Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music presents Béla Fleck and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra
2014-08-01
Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
307 Church St, Santa Cruz, CA
8:00 PM, Friday, August 1, 2014

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Dylan Mattingly: Sky Madrigal [world premiere]

Béla Fleck: The Impostor Concerto [west coast premiere] (featuring Béla Fleck, banjo)

Andrew Norman: Play [west coast premiere]

[8:09 PM tuning, lights down, opening announcements from Marin and Dylan]

1. [8:17 PM] Dylan Mattingly (b. 1991): Sky Madrigal (2014, world premiere)
   [work ends 8:31 PM]

[8:35 PM tuning, remarks from Marin and Andrew]

Andrew Norman (b. 1979): Play (2014, west coast premiere)

1. [8:39 PM] Level One
2. [8:50 PM] Level Two
3. [9:05 PM] Level Three
   [work ends 9:16; applause a bit, set ends 9:18 PM, out doors ASAP for fresh air!]

[9:49 PM lights down, tuning]

Béla Fleck (b. 1958): The Impostor Concerto, (2011, west coast premiere)
featuring Béla Fleck: banjo.

1. [9:50 PM] Infiltration
2. [10:03 PM] Integration
3. [10:14 PM] Truth Revealed
   [set ends 10:27 PM, applause a few minutes]
    
   Encore
4. [10:29 PM] Béla: Solo variations on the Ballad of Jed Clampett (Theme from Beverly Hillbillies)
   [show ends 11:32 PM, more applause, then off and out!]

• Marin Alsop: conductor, music director.
• Béla Fleck: banjo;
• Cabrillo Festival Orchestra

Despite some atypical work stress, everything came together nicely today. We hit the road close to 2 PM – a little later than hoped for – and managed to cruise nicely until traffic thickened up at the Hwy 880/101 interchange in San Jose. From there, things went from bad to worse, and we simply crawled along from the Hwy 17/85 interchange on past the Lexington reservoir. Somehow, things shook loose as we continued to climb to the summit, and the roll down into Santa Cruz was pretty smooth until traffic locked up again at the Hwy 17/1 interchange. Originally, we'd planned to head down to the beach, but with our progress limited to a couple cars per light, we eventually decided to bail out of the crush and head over to the Pacific Garden Mall.

The next hour or two was easily filled as we shopped and strolled the mall, stopping for coffee and kitchen supplies among other things. TC and Kaoru met us for dinner at 99 Bottles, where I enjoyed a Deschutes XPA on nitro – mm, smoooth! – and a chicken sandwich, followed by a Brouwerij Bockor Cuvee des Jacobins Rouge – a sour red ale – as a sort of anti-dessert in a glass.

Soon enough it was time to amble over to the Civic Auditorium for tonight's main event. The weather had cooled nicely, so it wasn't too hot in our dressy clothes, but even so, it was nicer to hang out with the crowd on Church Street in front of the venue than to press inside where the air was humid and heavy from the lack of circulation. Once we heard the second bell, we finally motivated and made our way in to our seats on the floor. As expected, it was a tight fit, and being situated in the fourth row behind a basketball team's worth of giants, we couldn't really see all the many of the performers. On the other hand, the sound there was very good, and the audience surrounding us was exceptionally well-behaved. Thanks folks!

Show wise, I thought the opening piece was excellent, and the follow-up merely good. Might have seemed interesting to the composer, but for me, it was a little too long and rambling, and I didn't particularly feel like it was worth three movements of my time. I was all the more surprised to see that it was quarter past nine by the time the set ended … uh-oh, gonna be a late evening!

So I jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and racing outside for relief … far too stuffy to stay inside the ole' sweatbox if I didn't have too. By this time the fog had blown in, but conditions were simply cool … really, quite a nice night for hanging out and talking about the show. Some half hour later, they herded us back in for the main event, Béla's Banjo Concerto. I was psyched to hear it, and hoping to be able to see him playing too, but Goliath in front of me was far too interested, and kept tilting his gigantic head across my field of view, so I had to be content with occasional glimpses of a hand on the fretboard, or the top of Béla's head … or look elsewhere, or just retreat within the cozy headspace between my ears. Frustrating, but not the end of the world…

How'd it go? Nicely! The orchestra was certainly well-prepared, and the writing contained lots of interesting bits that kept grabbing at my attention. I thought Béla did a pretty good job overall – his work is unlikely to join the regular classical canon, but it was a fun listen, and I guess I'd like to hear it again sometime in the future. Criticism? Well sure, I could have been listening analytically and compiling a list of complaints (and I bet that plenty of folks were listening that way), but I was trying to be open-eared about it, so I'll limit my complaints to noting that the piece kinda jumped about stylistically rather than staying focused on any particular sound style. That is, it presented a range of sounds from both the banjo and orchestra, kind of like creating a patchwork quilt out of random scraps. So to me, the listener's journey had a lot of, moments like “ah-hah! now it's ragtime!” or “ooh, we're evoking a 40's swing now” and so on. Stylistically diverse.

Program Notes

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