News & Reviews

 

Critical acclaim for the 2009 season: 

Sacramento Bee: "Rarely does a new music festival burn brightly on all cylinders, but that is exactly what the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music pulled off on opening night." read more...


San Francisco Classical Voice: "Sublime sounds strike Cabrillo" read more...

Santa Cruz Sentinel: "Alsop and the Festival Orchestra's outstanding players, along with the composers and their fine works, add up to incomparable musical riches..." read more...

Financial Times:
""...in the surf mecca of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, the Cabrillo Festival has made the contemporary repertoire sound urgent, indispensable and even sexy."" read more...

 
Musical America names Alsop 2009 "Conductor of the Year"

"(Marin) Alsop, who was affectionately mentored by Leonard Bernstein, shares his kind of drive and determination to make music matter. 'There has to be something more than just playing well,' she says, envisioning an orchestra that can 'play so stunningly that it changes people’s lives.' As she goes about seeking to produce such an effect, the conductor has used contemporary music with particularly forceful results; her knack for precision and keen attention to minute details understandably make her prized by living composers, from John Adams to Joan Tower. Alsop’s Cabrillo Festival in California showcases her passion for new sounds and draws audiences deep into the creative process."

—Musical America, Tim Smith, December 2008

“There’s no question that the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, held each summer in Northern California under the artistic direction of Marin Alsop, is a major force in promoting new music.”

    —Strings Magazine, Greg Cahill, January 2008


“Marin Alsop has her ear to the ground for composers of contemporary orchestral music, and you could do no better than to let her Cabrillo Festival programs be your guide"

    —San Francisco Classical Voice, Michael Zwiebach, May 2008


“This was a strong opening night to the festival, the foremost annual showcase for new orchestral music in North America.”

    —San Jose Mercury News, Richard Scheinin, August 2008

 

“In the past 47 years, this Santa Cruz Festival has carved a niche at presenting the new and unconventional.”

    —Sacramento Bee, Edward Ortiz, July 2008


“Of course, the orchestra can hold its own in the hands of a master like Christopher Rouse, a longtime Cabrillo regular whose new Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned for the festival, was the weekend’s headliner. It’s a boisterous, exhilarating concoction, in which fiercely patterned rhythmic explosions alternate with lyrical interludes headed by the strings, and as the title suggests, it’s a display piece for the orchestra members, who dispatched it superbly under Alsop’s taut, fluid leadership.”

    —San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman, August 2008


“The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music wowed sellout crowds at the Civic Auditorium Friday and Saturday evenings as Maestro Marin Alsop led the Festival Orchestra in vivid new orchestral music. The festival’s two opening concerts included no less than three world premieres, one U.S. premiere, and two West Coast premieres -with every composer present.”

    —Santa Cruz Sentinel, Phyllis Rosenblum, August 2008


“Among the seven new orchestral works heard during the first weekend of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, one stood head and shoulders above the rest. Christopher Rouse’s Concerto for Orchestra, composed with dazzling virtuosity, gave Marin Alsop’s musicians a showpiece of fierce demands and breathtaking execution.”

    —Metro Santa Cruz, Scott MacClelland, August 2008


"Big shifts are happening in the symphonic world, and Cabrillo is an important carrier of that message."

—San Jose Mercury News, Rich Scheinin, August 2004


"As expected, conductor Marin Alsop's amazing orchestra dominated the 43rd Cabrillo festival of Contemporary Music. As Expected? In fact, they have spoiled us into taking for granted what no other band in the land could reasonably deliver: brilliant performances of music they have never played, or even heard, before rehearsals began."

—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 Genius 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