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Cabrillo Music Festival Concert 7/29
July 29, 2022 @ 8:00 pm
Cabrillo Music Festival Concert at the Civic Auditorium.
THE END OF RAIN
Jessie Montgomery: Soul Force (WCP)
Gabriela Lena Frank: Contested Eden (WP | Festival Commission)
Scott Ordway: The End of Rain (Roomful of Teeth, vocal ensemble) (WP | Festival Commission)
Our 60th anniversary season opens tonight as we return to the live concert stage with two world premiere commissions and one west coast premiere! Jessie Montgomery says her work, Soul Force, “attempts to portray the notion of a voice that struggles to be heard beyond the shackles of oppression. The music takes on the form of a march which begins with a single voice and gains mass as it rises to a triumphant goal.” The title is drawn from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the piece draws on elements of popular African-American musical styles such as big-band jazz, funk, hip-hop and R+B.
Considered one of the most significant women composers in history (Washington Post), Bay Area composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank was commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival in 2021 to write a work that reflects on wildfires and climate crisis. Frank’s Contested Eden proved a deeply personal and compelling journey for the composer. The work is composed of an original secular psalm, Canto para California, that forms an intimate lyrical first movement performed by string quartet, followed by a second movement centered around the concept of in extremis, Latin for “in extreme circumstances,” performed by the full orchestra.
Santa Cruz-born composer and multimedia artist Scott Ordway collected stories from more than 200 members of the public who shared their individual experiences of wildfire and drought. These stories and words have been translated into a musical form “in an attempt to better understand how we feel about our evolving relationship to place, home, and security in a changing world.” The End of Rain is a 40-minute multimedia work written for the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, accompanied by documentary photography by Ordway, and receiving its world premiere performance tonight in Santa Cruz.
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