Concerts: The Photographer

At the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, musicians, artists and audience share the creative process together. Adventurous audiences defy convention and ask for something new, something wild, something we've never heard before! This year, Music Director Marin Alsop, acknowledging the visually stimulating world in which we live, crafts an exhilarating season with dance, opera, video, film, and narration for a musical experience that stimulates emotionally and intellectually. It's a season to thrill and excite!

Pre-Concert Dinner, Talk and Fanfare starts at 6:30 p.m.. Join the excitement of Opening Night, Friday, August 4, and enjoy a catered dinner outside the theatre as Marin speaks about the 2001 season.

Philip Glass/Robert Malasch's
The Photographer
West Coast Premiere
Friday, August 3 & Sunday, August 5 8:00 p.m.
Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium

A mixed media work in three acts,
featuring the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra.

Marin Alsop
Music Director & Conductor
and featured Violin Soloist

Michael Scarola: Stage Director
Matthew Antaky: Scenic and Lighting Designer
Maria Basile: Choreographer
Suzanne St. John: Video Artist
Tesse Crocker: Costume Designer
Jude Navari: Vocal Ensemble Director
Gaben Chancellor: Graphics Artist

Marin Alsop is an artist who likes to think big! And who, some may ask, can resist that? After the successes of Cabrillo Music Festival's last two seasons of large scale productions, she is not only undaunted, she's energized and determined to produce rarely performed works that will give artists and audiences unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

This season, the excitement begins with the West Coast Premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Malasch's mixed media work The Photographer. A nationally renowned artistic team partners with Music Director Marin Alsop to create an original production that Bay area audiences won't want to miss. Based on the scandal-filled life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose motion studies made him famous and whose murder of his wife's lover made him infamous, The Photographer presents us with a surreal spectacle of Muybridge's story and work, and explores the relationship of time to motion.

In 1872, "there was revived in the city of San Francisco a controversy in regard to animal locomotion." Thus the scene is set for The Photographer, an extravagant multimedia triptych created in 1982 by visionary composer Philip Glass and innovative writer Robert Malasch. Two decades later it receives its West Coast premiere at the Cabrillo Music Festival, with a violin solo by conductor Marin Alsop, who performed it with the Philip Glass Ensemble for the U.S. Premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

The Photographer combines music, theatre, dance and design for a breathtaking theatrical experience. It moves from the literal presentation of the play which recounts the circumstances of the murder and Muybridge's trial and acquittal (Act I), to an abstracted musical presentation accompanied by video and slides of Muybridge's photos (Act II), and finally gives way to the metaphor of dance (Act III). All of this happens while the haunting voices of a chorus accompanies the orchestra throughout the piece.

"The driving pulse of Glass' music, with its internal shifts of action, its jubilant unearthly harmonies, helps us to see the pictures swing and soar. What we hear lends momentum to what we see and at the same time fixes the photos as split seconds arrested from the flow of time," said Deborah Jowitt in the Village Voice. She added, "…the form of the dance makes reference to his process and the illusion it produced… we begin to see the motion in what is still, the stillness in what is moving."

Philip Glass' The Photographer is where all the edges of all the arts meet. Operatic in scale, it is the story of genius and scandal in the life of a true visionary. Muybridge was at the genesis of motion pictures and The Photographer brings us into the boundless expanse of his imagination. With only two performances, you are encouraged to Run! — Not Walk. Order early!

Read more:

"The Photographer" program notes

Tickets: $20-30

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