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.
Meier, director of the Orchestra Conducting Program at the Peabody Conservatory and formerly faculty in that discipline at Yale School of Music, Eastman School of Music, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Tanglewood Music Center, now works side-by-side with Marin Alsop in the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music’s annual Conductors/Composers Workshop. “I first saw Marin at Tanglewood,” he recalls. “All of us, from Ozawa to Bernstein, liked her instantly. This young woman made it clear that when it came to conducting, a woman could do just as well as a man.”
Meier, mentor and colleague, remains one of Alsop’s biggest fans. “Her passion and love for music was wonderful to see. And we did two things never done before at Tanglewood. Marin was invited to come back the following summer—the policy was no repeaters—and the administration reinstated for her the Koussevitzky Prize, which had been shelved for many years.”
When Alsop took the reins of the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1992 at the age of 35, she had already gained critical praise as a guest conductor of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was at that time music director of the Eugene Symphony in Oregon, the Long Island Philharmonic and her own Concordia at Lincoln Center. But, as Pulitzer-winning composer Christopher Rouse put it in a recent email, “It’s important to remember that Marin was the music director at Cabrillo before she became a world-famous maestra. And even though she’s now in high demand everywhere, she remains committed to the festival and the repertoire it champions. That’s pretty wonderful.”
To list all the memorable and momentous events at the Cabrillo Festival on Alsop’s watch is like cataloguing the crown jewels. This summer, journalists everywhere have been putting her on the spot for an answer to the question of what constitute for her the highlights.
“We still talk about Rapunzel,” she says of the 2001 production of the Lou Harrison opera, “memorable because of its gnarly, atonal music.” Harrison, a co-founder of the festival, was a fixture in person and in music at festivals from its inception until his death in early 2003. That year Alsop organized a major memorial program featuring Philip Collins and his New Music Works and a homecoming appearance by Alsop’s festival predecessor, Dennis Russell Davies.
Alsop holds a special fondness for each festival’s final program at Mission San Juan Bautista because of its atmosphere and mystique. “It has a kind of spirituality that is conducive to strong personal experience,” she says. She recalls performing John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 “Of Rage and Remembrance” in her second season there. “It was at the height of the AIDS epidemic,” she says. “At the end there was no applause, and I thought I heard sobs in that stifled stillness.”
The World in A Festival
At the 1994 San Juan concert, trombonist Joseph Alessi played Rouse’s Trombone Concerto, the 1993 Pulitzer winner. At its conclusion, the audience rose to its feet cheering as one person. That season saw an explosion of guest composers, including Rouse, John Adams (who had served as festival music director in 1991), Libby Larson, violinist/composer Mark O’Connor and George Tsontakis.
“It would have been hard to predict the degree of achievement that Marin Alsop was to reach back in our chummy student days at Juilliard,” Tsontakis remembers. “In the standard symphonic repertoire she can stand toe-to-toe with any living conductor. Her concert last summer in Aspen included a Rite of Spring that just blew everyone away.”
During Alsop’s first 10 years at Cabrillo, she included major works by American and European composers, living as well as dead. But, since 2002, she explains, “Being alive is one of the requirements.”
As her career has expanded, so have her interests. “I’ve experienced many different cultures and fallen in love with a lot of composers from around the world,” she says. Her exposure in recent years to Europe, Japan and now Brazil (she takes the helm at the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra next season) has opened new vistas and discoveries. But, she explains, “There is still a huge divide: oceans. When you get to know these talented people personally, they are a lot more willing to come to Cabrillo.”
While there’s not really a set of criteria she uses to pick the music she champions, Alsop does favor variety and chooses carefully for her programming. “I listen to or look at every score that comes in,” she says. “My assistant, Carolyn Kuan, and I evaluate the writing for the orchestra as well.” Music has to have a journey “and some kind of a payoff,” she explains. “And, whether one agrees with it or not, I believe the composer needs to express a strong point of view.”
In addition, she praises the Cabrillo audiences. “Everyone has an opinion, but they come with an open mind, not an a priori judgment.”
Greatest Hits
In 1996, Alsop put the focus on film, with Richard Einhorn attending the screening of the 1927 silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, for which he composed a haunting score for chorus, vocal quartet and orchestra. In that summer, Alsop also introduced her String Fever jazz band. In 1998, Alsop’s in-residence composers included, for the first of many times, John Corigliano and Michael Daugherty. The latter’s “American Icons” series included the Superman comics-inspired Metropolis Symphony and Motown Metal. The San Juan Mission concert included The Red Violin Chaconne, from Corigliano’s Oscar-winning film score.
From there, the hits roll in fast and furious. A gigantic production of Bernstein’s powerful Mass dominated the 1999 festival. In 2001, Philip Glass’s The Photographer played while images by the pioneering Eadweard Muybridge were projected on the big screen. In 2002, the festival’s 40th anniversary season, the petite, hard-of-hearing, barefoot Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie made her first festival appearance in Daugherty’s UFO.
In 2003, composer Kevin Puts made the first of many guest appearances at Cabrillo. “What I love about Marin, and I think the reason we have the relationship we do, is that she truly takes my music for what it is,” he says. “Since she knows I am sincere, she doesn’t feel the need to detach herself emotionally from what my music is trying to do. She is never cool or ironic to prove something.”
Puts, whose music is unusually listener-friendly, was back in 2004, as was Jennifer Higdon, who heard a dazzling performance of her Concerto for Orchestra. One of the major American talents whom Alsop has championed, Higdon first appeared at the 2001 festival. “Marin Alsop is a visionary who truly knows the power of music,” says Higdon. “You can see this in a wide range of projects, including her ORCHKids program with the inner city kids in Baltimore, as well as the Cabrillo Festival, which is one of the best festivals in the world.”
‘Acts of Courage and Daring’
Philip Glass made his first live appearance at the festival in 2006 for Life: A Journey Through Time, featuring the nature photography of Frans Lanting. (He returns to Santa Cruz Aug. 5 to see his festival-commissioned Black and White Scherzo, a tribute to Alsop, performed.) Glennie returned to play Puts’s Percussion Concerto.
No fewer than 12 guest composers attended the festival in 2008. The same year the world premiere of Rouse’s Concerto for Orchestra, a festival commission, put the musicians through huge challenges, with virtuosic results.
Avner Dorman’s Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! excited the senses in 2009, a season that also saw Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov’s moving Azul performed by cellist Alisa Weilerstein. In 2010, Alsop’s guest composers included Mark Anthony Turnage and Puts, who played his own piano concerto, Night, followed by John Adams’ City Noir, a “soundtrack without a movie.”
“I love to watch her conduct,” says Adams, an accomplished conductor in his own right, “She can be alternately powerful, delicate, driven, dramatic, graceful and lyrical, and she can often do all of that in the space of just a few bars of music.” She’s not afraid to take risks, he says, “knowing that cultivating a new repertoire can only be accomplished by acts of courage and daring.”
Elena Kats-Chernin’s Heaven is Closed opened the 2010 San Juan mission concert. “I knew from the first minute of the first rehearsal that I could be completely relaxed in the knowledge that my piece was in the best possible hands, literally,” she says. “I love [Alsop’s] incredibly dynamic and vibrant approach to the music she conducts.”
The list of Alsop’s Cabrillo premieres (World, US, West Coast) is staggering, and growing, along with her honors and awards. In 2007, she was engaged as music director of the Baltimore Symphony, and in so doing became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.
Her full conducting schedule now includes the London Symphony and London Philharmonic each season, and guest engagements with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle, Orchestre de Paris, Bavarian Radio Symphony and La Scala Milan. Her work can be heard in a growing library of commercial recordings.
How does Alsop see her exploding celebrity? “It’s a privilege to be afforded the opportunity to be able to actualize the possible, to get pieces commissioned, to give a forum to talented living and upcoming composers and great performing artists,” she says. She feels humbled to have a platform “to hopefully make a small difference.” In 2012, the festival’s 50th anniversary season, that platform will introduce The Hidden World of Girls, a multimedia collaboration with the Kitchen Sisters of NPR Radio and a world premiere commission from James MacMillan, a major symphony about which Alsop says he told her only that “he’s already working on it.”
John Corigliano, one of many who have composed 20th anniversary celebration pieces, puts it succinctly. “There’s no one like Marin. She’s just the best!”
CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Through Aug. 14
Opening concert “Mysteries of Light” (featuring composers Margaret Brouwer, Mason Bates, Christopher Rouse, Philip Glass and James MacMillan) Friday, Aug. 5, 8pm
Civic Auditorium, 307 Church St., Santa Cruz
Tickets $32-50 at SantaCruzTickets.com or 831.420.5260
For full schedule, including free events, visit www.cabrillomusic.org
