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.
On the same program, George Tsontakis’s Laconika sounded positively retro, five smart pop-tinged miniatures that played off its L.A. Chamber Orchestra commission. But it was composer Michael Daugherty’s Gee’s Bend, a concerto for electric guitar, that sparked the sharpest focus of the evening as soloist DJ Sparr found a kaleidoscope of colors and effects to match the four movements: ‘Housetop,’ ‘Grandmother’s Dream,’ ‘Washboard’ and ‘Chicken Pickin.’ These pieces honor pop and blues guitarists from Chet Atkins to Jimi Hendrix, while the work overall celebrates a tiny hamlet on an Alabama river where its residents, descended from slaves, have created a unique heritage of quilting. Daugherty’s vivacious orchestrations were ear- and eye-popping, as was his own jazzy tribute to Alsop, Fever. Dutchman Robin de Raaff’s Entangled Tales, celebrating his time at Tanglewood, proved to be a prismatically dense thicket of colors.
On Sunday, at Mission San Juan, principal hornist Kristin Jurkscheit showed off what a fine and versatile player she is in the premiere of Chiayu’s concerto, Xuan Zang, a festival commission. Tracing the travels of the Tang Dynasty monk of its title, the largely cinematic score engages “diverse cultural elements,” says the composer, including a folksong of the Uighur people of Xinjiang. Anna Clyne’s masterful Within Her Arms, for 15 individual strings, recalled Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, but with a haunting and much warmer embrace. Pierre Jalbert’s Fire and Ice delivered as promised, while Dan Welcher’s A Valediction tracked a more personal narrative with formal clarity and a sure hand. Both works well deserved Alsop’s attention, the orchestra sizzled and all composers were in attendance.
