CREATIVE COAST
Gabriella Smith: Lost Coast (Gabriel Cabezas, amplified cello)
Wynton Marsalis: Concerto for Trumpet (Michael Sachs, trumpet) (West Coast Premiere)
Bora Yoon: PARHELION, Creative Lab (World Premiere | Festival Commission)
The second weekend of the Cabrillo Festival kicks off with the debut of the Cabrillo Festival’s Creative Lab featuring a world premiere by Bora Yoon, Wynton Marsalis’ West Coast premiere of his new Trumpet Concerto, and a powerful work by Gabriella Smith.
Gabriella Smith’s music is described as “high-voltage and wildly imaginative” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and “the coolest, most exciting, most inventive new voice I’ve heard in ages” (Musical America). She returns to the Cabrillo Festival to present Lost Coast, a cello concerto featuring the dynamic Gabriel Cabezas on amplified cello. This work immerses audiences in a performance inspired by the rugged beauty of California’s northern coastline while also expressing the grief, loss, rage, and fear experienced in the loss and displacement of those habitats from climate change.
In a recent addition to this concert, Wynton Marsalis‘ West Coast Premiere of his new Trumpet Concerto takes listeners on a journey through emotions. It opens with a powerful fanfare highlighting the trumpet’s strength with accomplished soloist Michael Sachs leading the way. It then transitions to a lyrical duet with the oboe. The other movements explore Afro-Hispanic influences, and then delving into the blues, showcasing the roots of American music. This blend of styles reflects the 2024 Season’s theme of music as a force for connection and movement.
The Cabrillo Festival unveils the Creative Lab, a new project that gives curatorial control to the composer, empowering them to rethink the orchestral experience. In its inaugural year Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra in a world premiere by Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist Bora Yoon. The composer will realize this creative freedom through spatial placement of the orchestra, technology, and production design. Entitled PARHELION, this immersive sonic experience will unfold within the distinctive architecture of Santa Cruz’s Civic Auditorium. Collaborating with Interval Studios and Visual Endeavors for multimedia and design, and produced by Annie March of Sozo Impact, Yoon’s composition defies conventional boundaries, immersing listeners in a captivating fusion of sound and light. Drawing inspiration from time, seasons, and the concept of cycles, Yoon’s innovative structure incorporates movements by orchestral players to generate dynamic projections and interactive graphics
Featured Artists
Gabriel Cabezas, Amplified Cello
Cellist Gabriel Cabezas is a true 21st century musician. Named one of “23 Composers and Performers to Watch in ’23” by the Washington Post, he is a prolific and sought-after soloist and collaborator, as comfortable interpreting new works as he is with the pillar scores of the cello repertoire.
Gabriel has appeared with America’s finest symphony orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, and has premiered dozens of new works by some of the most acclaimed composers working today.
He recently released Lost Coast, a dynamic album of original music composed by Gabriella Smith inspired by her reflections on climate change, which she has seen devastate her home state of California. The album was named one of NPR Music’s “Favorite Albums Of 2021” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times.
Gabriel premiered the concerto Lost Coast, reimagined by the composer as a daring work for solo cello and orchestra, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel in May 2023. Further performances of Lost Coast in the 2024-25 season include an appearance at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music with music director Cristian Macelaru, and performances with the New York Philharmonic led by John Adams.
In 2016, Gabriel received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a career grant awarded to extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians, who, early in their professional career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and ongoing commitment to leadership. Gabriel studied at the Curtis Institute of Music under Carter Brey.
Michael Sachs, Trumpet
Michael Sachs joined The Cleveland Orchestra as Principal Trumpet in 1988. Celebrating his 36th season with the orchestra, Michael is the longest-serving Principal Trumpet in the history of The Cleveland Orchestra. Mr. Sachs has been frequently featured as soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra. Highlights include the world premieres of Wynton Marsalis’ “Concerto for Trumpet,” John Williams’ “Concerto for Trumpet,” Michael Hersch’s “Night Pieces,” Matthias Pintscher’s “Chute d’Etoiles,” and the United States premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s “Requiem,” as well as solo appearances at the Lucerne Festival, Salzburg Festival, and Carnegie Hall.
Starting in the Fall of 2024, Michael Sachs will be joining the Trumpet faculty at The Curtis Institute of Music. From 1988-2023, he served as Chair of the Brass Division and Head of the Trumpet Department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Since 2015, Michael Sachs serves each summer as Music Director of Strings Music Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He is the author of numerous books including Daily Fundamentals for the Trumpet and The Orchestral Trumpet. Mr. Sachs was extensively involved in the planning of the National Brass Ensemble concert, recording, and DVD project for June 2014 involving music of Gabrieli and a new work by John Williams.
Prior to joining The Cleveland Orchestra, Mr. Sachs was a member of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, where he also served on the faculty of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.
Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Sachs attended UCLA, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History before attending The Juilliard School of Music. His former teachers include Mark Gould, Anthony Plog, and James Stamp.
Composers
Bora Yoon
Bora Yoon is a Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice, and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries to formulate a storytelling through music, movement, and sound. Called “Exquisite” by The New York Times, Yoon has been featured on the front-page of the Wall-Street Journal, WIRE magazine, TED, and the National Endowment for the Arts podcast. Through her unusual instruments and everyday found objects as music, she evokes what George Lewis describes as “a kind of sonic memory garden” using voice, viola, Tibetan singing bowls, vocoder, Bible pages, bike bells, turntable, walkie-talkies, chimes, water, and electronics.
As a performer/composer, Yoon has presented her work around the globe at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Visiones Sonoras (Mexico), Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Nam Jun Paik Museum (South Korea), PROTOTYPE Opera Theater Now Festival — and served as artist in residence with the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), The Hermitage, and TED Fellows.
As a composer, she has been commissioned by So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Voices of Ascension Chorus and Orchestra with select scores published by Boosey & Hawkes, Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA), and SozoMart, and recordings distributed by Innova Recordings, Naxos, and Journal of Popular Noise.
Yoon’s music has provided the live score for Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle and additional film score for Apple TV+’s Pachinko. Her music has been awarded by the New York Foundation of the Arts (Music/Sound), Foundation for Contemporary Art, Asian American Arts Alliance, Princeton University, Fromm Foundation at Harvard Music, Barlow Endowment, Sorel Organization, and Opera America.
Gabriella Smith
Gabriella Smith is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (LA Times), her music “exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (NY Times).
Lost Coast, a concerto for cello and orchestra, written for her longtime collaborator Gabriel Cabezas, received its world premiere in May 2023 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. This work joins her organ concerto, Breathing Forests, written for James McVinnie also premiered by the LA Phil, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Other current projects include a large-scale work for Kronos Quartet, commissioned in celebration of their 50th anniversary season, and an album-length work for yMusic featuring underwater field recordings. In December 2023, her work Tumblebird Contrails was performed on the Nobel Prize Concert by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Her first full-length album, titled Lost Coast, was recorded with Gabriel Cabezas and producer Nadia Sirota at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland and named one of NPR Music’s “26 Favorite Albums Of 2021” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times. Gabriel and Gabriella, as a cello-violin-voice-electronics duo, have performed together around the world, including in Reykjavík, New York City, and Paris.
Gabriella grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area playing and writing music, hiking, backpacking, and volunteering on a songbird research project.
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis is a world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and a leading advocate of American culture. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961, he is the son of jazz pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis, Jr. Wynton started practicing trumpet at age 6. As a child, he played in New Orleans traditional marching bands, funk groups, concert bands, symphonic orchestras, and jazz ensembles. Just one year after moving to New York City to attend The Juilliard School at age 17, Marsalis joined the legendary Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers.
In 1981, Marsalis formed a quintet and began touring worldwide—and he hasn’t stopped since. He has rekindled widespread international interest in jazz over the past four decades vis-à-vis performances, recordings, educational programs, books, curricula, and relentless public advocacy.
Marsalis is inspired to experiment in an ever-widening palette of forms, constituting some of the most advanced thinking in modern jazz and in American music on the broad scale. His body of original work includes (but is not limited to) 600 songs and movements, 11 dance scores, 13 suites, four symphonies, two chamber pieces, two string quartets, a jazz oratorio, a fanfare, and concertos for violin, tuba and most recently, trumpet.
Marsalis was appointed Messenger of Peace by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (2001), awarded The National Medal of Arts (2005), and The National Medal of Humanities (2016). In 2009, France bestowed him with the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; on his 62nd birthday in October 2023, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Music—Japan’s most prestigious prize for the arts. He holds honorary doctorates from 41 of America’s top academic institutions.
Wynton Marsalis’ core beliefs are based on jazz fundamentals: freedom and individual creativity (improvisation); collective action and good manners (swing); acceptance, gratitude and resilience (the blues). Marsalis believes that music has the power to elevate our quality of life and lead us to a higher level of consciousness.
Marsalis presently serves as Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Director of Jazz Studies at The Juilliard School, and President of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.
Program Notes
Lost Coast (2023)
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Lost Coast is inspired by a five-day solo backpacking trip I took on the Lost Coast Trail, a surprisingly remote section of the Northern California coastline. It’s a wild, dramatic landscape of jagged precipices and stomach-turning drops overlooking ferocious, pounding surf. The area is so rugged that the Pacific Coast Highway had to be diverted 100 miles inland because the land was too riddled with cliffs to build on. Trail conditions were dubious, with washouts and sections so overgrown I had to fight my way through the coastal scrub. Some sections were so steep I had to grab hold of the coyote bush to pull myself up short slopes. In five days, I only encountered two other people on the trail.
With the climate crisis becoming an increasing part of our daily lives and little to no progress slowing the emissions of greenhouse gasses, the title Lost Coast has taken on a secondary meaning for me. The piece is a raw emotional expression of the grief, loss, rage, and fear experienced as a result of climate change—as well as the joy, beauty, and wonder I have felt in the world’s last wild places and the joy and hope in getting to work on climate solutions.
—Gabriella Smith
Trumpet Concerto (2023)
Wynton Marsalis (b.1961)
[West Coast Premiere]
When Michael Sachs approached me with the idea of writing a trumpet concerto for him and the orchestra, I was honored. We are of the same generation and share many common experiences. At 26, he became principal of this revered orchestra. His appointment was inspirational for all of us, showing that it was possible for an important new voice to emerge and extend the legacy of American orchestral trumpet playing at the highest level.
Through the process writing this piece, Michael and I have gone off subject to converse for hours with unforced enthusiasm about all the great teachers we’ve had, the august masters we love, the fantastic younger players we encounter, and ultimately, about what we continue to learn from our instrument. I want this concerto to enable Michael to convey the broad depth of feeling and joy of defying technical limitations that define our legacy as trumpeters.
The first movement begins with the blaring trumpeting of an elephant and a couple of big footsteps in response. A brash heroic fanfare and its echo ride the tension between triple and duple rhythms and loud and soft tones. The trumpet is partnered with timpani as it is in so many classical symphonies. A lyrical minor 7th phrase and its repeated triplet response provides a contrasting counter theme. We are soon introduced to some magical elements, like alternate fingerings and flutters and growls that give added flavor to our palette of expression. These elements will be developed throughout the piece.
The second movement is about a love feeling. In this ballad, trumpet is partnered with oboe. The arpeggiated minor 7th lyrical phrase from the first movement is expanded into a fully developed strain and the fanfare triplets are transformed through higher registration and intention to evoke the youthful romanticism of doo wop. We continue in unabashed, openly romantic style of instrumental singing gifted to the world by Louis Armstrong and subsequently developed by many great trumpeters of all styles.
The solitary yet razor-sharp attack of the Spanish-inflected trumpet is a definitive aspect of the international trumpet sound. Movement three addresses the music of the Afro-Hispanic diaspora and begins with a recasting of the first movement main theme. It is developed through many different virtuosic variations in an alternating 2-3 feel. We proceed into a Spanish Bolero with plucked, bowed, and bounced strings over and under which trumpet and bassoon converse. Woodwind calls and responses lead us into a modern Habanera in 5/4, and the trumpet sings with an accompanying retinue of French Horn counterlines. In the end, those Horns chant “Aum” as trumpet incants a prayer-cadenza that connects us to our ceremonial role as ambassadors to the afterlife (still signified by buglers’ solemn playing of Taps at the passing of soldiers).
The fourth movement is blues. Call and response is the principal mode of blues communication as it is also the very definition of concerto. We begin with the introspection of a single note drone and woodwinds weaving pentatonic-based melodies through the various registers. The subject is once again that lyrical minor 7th secondary theme of the first movement split between trumpet, clarinet and bass clarinet, soon to be trumpet and English horn. A middle section features church evocations and the tension between secular and sacred that the blues always brings. In this iteration, the trombones and French horns preach a serious sermon, while the trumpet is that jokester always playing around during service. Trumpet answers the seriousness of preaching trombones and French Horns with playful vocalisms over the two-beat dance groove of a country string band. The preaching becomes more serious while the trumpeter triples down on irreverence. In the end, the transcendence of seriousness is acknowledged with an open brass chorale. We return to the lonesome blues with an impassive introspection that walks the pentatonic road connecting East to West and ends with a solitary violin drone with woodwinds and muted trombone weaving dispassionate colors.
The fifth movement is a brief lyrical waltz inspired by the legacy of French trumpet playing. Our generation of American trumpet players was heavily influenced by the great Maurice André and beloved Pierre Thibaud. We grew up practicing out of the Arban and Charlier books, we played characteristic French concert pieces by Tomasi and Jolivet and all types of test pieces from the Paris Conservatory library. This is a quirky, rubato three-way conversation with contrapuntal voices weaving in and out of tempo, register, timbre and key to create an impressionistic tapestry.
The sixth movement focuses on the magical ‘joker/trickster’ element that has been an undertone of the entire piece. Virtuosity itself has the conjuring power of making the impossible seem easy, like the rule-defying, cunning insights of Master Juba, Anansi, Br’er Rabbit, Pulcinella, the Coyote, or any of the many tricksters that inhabit universal myth. Trumpet players like to defy authority. We like to play games and pranks. This movement opens the percussion toolbox to create mayhem and barely controlled chaos whilst the trumpet dances through it all. It develops themes from the other movements and is rooted in a circle dance groove from the Jewish tradition of Eastern Europe. Things build up and break down and build up again and again, but when all is said and done, we end up back in the jungle where that old elephant breaks loose. There they go, making all kinds of noise. And with that final fanfare, the elephant saunters away, and we realize that it all began when she first broke loose.
— Wynton Marsalis
PARHELION (2024)
Bora Yoon (b. 1980)
[World Premiere | Festival Commission]
Commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music with generous support from Robert and Caroyln Levering.
Featuring text by Bora Yoon and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
PARHELION is a symphonic multimedia work that traverses through many atmospheric worlds — split into five movements to create a ring cycle of atmosphere and weather:
I.Lux (Light)
II.Ventus (Wind)
III.Aquarum (Water)
IV.Viscera (Matter)
V.Celestis (Heavens)
This work is inspired by light artist James Turrell’s Sky Space installations and subtle movements of light and color that take place at the time of greatest change in light, sunset, and sunrise. Sonically and aesthetically, an immersive score of sound design juxtaposes the symphonic palette and the amplified small sounds of nature, transformed objects, and voice to feature the ultimate telescoping of sound––from the tiniest of sound worlds to the largest oceans of sound. This work is an amalgam of my work as a spatial audio surround-sound artist, a symphonic composer, and the narrative solo multimedia composer/performer that I explore in my duo work with live visualist Joshue Ott.
A parhelion is an optical phenomenon and spherical glow around the sun, created from crystalline moisture in the air, viewed at a particular angle. Through the colors, timbres, and textures of the orchestra, PARHELION traces an atmospheric journey from the heavens to the earth, to water and matter, and back out into the heavens. Dramaturgically, this is a metaphysical journey of the sun’s path from sunset to dawn—with the concentricity of the Hero’s Journey, the underworld before its dawn, molting and breaking anew in rebirth and regeneration.
This work was created for the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Building sensory sound worlds at the intersection of music and architecture, PARHELION offers both an inward and outward sonic meditation, and celebration of the Cabrillo Festival and what new music for the symphonic palette can be. The atmospheric aesthetic is inspired by the majestic and effervescent coasts of Santa Cruz, witnessing the slow cast of colors, shift of lighting, visual oscillations of the lighthouses and synergistic rhythm of the ocean waves. Transformed into music, this work captures these moments, pulsations of light frequencies, distances and proximities, creating a sense of the spatial and vast nature of the cosmos, and our perceptions of inner and outer space.
– Bora Yoon