Cabrillo Festival Of Contemporary Music Announces 58th Season

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, America's longest running festival of new orchestral music, celebrates its 58th season July 26 - August 9, 2020, with a remarkable season of timely, topical, and thought-provoking new works.

Led by 2020 Grammy Award-winning Music Director and Conductor Cristian Măcelaru, the Cabrillo Festival is all about "music of our time, for our time." The Festival is proud to offer composers a haven to present contemporary music that speaks to the world around us, bringing together a community of artists and audiences to experience the creative process. While this year's Festival reflects on the deep divisions in our nation, it is also infused with hope for change, transformation, and peace. The Festival's 58th season welcomes thirteen resident composers, a stunning roster of soloists, three world premiere commissions, and eight West Coast premieres.

This year's composers in residence are Mason Bates, Dan Caputo, Stacy Garrop, John Harbison, Jake Heggie, Pierre Jalbert, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Paola Prestini, Kevin Puts, Andrea Reinkemeyer, Iván Enrique Rodríguez, Sean Shepherd, and Gregory Smith.

Guest Artists include Katherine Needleman (oboe); Benjamin Beilman (violin); Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano); Gregory Smith (narrator); Quartet San Francisco; Lara Downes (piano); and Stewart Goodyear (piano).

Among this year's highlights are: the final performance in an expansive Bay Area collaboration commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz--the world premiere of the full orchestral version of Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheers' Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope; two contemporary homages to Beethoven's 250th anniversary (by Pierre Jalbert and Joan Tower); two works commemorating women's suffrage and the centenary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (by Stacy Garrop and Paola Prestini); and a posthumous tribute to beloved composer and longtime Cabrillo friend, Christopher Rouse, who died in September 2019.

The Festival also continues its "pay-what-you-can" Community Night performance on Thursday, August 6 at 7pm. This hour-long chamber music concert is designed to introduce new audiences to the Festival, and this year-in addition to showcasing the talents of Cabrillo Festival Orchestra members-will feature two spectacular pianists, Lara Downes and Stewart Goodyear.

As well as the featured evening concerts, the Festival continues its tradition of hosting open rehearsals, talks, and the Conductors/Composers Workshop professional training program (focusing on the creation and performance of new music), the Free Family Concert with Tour of the Orchestra, and the two-day community-focused Church Street Fair.

A Nation Divided - Friday, July 31, 8pm

Maestro Măcelaru kicks off the 58th season with works by composers Iván Enrique Rodríguez, Kevin Puts, Andrea Reinkemeyer, and Mason Bates.

Composer Iván Enrique Rodríguez composes works focusing on social justice and activism and incorporating his Puerto Rican musical heritage. Maestro Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in the West Coast premiere of his most recent orchestral piece, A Metaphor for Power, which reflects upon our ideals of equality in America, as seen through the personal lens of the composer's Latinx experience.

Cabrillo Festival veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts will be in residence for the West Coast premiere of his Second Oboe Concerto: Moonlight. This concerto was inspired by the Academy award-winning film Moonlight, and written for oboist Kathleen Needleman, who performs with the esteemed Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. Puts writes, "the piece was written in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, during a time of great upheaval and division in the country and-for me-a profound feeling of disillusionment. I floundered for several months, searching for inspiration until the discovery of the 2016 film Moonlight. I found it exquisitely made, and the film's demonstration of tolerance and compassion in the midst of a tough environment stayed with me for some time, giving me cause for hope."

The music of American composer Andrea Reinkemeyer has been described as, "hauntingly melodic and fun, dancing and almost running its way forward (Fanfare Magazine). It explores the interplay of visual metaphors, nature, and sound to create lush textures against churning rhythmic figures. Her piece, Water Sings Fire draws inspiration from Leigh Bardugo's eponymous short story, a feminist origin myth to the Hans Christian Andersen classic, The Little Mermaid, in which themes of ambition and betrayal are explored allegorically through Ulla's transformation from obscure mermaid to tempestuous sea witch.

Closing out the evening is the West Coast premiere of Grammy Award-winning composer Mason Bates' The Art of War, a powerful new symphony that explores the drama of human conflict from the perspectives of soldiers, weaponry, and human loss. Animating a three-movement symphonic structure are original field recordings-of weapons tests; elements of American and Iraqi folk music; and the printing presses of the US Treasury-triggered from the orchestra by the composer.

Violins of Hope - Saturday, August 1, 7pm

Maestro Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in two West Coast premieres and one World premiere on Saturday, August 1.

"The American composer Pierre Jalbert writes music of considerable elegance," wrote Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maestro Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in the West Coast premiere of Jalbert's Passage, written in response to Beethoven's Symphony No 4 and presented in commemoration of Beethoven's 250th Birthday. "The title refers to the transformation of musical passages from Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, which informed this work, into a modern musical language," writes Jalbert. Passage is in three contrasting movements, with each movement responding to a different aspect of Beethoven's score. "Ultimately, the piece stands on its own terms, filtered through my own musical language, to form something of our own time."

Dubbed "one of the decade's more gifted, up-and-coming modern classical composers" (Pitchfork), Sarah Kirland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative. Her single-movement orchestral work Hiraeth, which features an original film by Mark DeChiazza, receives its West Coast premiere at Cabrillo. 'Hiraeth' is a Welsh word, loosely translated as homesickness tinged with longing for the lost or departed, or for a home you can no longer return to. The music is deeply emotional, affected by Snider's loss of her father as she was composing.

The evening concludes with a powerful and profound Festival commission: the full orchestral version of Guggenheim Fellow Jake Heggie's Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope, with text by Gene Scheer, and featuring mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and violinist Benjamin Beilman as guest artists. Written in commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. This powerful work is based on the stories told by musicologist and author James A. Grymes in his book Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour. Violinist Beilman, as well as several of the Cabrillo Festival musicians, will perform on some of the historic string instruments from the Violins of Hope collection-instruments that were played by Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust and subsequently recovered and meticulously restored by Israeli violinmakers Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein. This is the last event of Violins of Hope SF Bay Area, a monumental 40-organization collaboration, and will include talks and educational programs with Avshalom Weinstein.

Free Family Concert - Sunday, August 2, 1 pm

The Festival's annual fun, free and always engaging family concert brings back Festival favorite Gregory Smith. A multitalented composer and arranger of scores, songs and themes for television and film, Smith is also the creator of engaging family-friendly concert music that has been performed by major orchestras from Boston to Bonn, Toronto to Hong Kong. This concert features VIBE, the newest symphonic educational concert work by Smith. Narrated by the composer, this lighthearted, participatory musical takes its young audience behind the scenes to explore the science of sound and how it travels, how echoes work, and the significance of having two ears. The event also includes the popular Tour of the Orchestra, which invites kids to meet the orchestra's different instruments and players.

Quartet San Francisco in Concert - Sunday, August 2, 7pm

Quartet San Francisco, three-time Grammy Award nominee, makes their Festival debut with a Sunday night program of tango and jazz-and you can expect them to do it with "breezy wit, fine technical finish and a genuine feeling for musical idiom" (Washington Post). Founded by violinist Jeremy Cohen, QSF is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet, exploring a wide range of music genres and challenging the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet. Violist Chad Kaltinger is a hometown troubadour and longtime member of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra.

Community Night - Thursday, August 6, 7pm

This year the Festival's popular pay-what-you-can Community Night concert includes a presentation of Entr'acte by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw performed by string players of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, conducted by Cristi Macelaru. As well, the program includes solo piano performances by guest artists Lara Downes and Stewart Goodyear, playing in advance of their orchestral concerts during the Festival's final weekend. All seating is general admission, and the audience is invited to stay after the show to sip wine and meet the musicians. Inaugurated in 2018, Community Night has already become a beloved community tradition.

Susan B. - Saturday, August 8, 7pm

The second weekend of the Cabrillo Festival begins with works by Stacy Garrop, Paola Prestini, Dan Caputo, and the late Christopher Rouse.

The evening begins with For the Crime of Voting, a world premiere by celebrated Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop, whose music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. This new work for orchestra and spoken narration was commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival in commemoration of the centenary of women's suffrage in America. Incorporating the words of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, Garrop takes the audience thorough a journey of Anthony's arrest, trial, and conviction, after she illegally voted in the 1872 presidential election.

A second work celebrates the passing of the 19th Amendment: Paola Prestini's piano concerto Hindsight: Let Me See the Sun, which features trailblazing pianist Lara Downes. Prestini is an "imaginative composer" hailed the New York Times. Hindsight: Let Me See the Sun infuses folk music, virtuosity, harsh dissonance, and vocal simplicity. The concerto is about the human impulse to remain hopeful, and what it means to struggle towards clarity and light. The work is structured as a dialogue between piano and orchestra, at times contentious and at times unified.

Dan Caputo, a composer of instrumental and electronic music, explores the ways detailed aural textures and curious musical behaviors can elicit complex psychological responses. Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in Liminal, a work that aims to reflect the psychological behaviors people experience during transitional states.

Concluding the evening is a posthumous tribute to a beloved friend to Cabrillo and Festival favorite: Pulitzer-prize winning composer Christopher Rouse. In his prolific career, Rouse created a body of work perhaps unequaled in its emotional intensity. The New York Times called it "some of the most anguished, most memorable music around." Tonight Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in Rouse's final work, Symphony No. 6. Notable for its dark, expressive sound world, Symphony No. 6 was Rouse's only four-movement symphony. Rouse wrote of composing this work, "Now I hope to have lived a full enough life to have something to say that is worth perhaps a little of my listeners' time. To live one's life is, it sometimes seems, to spend all of one's time on a rollercoaster as we try adapting to the sudden, unexpected changes of direction our 'amusement park ride' subjects us. (Sometimes those changes aren't always very 'amusing.') Nonetheless, it is the very unpredictability of life that makes it so wonderful."

Truth to Power - Sunday, August 9, 7pm

Cabrillo Festival concludes another extraordinary season on Sunday, August 9, with works by John Harbison, Joan Tower, and Sean Shepherd.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison is an 81-year old American master who has yet to be featured at Cabrillo Festival - until now. Harbison's music is "rich with lyrical outpourings" (New York Times) that are filtered through his "rigorously crafted language" (Strings Magazine). The Great Gatsby Suite-adapted from his opera, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald-abounds in cakewalks, ragtime and jazz, and is scored for orchestra, including saxophones and banjo. Composed in 2007 the work receives its West Coast premiere tonight, with Harbison in residence.

Grammy Award-winning composer Joan Tower is celebrated for her bold and energetic music. A gifted pianist, she composed her Piano Concerto (Homage to Beethoven) in 1985, infusing it with references to three of her favorite Beethoven sonatas-the Tempest, the Waldstein and Op. 111. As Cabrillo celebrates the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, soloist Stewart Goodyear-a celebrated Beethoven interpreter-tackles Tower's virtuosic homage. His playing combines an "instinct for drama and aching lyricism with a sense of freshness, rhythmic vivacity and organic sweep (Gramophone)."

Closing out the program and Festival is Mass Appeals, a world premiere by Sean Shepherd commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival. An "exciting composer of the new American generation" (New York Times), Shepherd has earned wide acclaim and commissions from major ensembles and performers across the US and Europe. Steeping himself in the words and ideas of historic and contemporary public figures including Robespierre, Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman and Greta Thunberg, Shepherd's piece explores the profound impact of words, using only the language of music. Quoting music of their respective eras, Shepherd's Mass Appeals comments on the power of language and suggests the possibilities for change, transformation and peace.

Festival tickets range from $30-$75 for individual concerts and $310-350 for full subscriptions. Many events are free and open to the public. The public may access information on the Festival website at www.cabrillomusic.org or call (831) 426-6966; and are encouraged to join the mailing list to receive updates.

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