MUSIC AT THE MISSION:
NEWLY DRAWN SKY
Sunday, August 13, 4pm & 8pm Mission San Juan Bautista
Tickets: $35 day/$30 eve
Sponsored by: 
Nicholas Maw: Concert Suite From Sophie’s Choice (West Coast Premiere) featuring Gale Fuller, mezzo-soprano
Aaron Jay Kernis: Newly Drawn Sky (West Coast Premiere)
Esa-Pekka Salonen: L.A. Variations
For more than 30 years, the sanctuary of the Old Mission at San Juan Bautista has ushered the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and its audiences into its warm embrace.
The day's journey begins when Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis returns
for the West Coast Premiere of Newly Drawn Sky. Kernis' inspiration was “a reminiscence of the first summer
night by the ocean spent with my children, and of the changing colours
of the summer sky at dusk.” The Chicago Sun-Times said it was "full of brilliant color" and "shifted between suspenseful, ominous thunder and light-hearted, scampering winds." Then Maestra Marin Alsop introduces Festival-goers to one of Britain's most admired composers, Nicholas Maw. His opera Sophie’s Choice, based on the novel of the same name by William Styron, was commissioned by the BBC and Royal Opera House and premiered in 2002. From that work, Maw has derived a Concert Suite to receive its West Coast Premiere today featuring mezzo-soprano Gail Fuller. The day's journey is brought to a rousing finale with L.A. Variations, a work by Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, the esteemed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Of L.A. Variations––which highlights the different sections of the orchestra and has a distinctively urban energy––Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times says it derives it’s originality in large measure from its “brilliant orchestration,” and provides “at least a thrill a minute.”
Concert-goers are invited to participate in the San Juan Day tradition of picnicking between concerts in the Mission Olive Grove.