concert review: Cabrillo Festival

Here's my latest.

This was a tricky review assignment, because the Cabrillo Festival this year, unlike Menlo, is entirely online. My editor asked me to cover the two commissioned works for orchestras receiving their premieres here. At least, with the concerts being left up afterwards, I could relisten to them several times, including with the video off so that I could concentrate on just the music.

I liked the music just fine, and complimented its virtues in the review. In particular, they avoided the problem in much recent music of saying what it has to say in ten minutes and then going on for another ten minutes with nothing to say.

But then you might say: wait a minute. With the entire orchestra's musicians each playing separately, with nothing but a click track and some notes for additional guidance, and then put together by an audio engineer - and how the heck did he manage to get something coherent out of that; his comments in the Q&A afterwards didn't even begin to address that question - how does it sound? How well does an orchestra play without a conductor or even each other around? (So-called conductor-less orchestras work out extensively in rehearsal.) How does the interpretive flow come out? Are they even together?

And I didn't address that matter because, frankly, I don't know. I can't really judge those matters in music I'm unfamiliar with, however fine my judgment may be in works I know well. I learned that lesson from my encounters in the 1970s with recordings by a pianist who'd re-emerged from decades-long obscurity and became a cult favorite for a while, though he was immensely controversial for an eccentric and individual performing style. His name was Ervin Nyiregyházi. He announced his return to the field with a double-album of pieces by Liszt. I listened to it, but I don't know Liszt's piano music very well. It sounded perfectly ordinary to me. Then Nyiregyházi released another record, including pieces by Grieg and Tchaikovsky that I did know. Oh, now I could hear his performing style, clear as anything. Yep, it was really eccentric. What's more, now that I knew what to listen for, I could detect it in the Liszt as well.

So that taught me a lot, including not to judge Cabrillo's method of putting its orchestra together until I can do so fairly. I stuck to the music. I know earlier works by both composers, so that I could judge.