2011 Cabrillo Festival To Feature Works by Clyne, Daugherty, Kats-Chernin, MacMillan, and Rouse

(July 2011)

Festival Features Three U.S. Premieres and Three West Coast Premieres

For nearly half a century, California's Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has presented the newest and most innovative creations by established and emerging composers. This summer's festival, July 31–August 14, 2011, is the 20th under the leadership of Marin Alsop, and will feature new works by Boosey & Hawkes's composers Anna Clyne, Michael Daugherty, Elena Kats-Chernin, James MacMillan, and Christopher Rouse, including three U.S. premieres and three west coast premieres. Complete information about all the performances at this year's Cabrillo Festival can be here found here.

The first concert featuring Boosey & Hawkes's works is August 5, with two west coast premieres of pieces by Christopher Rouse and James MacMillan. First performed in February 2010, Rouse's Odna Zhizn (A Life) (2009) is inspired by a close friend of Russian ancestry. Much of the musical material in the work is constructed from words and phrases that have been symbolically translated into notes and rhythms, a compositional technique found in many of Rouse's works. Following its world premiere, the New York Times noted: "the real action is in the huge percussion array, which not only contributes shimmering effects and underpins the brass bursts, but also provides the connective tissue between the string and wind writing."

MacMillan's Piano Concerto No. 3, The Mysteries of Light (2007-08) premiered this past April with soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and the west coast premiere will feature Thibaudet again performing MacMillan's five-movement work. In this concerto, the composer aimed "to revive the ancient practice of writing based on the structure of the rosary." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune hailed the work as "a wild ride, overflowing with color." Watch videos of MacMillan discussing Piano Concerto No. 3 here.

The following evening, August 6, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra will present the U.S. premiere of Re-collecting ASTORoids (2009) by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. Composed as a tribute to Argentinian Tango Nuevo master Astor Piazzolla, this orchestral suite is interlaced with elements of the tango and film-noir music. Kats-Chernin states in her program notes "my piece uses some of Piazzolla's unusual harmonic turns, with clear nods to composers that I hear in his music, as diverse as Bach and Legrand."

On August 11, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra will perform two corresponding works by British-born, American-based composer Anna Clyne: her arrangement of one Benjamin Britten's earliest works, A Hymn to the Virgin (1930, rev. 1934, arr. 2010), followed by her companion piece Lady Flow'r (2010), both U.S. premieres. Clyne's string ensemble piece Within Her Arms (2008-09) will be performed on the festival's final night, August 14. Referring to text by Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and dedicated to her mother, this elegiac work was first premiered in 2009 and was praised by both the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.

Michael Daugherty puts the electric guitar front and center in his concerto Gee's Bend (2009), which receives its west coast premiere on August 13 in a performance featuring soloist D.J. Sparr. Inspired by an Alabama town of the same name, Gee's Bend showcases Daugherty's signature American musical style. As the composers writes, "my composition is a patchwork of various crosscurrents: I intertwine American guitar rock and southern folk music with contemporary classical music to create a colorful and unique tapestry of sound."

> To view scores of these works, please click here.
> For more information and to purchase tickets to the 2011 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, please click here.

Photo credits: Alsop - Kym Thomson, Clyne - Todd Rosenberg, Kats-Chernin - Bridget Elliot, MacMillan - Philip Gatward, Rouse - Jeffrey Herman

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