Con Brio: Cabrillo Festival Orchestra Concert

Maestro Cristian Macelaru conducts the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in the West Coast premiere of William Bolcom’s one-movement Ninth Symphony, composed in 2012. Bolcom—a National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize, and Grammy Award-winner—wrote, “Ours is both a dark and a hopeful time. Today our greatest enemy is our inability to listen to each other, which seems to worsen with time. All we hear now is shouting, and nobody is listening because the din is so great. Yet there is a ‘still, small voice’ that refuses to disappear…I pin my hope on that voice. I search for it daily in life and in music—and possibly the ‘Ninth Symphony’ is a search for that soft sound.” Of Irish composer Gerald Barry’s witty Piano Concerto, The Guardian (UK) writes,“[it] is typically irreverent, but typically affectionate too. It takes conventional concerto rhetoric and stands it on its head…It’s surreal, funny, and just a bit breathless, but it’s also a genuine virtuoso vehicle for [the soloist].” It receives its US premiere tonight, performed by celebrated pianist Jason Hardink, making his Festival debut. German composer Jörg Widmann’s Con Brio is an ‘exercise in fury and rhythmic insistence,’ composed with a knowing wink towards 19th-century Romanticism. San Francisco Classical Voice music critic Georgia Rowe wrote, “[Con Brio] incorporates material from Beethoven’s 7th and 8th symphonies in a kaleidoscopic scheme…it produces a small universe of sound throughout its 12-minute span.” The program closes with award winning composer ’s Symphony No 1: Ballet for Orchestra, a work that embraces various dance styles and draws inspiration from famous scores of balletic pedigree. McTee writes, “Music is said to have come from dance—from the rhythmic impulses of men and women. Perhaps this explains my recent awareness of the inherent relationships between thought, feelings, and action—that the impulse to compose often begins as a rhythmical stirring and leads to a physical response—tensing muscles, gesturing with hands and arms, or quite literally, dancing.”