from the wall street journal
September 4, 2001
A Music Festival Comes Back From the Dead
By Brett Campbell
Santa Cruz, Calif.
In 1991, the Cabrillo Festival, the longest-running continuous new-music series in the United States, was in trouble. Its home base of Santa Cruz was still recuperating from the devastating 1989 earthquake. Its celebrated longtime music director, Dennis Russell Davies, had moved on after 17 years. Beleaguered by a $90,000 debt, the festival could no longer rent a venue at the University of California-Santa Cruz and was forced to stage concerts in various local churches. That summer, with composer John Adams as interim director, the festival cut the number of concerts in half, to six, yet still lost "a ton of money," recalls development director Tom Fredericks, who, with Ellen Primack, the executive director, arrived that year to try to save one of America's premier showcases for contemporary classical music. Marin Alsop
This year's festival showed how well they succeeded over the last decade. The orchestra unleashed bristling performances of contemporary music, revived and revitalized a couple of neglected American masterpieces and, despite its proximity to dot-bombed Silicon Valley, drew strong audiences. The Cabrillo Festival has shown how to build a sustaining community around progressive music.
How did they do it? The new management team found a permanent home in the downtown Civic Auditorium, a 920-seat converted gymnasium, which, despite some inadequate acoustic enhancements, still feels as though it should be hosting a basketball game. (The festival also sponsors one concert at the more congenial Mission San Juan Bautista.) They commissioned an audience survey and found that the festival's core listeners craved challenging artistic experiences. Most important, they hired a promising young music director, Marin Alsop, who eliminated the war horses -- pieces by Beethoven, Brahms -- that had balanced the new music that made the festival a fount of modern sounds, including 65 world premieres and many more national and regional debuts, since its founding by the composer Lou Harrison and others in 1963.
Ms. Alsop -- "a New Yorker through and through," she insists -- also changed the programming focus, favoring East Coast composers such as her friend Christopher Rouse. She also brought the pre- and postconcert talks and Q&A sessions, delivered with the dry wit and easy explanations that have endeared her to audiences in Eugene, Ore., Denver and, most recently, Britain.
Not everyone in the Cabrillo family embraced the changes Ms. Alsop has made in the last 10 years. Some critics deplored Ms. Alsop's turn toward tonal, neo-expressionist and (early on) crossover repertoire that took fewer risks than some of the thornier, less-predictable works of the past. Mr. Harrison and others, on the other hand, while praising Ms. Alsop's superior conducting skills, were less enamored of her elimination of classic works, the preconcert lecture demonstrations and her emphasis on "spiky chromaticism" at the expense of more consonant contemporary composers. But Ms. Alsop retained the creative, informal atmosphere that the genial Mr. Harrison had begun and that Mr. Davies extended when he arrived, stripped to the waist, on a motorcycle in 1973.
Ms. Alsop recalls being alarmed to discover that the Cabrillo musicians wear casual clothes onstage, but she grew to appreciate the laid-back creative environment. The festival also continues to offer plenty of opportunities for audience-artist interaction, including open rehearsals and lunch with the composers.
Cabrillo retained another tradition: The 68 musicians receive no fee, only a small per diem and free accommodations in local homes. Yet longtime observers maintain that the performance quality has risen steadily over the years, approaching that of major chamber orchestras. "It's like having the ultimate garage band, an all-star team of contemporary music players," Ms. Alsop explains. What draws top classical players from the Bay Area and farther afield, says cellist Roger Emanuels, a 16-year Cabrillo veteran, is the rare chance to play innovative music in a sympathetic atmosphere and to work with a gifted conductor like Ms. Alsop.
"You can sense [the musicians'] enthusiasm and willingness to work with composers," says Mr. Rouse. "It's also a very devoted and enthusiastic audience. A lot of that has to do with Marin. She's wonderful not just in working with composers and musicians, but also in relating with audience members." Cabrillo listeners trust Ms. Alsop to bring them the thrill of the new while mostly avoiding superficial, dull or merely gimmicky contemporary pieces -- and to help them appreciate the good stuff.
The old informality and new outreach have broadened the audience beyond the core group of adventurous listeners; attendance has soared in recent years, and the debt was retired by 1998. This summer, belying her (undeserved) reputation as a specialist in only neo-expressionist Americana, Ms. Alsop programmed not only music of Mr. Rouse (whose violin concerto included a sensational performance by concertmaster Yumi Hwang-Williams) but also sometime minimalists John Adams and Philip Glass, lyrical melodicists Harrison and Virgil Thomson, and symphonies by the Scotsman James MacMillan and the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara.
"Working so much in Europe now, I'm hearing a lot more and broader influences in contemporary music," Ms. Alsop says. "It's opened up my ears a bit." (And her eyes: Three pieces featured visual components, although one of them has been part of her own musical history since 1983. In that year she played violin in the American premiere of Philip Glass's mixed-media work "The Photographer," at Brooklyn's Next Wave Festival.
For this summer's performance at Cabrillo, nothing but the score remained from the original production, so Ms. Alsop commissioned new choreography and tracked down images of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge to be projected behind the players and dancers. Mr. Glass supplied some new incidental music. The reconstruction worked marvelously: the dancers echoed the style of earlier music theater works featuring Mr. Glass's music, while the images and nonlinear narrative complemented his haunting, cyclical music.
Another concise and underperformed American masterpiece, Mr. Harrison's 1954 chamber opera "Rapunzel," received what the 84-year-old composer called its best performance ever, sparked by outstanding baritone Sanford Sylvan. Director Michael Scarola, Designer Matthew Antaky and shadow artist Leonidas Kassapides added projections of evocative images that helped flesh out the spare, actionless storyline, in which only three characters appear. Mr. Harrison's somber, atonal yet tuneful score mirrors the complex, dark emotional landscape of the libretto he by the 19th-century artist, mystic and designer William Morris. The sellout crowd whooped when Mr. Harrison and Ms. Alsop, the town's old and new musical treasures, embraced at the curtain call.
At the end of the final work on the program -- a live performance of the score, by Virgil Thomson, Mr. Harrison's mentor, for Pare Lorentz's documentary "The River", which ran simultaneously but soundlessly -- the cellists pulled their annual prank: whirling large plastic fish from their bows. A grinning Ms. Alsop posed for photos with them, fish dangling over her head. ("My manager tells me I've got to work on the maestro thing," she admits.) Outside, musicians and audience members mingled over free cake and champagne, chatting for almost an hour after the final notes. The annual Cabrillo music community had come together again.
