—Metro Santa Cruz, Scott MacClelland, August 2005
"Cabrillo has created an
audience for totally unknown music and is setting a great precedent for
other festivals," says David Harrington, the violinist and artistic
director of San Francisco's Kronos Quartet."
—Metro Santa Cruz, Peter Koht, August 2005
"If there's a more
improbable enterprise on today's treacherous musical landscape than a
festival devoted to contemporary music, it could only be a festival
devoted to contemporary orchestral music...Yet every summer, hundred of
listeners, performers, and composers find their way to the Cabrillo
Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, for two
week's worth of recent and slightly less recent orchestral
music...audiences come to hear music Director Marin Alsop lead
performances of works by living masters like John Adams, Christopher
Rouse, James MacMillan, Thomas Adès, and Aaron Jay Kernis.
According to
all the traditional marketing dicta, not to mention the persistent
naysaying Cassandras of the orchestral world, this is a formula that is
not supposed to work—not financially, not artistically. But at 43, the
Cabrillo Festival is looking better than ever, its books are balanced,
its audiences and donor base committed and enthusiastic, and its
artistic profile as keenly etched as it's ever been. More than just an
improbable enterprise, it's an improbable success story."
—Symphony Magazine, Joshua Kosman, May-June 2005
"Alsop has used her taut,
expressive conducting style and the skills of a first-rate pickup
orchestra to argue forcefully for the place of orchestral music on the
postmodern landscape."
—San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman, August 2004
"These composers have
Alsop to thank for bringing their music to life and to audiences. Their
names may ultimately outlive hers, but in the moment, she's the sun and
they're the planets, and the rest of us can fasten our seat belts for
this 'screaming' ride around a solar system called Cabrillo."
—Metro Santa Cruz, Scott MacClelland, April 2004
"The American
Symphony Orchestra League¦would do well to fund a thorough case study
of the Cabrillo phenomenon as a model for all the symphonies out there
who are struggling to survive, looking desperately for formulae to
stimulate and draw audiences. Clearly, Cabrillo has achieved something
that others do not remotely grasp."
—Arts San Francisco, Paul Hertelendy, Week of Aug. 16-23, 2004
"The Cabrillo
Festival's most recent program radiates the new rainbow of color and
timbre of the American 21st century orchestra."
—Metro Santa Cruz, Scott MacClelland, Week of Aug. 25-Sept. 1, 2004
"...it was powerful
stuff, and it was conducted with characteristic focus and flair by
music director Marin Alsop. If the two composers seemed an odd
couple—Adès so flashy and so British, Adams deeply American and
increasingly writing with the wisdom of middle age—the net effect was
invigorating, to say the least."
—San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman, August 13, 2003
"Over 11 seasons [with
the Cabrillo Festival], Music Director Marin Alsop has treated her
composers like fine wines. She chooses them for their aging potential,
serves them to us regularly so we can sample how their complexity is
developing, and produces award-winning product year after year."
—San Francisco Classical Voice, Jeff Dunn, August 2003
"For lovers of contemporary music, Santa Cruz, California is the place to be during the first two weeks of August."
—BBC Music Magazine, August 2001
"For more than 40
years, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has been a notable
West Coast outpost for new classical music. But the festival, which has
had a series of distinguished music directors, has evolved... "
—New York Times review, John Rockwell, August 13, 2003
"Marin Alsop Joins Oprah Winfrey in Newsweeks List of Powerful American
Women. Conductor Marin Alsop is featured in a series of articles about
women in leadership roles in the October 24 issue of Newsweek."
—Playbill Arts, October 2005
"Marin Alsop, the first
woman to lead a major American symphony and the artistic director of
the Santa Cruz-based Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, was among
the 25 innovators chosen for this year's MacArthur Foundation œgenius
grant. $500,000 that recipients can use however they wish."
—The San Jose Mercury News, September 2005
"When the news
leaked out that Marin Alsop was to be appointed the next music director
of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the national media leapt on the
story as a barrier-breaking milestone. Ms. Alsop would be the first
woman to direct a major American orchestra. She had already made
history in 2002 as the first woman to become principal conductor of a
major British orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony."
"Though the breakthrough is overdue, I supported the decision for
other reasons. Instead of turning to an elderly European eminence, as
major American orchestras so often have, the Baltimore Symphony was
putting its faith in a 48-year-old American dynamo, a formidable
musician and a powerful communicator, a conductor with a vision of what
an American orchestra could be in the 21st century."
—The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, July 2005
"The recent announcement
that Marin Alsop will become music director of the Baltimore Symphony
at the end of the 2005-2006 season is an exciting step for all who have
followed her extraordinary career with great admiration, and for all
who care about the well-being of the symphony orchestra in America."
—The Wall Street Journal, August 2005
"Marin Alsop breaks new ground in a world of male maestros... the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) announced last week that it had
chosen Alsop to be the orchestra's new conductor... Alsop was seen as
new blood and a new direction: she's only 48, young for a conductor at
this level. She's funny and approachable—she has a habit of chatting
informally to audiences from the podium—and she has been known to
moonlight (on the violin) with a swing band. She can handle the
warhorses of the repertoire—she just recorded Brahms' Symphony No. 1
with the London Philharmonic—but she also champions living American
composers like Philip Glass. She can even be heard, on occasion, to
utter the phrase way cool. 'There's this whole archetypal image of what
a conductor is, this inaccessible person with an accent and an ascot,'
Alsop says. ˜This is the age of collaboration rather than autocracy.'"
—Time magazine, August 2005
Photo by: r.r. jones
