Riffs & Refrains/Cabrillo Festival/Maestra Alsop/Bharat Chandra August 9, 2008

The definition of "thrilling": being 19 years old and having Marin Alsop conduct the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in your newest work, presented on the same program as your mentor John Adams! And so goes the life of Matthew Cmiel, a Bay Area composer/performer who grew up coming to the Cabrillo Festival and was invited by Alsop to write an orchestral work to receive its World Premiere tonight. In titling this concert opener, Cmiel quotes Alsop's own sage advice to him, Sneak in a Window-a direction to seize whatever openings you can to make your dreams come true.

Next, the Festival's own principal clarinetist Bharat Chandra, praised for his "superb phrasing and creamy tone," takes center stage as soloist for the U.S. Premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage's Riffs and Refrains, a work said to "exploit the full range and color of the instrument."

Then John Corigliano's The Mannheim Rocket takes us on an imaginary journey to the heavens and back atop an 18th century wedding-cake-rocket commandeered by the great Baron Von Munchausen.

The concert closes with the West Coast Premiere of John Adams' new Doctor Atomic Symphony, a 25-minute, one-movement symphonic score adapted by the composer from his 2005 opera about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. This is a piece considered by some critics to be "a significant leap forward for Adams as a composer." The work includes passages from the overture, Oppenheimer's Baudelaire soliloquy, the electrical storm music, "Batter my heart," and the culminating "Countdown" music. And according to the New York Times "invites you to hear the elusive music-driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares-on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context." An evocative and explosive evening awaits!

$26-41.

Official Website: http://www.cabrillomusic.org