concert review: Cabrillo Festival

[calimac]

For the final concert, chronologically, of the flood that's kept me occupied for the last three weeks - I have one more review coming later, of a slightly earlier event - my editor sent me to the Cabrillo Festival finale, at Mission San Juan Bautista, pretty much because I'm the furthest south reviewer, the only one for whom driving to SJB isn't much of a burden. It's about an hour from here if there's no traffic, but there was.

My first thought was, "Ugh, the Mission's hard benches." But they weren't much of a problem this time. My second thought was, "Ugh, Magnus Lindberg's clarinet concerto," but that turned out not to be much of a problem either.

The concert was at 4 p.m. (there's an evening repeat, but I had to be back by then) and I arrived about 1:30, figuring to have a leisurely late lunch in one of the tiny backwater town's 3 or 4 peaceful backwater restaurants. Not a chance. Sometime since the last time I've done a concert at the Mission, they've set up a street fair in SJB on Cabrillo Sunday. Not like one of the art festivals we get further north, this was table after table, block after block, of junk from people's attics. Not antiques or anything like that, just junk. Nevertheless it was hugely popular, and the town was packed. So were the restaurants. It was after 2 before I'd parked, surveyed the scene, and determined that there was no booth food worth having, so I had to run back to Gilroy for a quick snack instead.

Short version of the review: I didn't exactly like any of the music, but it all impressed the heck out of me.

On the long walk back to the car, I overheard a man behind me note to his partner that he'd attended an organ recital from the Carmel Bach Festival at the Carmel Mission just a couple weeks before, so that was two mission concerts in short order. I turned around and said, "Have you ever been to a concert at Mission Santa Clara?" He said no, but I have, and I've been to concerts at Mission San Jose, too. He, in turn, reminded me of Holy Cross in Santa Cruz (ta da, same name), which might count as it's the successor church of a mission. So we've been to concerts in five of them, and I've been to a wedding in a sixth. That puts us in a good missionary position. Only 15 to go.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised to see you calling Lindberg a modernist. How would you define the term?

Those weird sounds you're referring to in the clarinet concerto are bird call imitations.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

See my comment to Jeff in the review. A modernist, among today's composers, is one whose compositional ethos descends directly from one variety or another of early-to-mid 20C modernism, and doesn't take the entirely different ethos of the varieties of postmodernism. The difference seems to me stark - I mentioned a full-bore encounter with it here. Lindberg's more recent music, what I've heard of it, is moving in a postmodern direction, but 1) he had not got far enough on it in the clarinet concerto even to be said to have started on the journey, and 2) I'm not yet convinced that what he's writing now really is postmodernist and not a modernist speaking a foreign language, like David Del Tredici.

Not sure what "weird sounds" you're referring to. I didn't use the phrase. If you mean Jonason's flutter-tongue passages, sure, but I didn't consider those weird. If you mean the "ugly and grotesque" sounds from Kriikku's recording, those ain't no birds.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

That's a very personal and idiosyncratic definition of modernism; I don't think I have ever seen the term used as you're using it. Also, to my ear Lindberg's music, and I've heard a lot of it, is firmly in the non-modernist Finnish tradition.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don['t see why you would say that. A 20C Romantic, for instance, is a composer whose ethos derives directly from 19C Romanticism, without the intervention of the modernist revolutions of the 1890-1920 period, like Rachmaninoff. Same thing applies for other traditions. I didn't specify a specific strain of modernism, and if that concerto isn't modernist, nothing is. Insofar as Sibelius is "non-modernist" (and in the context of modernism vs. postmodernism, he most certainly is not, regardless of what terms you want to use to chop up varieties of modernism), that strain lapsed a long time ago, and while I can hear it in Rautavaara and Sallinen, it's as absent from earlier Lindberg as it is from Kokkonen and Segerstam.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Taking it to my blog to seek wider perspective.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, you probably won't be getting any response there from me, because the last few times I've tried to post comments on your blog, all three of my browsers have given me error messages.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

That is weird; no one else is reporting such issues.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

The fact that it's three different browsers involved suggests an authentication or other account-related issue of some kind.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. I just tried writing a comment using my Google account under my real name, since that's what you (quite properly in this case) cited me as, and I got the same error message that I get when I post using OpenID for LJ, which has caused me endless trouble in the past too.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Foolishly, I didn't save the text before trying to post, and now it's gone, but it was something like this:

Modernism comes in multiple forms; "high modernism" (distinguished by that adjective) is just one, although one of its salient characteristics is a refusal to admit the existence of any others. I can't believe in a definition of modernism that excludes, say, Richard Strauss, though he doesn't fit your description. In the current context, I see the fundamental divide as between postmodernists, who accept, or at least start from the premises of, a compositional ethos that hardly existed, a few eccentrics aside, before 1960 (and of which stasis is just the most prominent, though not the only or even an essential, element), and modernists, who are those who sail on in one of the traditions of the earlier 20C modernists, as if that revolution never happened - the same way that, in an earlier time, Rachmaninoff was a Romantic who sailed on in the tradition of the 19C Romantics as if the revolutions of the 1890-1920 period never happened.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

In response to Tom DePlonty's comment, I'd say that the music world had the same argument over numerous other terms borrowed from the visual arts, including "minimalism" (a term which most of the relevant composers don't like), "Impressionism" (a term Debussy didn't like), and even "Baroque" (and I'm guessing that's a term J.S. Bach wouldn't have liked).

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I've made some changes to commenting on my blog, so I hope future comment attempts will work for you. Three others reported issues as well.

Would you like me to post the above comments as "David Bratman sends the following comments:"?