acclaim as “the Rolls Royce of concert grands.” So agrees John Orlando, who runs Cabrillo College’s Distinguished Artists series. The piano has a “beautiful singing quality,” he says, “like the human voice.”