BECOMING
Conducted by Cristian Măcelaru
Lou Harrison: Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra (Justin Bruns, Violin)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: CATAMORPHOSIS (West Coast Premiere)
Darian Donovan Thomas: Flowercloud, Creative Lab (World Premiere | Festival Commission)
The second weekend of the Cabrillo Festival welcomes the return of Maestro Măcelaru with a program featuring the Cabrillo Festival’s second Creative Lab with a world premiere by Darian Donovan Thomas, a tribute to the enduring legacy of Festival Co-Founder Lou Harrison, and a powerful work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
A celebration of Pride would not be complete without Festival co-founder, Lou Harrison. His Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra stands as one of the most memorable concerti ever composed by an American. Lou’s spirit of bold activism, innovation, and his courage to live authentically is a legacy we will honor in this season and every season of our Festival. This vibrant masterpiece for violin and five percussionists will feature Festival concertmaster, Justin Bruns.
The core inspiration behind Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s CATAMORPHOSIS is our fragile relationship with our planet. The aura of the piece is characterized by an orbiting vortex of emotions and the intensity that comes with the realization that if things do not change, we risk utter destruction–catastrophe. The work is driven by the tension between various polar forces–power and fragility, hope and despair, preservation and destruction.
The Cabrillo Festival brings back the Creative Lab for a second year, a project that gives curatorial control to the composer, empowering them to reimagine the orchestral experience. Măcelaru leads the Festival Orchestra world premiere by genre-exploding, multi-instrumentalist Darian Donovan Thomas. This rapidly ascending composer has been given wide latitude through the Creative Lab to collaborate with the orchestra and utilize the venue and production team to create an entire experience. The work is dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Santa Cruz LGBTQIA Pride and will explore the process of coming out–discovering self, love, and community.
Featured Artists
Justin Bruns, Violin
For two decades, Justin Bruns has loved every moment of being a part of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and has had the honor of serving as Concertmaster since 2012. He is Associate Concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Concertmaster of the Bellingham Music Festival, and an Artist Affiliate of Emory University. This past season, he made guest appearances as Concertmaster with the North Carolina Symphony and Tucson Symphony Orchestra, as well as Principal Second with the Houston Symphony. Earlier in the summer, Bruns was featured as a soloist with the ASO in works by John Williams, and performed chamber music with Anne-Marie McDermott at Bravo! Vail, and was a guest Concertmaster for Sinfónica de Minería in Mexico City and Vail.
An active chamber musician, Bruns appeared in the 24/25 season with the Atlanta Chamber Players, the Georgian Chamber Players, and at the Jackson Hole Chamber Music Winter Festival. Several of his performances from the ASO Chamber Music Series were featured on Performance Today. Previous highlights include a Carnegie Hall debut, and residences at the Savannah and San Miguel Chamber Music Festivals.
As a teacher, Bruns has worked with students at National Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Music in the Mountains Festival, NTSO Festival (Taiwan), as an orchestra mentor at the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University, and as advisor and faculty of the Talent Development Program. Bruns began his own violin lessons at age three, studied at the University of Michigan and Rice University, but hasn’t stopped learning yet.
Composers
Darian Donovan Thomas
“Bright, fresh and, in the best sense, innocent.” —Steve Reich
“… from a taut murmur to a roaring shout, a raw, passionately vulnerable experience.” —Jeremy Reynolds, New Sounds
“Exuberant violin playing… a loud, sometimes overwhelming, yet always vivid, wash of harmony.” —Vanessa Ague, The Road to Sound
Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist Darian Donovan Thomas was born in San Antonio, Texas, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He is interested in combining genres and mediums into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre—this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive.
Darian has been commissioned and premiered by Jennifer Koh, Wild Up, Ensemble Signal, Adam Tendler, So Percussion, ~Nois Quartet, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, among others around the world.
These days, you can find Darian performing anywhere from a salon house show to grungy basements to formal concert halls. He has toured with Moses Sumney, appearing on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ColorsxStudios, performed in three Tiny Desk concerts with critically acclaimed artists Arooj Aftab, Balun, and Wild Up, and has toured internationally from Iceland with Apartment Sessions to Saudi Arabia with Arooj—performing at Coachella and Glastonbury festival along the way.
In NYC alone, he has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Appolo Theater, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The Met Museum, and The Noguchi Museum.
He presently performs with Arooj Aftab, Balun, Wild Up, MEDIAQUEER, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and occasionally with Ensemble Signal and Bang On A Can. You can also find him performing his “Safe Space” solo set at different performance spaces and festivals around the country.
Darian has been a resident at Marfa Ballroom, Denniston Hill, New Amsterdam Records Composer Lab Fellow, So Percussion Summer Institute Composer Fellow, Infinite Palette composer-performer for Aeon Ritual at MASSMoCA, and a Bang on a Can Summer Institute “Banglewood” Composer Fellow (2019). He has studied composition with Julia Wolfe, Sarah Kirkland Snider, William Brittelle, Andrea Mazzariello, and Troy Peters, amongst others.
Lou Harrison
After graduating from high school in Burlingame, California, studying, working and composing in San Francisco for nearly a decade, a year in Los Angeles, a hectic decade on the East Coast which led to a serious breakdown, Lou Harrison landed in the sleepy village of Aptos on a rolling hill overlooking the Monterey Bay in December of 1954. He was 37.
Aptos was the perfect climate for the ongoing recovery of his New York frantic decade. The cabin was peaceful and the few neighbors friendly. There was no phone and no deadlines. Harrison wanted only the time to study and compose, and to be employed just enough for basic expenses. He applied for several positions: flower gardener (Council for Civil Unity), full-time janitor position (Pajaro Valley school district), Reed College and Kumasi College in Ghana (no positions available). He eventually took work as a dog groomer and a forest service employee.
There was plenty of time to pursue alternate tuning systems and he composed in the next few years, incidental music for Corneille’s Cinna (“Five strict compositions on a tuning of 12 tone in the 2/1 and with each 2/1 tuned similarly”), Simfony in Freestyle (“ The exact vibrations per second of each required tone can be easily be worked out from the ratios; then by aid of Boehin’s Schema….”), Recording Piece (for percussion and electronic overlay), the Political Primer and Strict Songs, all with specified “Just Intonation” schemas.
Then in 1959, a young musician and composer, Robert Hughes, a graduate student at University of Buffalo came upon a recording of pieces by Virgil Thomson and Harrison including the Suite for Cello and Harp and the Second Suite for Strings (performed at the Cabrillo Festival in 1993). Hughes was moved by the simple beauty of Harrison’s work, began a lengthy correspondence and arranged a residency in Buffalo in May of 1959 (following the premiere of Harrison’s opera Rapunzel which received its West Coast premiere at the 1966 Festival).
Hughes soon after received a Baird Fellowship to study in Italy but became “disenchanted” and he took what was left of his money and travelled 6,000 miles to study with Harrison in Aptos. Around that same time, Victor and Sidney Jowers had opened a “roadhouse” café and bar. The Sticky Wicket began presenting chamber music concerts and dramatic productions. Several pieces of Harrison and Hughes works were performed and premiered.
In 1961, Harrison was invited to attend the East-West Music conference in Tokyo with an extended trip to Korea after he had met Dr. Lee Hye Ku and fallen in love with Korean Music. Dr. Lee came to collaborate in Aptos and Harrison returned for a second trip to Korea in 1962. Cabrillo Community College, which was operating out of Watsonville, opened an Aptos campus in 1963 and provided a larger venue for concertgoers, (Harrison’s theatre “kit” Jephtha’s Daughter was premiered there in 1963 even before the first Festival Season.)
Along with Hughes, Ted Toews, Alice Vestal and Gene Hambelton, Harrison was a part of the nucleus group that helped shape the expansion of the Sticky Wicket Concert Series into the Cabrillo Music Festival. However, as the first Festival neared, his second trip to Asia, a residency in Hawaii and the death of his father kept Harrison from direct participation, though he was able to return for the concerts which included his Six Sonatas for Cembalo performed by Margaret Fabrizio.
From then and throughout most of the Festival’s history, virtually every major work of Lou Harrison’s has been performed, including many premieres, two commissions, and several “volunteer” pieces. In the summer preceding Harrison’s death, the Cabrillo Festival staged a magnificent performance of Harrison’s opera Rapunzel, which brought the composer great joy. After Harrison’s death in 2004, a memorial tribute concert was presented at the Festival season, featuring a performance by Dennis Russell Davies reprising Harrison’s beautiful Grand Duo. Fittingly, the Cabrillo Festival has presented 72 performances of Harrison’s work, more than any other composer in its history.
For the 20th Anniversary of the Festival (1982) Harrison was commissioned to write his Third Symphony, which incorporates revisions and orchestrations from as early as 1937. As an anniversary tribute, the 2012 Cabrillo Festival season included Harrison’s Third Symphony on Saturday, August 11, with the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.
– Charles Hansen
Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (New York Times) and striking sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material—it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow. Her music is widely performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations—such as the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Danish String Quartet, BBC Proms, and Carnegie Hall. Anna’s “detailed and powerful” (The Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, the Nordic Council, and the UK’s Ivors Academy. Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra 2018-2023, Anna was in 2023 also in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. In 2024-2025, she is the Tonhalle Orchestra’s Creative Chair. In 2024, she was selected as a winner of the CHANEL Next Prize. She holds a Ph.D. (2011) from the University of California in San Diego.
Program Notes
Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra (1959)
Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Festival Co-founder Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra is also entitled Koncerto por la violono kun percuta orkestra, which is in Esperanto, of which Harrison was an ardent advocate. Esperanto, which roughly translates to ‘one who hopes,’ is a constructed international language and was created to foster world peace and global understanding—a world-view inherent not just in this work, but of Harrison’s oeuvre at large.
The work is inscribed as 1959-1940. This unusual method of dating suggests that the work and his interest in world music and percussion were conceived early on but completed later after Harrison had turned away from twelve-tone serialism and revived those earlier interests. It was first performed in New York’s Town Hall in 1959 by the violinist Anahid Ajemian, to whom it is dedicated.
Percussion, found objects, and an interest in global music ultimately led to what Harrison would dub the “American Gamelan,” which is central to his artistic output. His profound knowledge of non-Western idioms, particularly Indonesian gamelan, made him a masterful musical practitioner of cultural fusion.
The work is scored for a solo violinist and five percussionists using a wide instrumentation of non-traditional instruments including: twelve brake drums, six flowerpots, plumbers pipe, damped plumbers pipe, wind chimes (glass & metal), two sistra, temple blocks, dustbins, spring coils, cymbals, congas, gongs, double bass laid on its back and struck with sticks, snare drum, tom toms, maracas, two triangles, tin cans.
Other previous percussion ensemble works include Canticle No. 1 in 1939, Canticle No. 3 in 1941, and Suite for Percussion in 1942, as well as collaborations with John Cage, who was also similarly fascinated with the medium of percussion ensemble and non-western music. Through these explorations and their revolutionary focus on an expanded palette of the percussion family, Harrison and Cage firmly set the stage for the development of the American avant-garde in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Sometimes, the percussive work is rhythmic and incisive, but often, it is delicately and colorfully scored, in the manner of a gamelan. Against this textured wall of sound, the violin stands out in high relief as intensely melodic—although it is often rhythmic and coloristic as well. Harrison’s earlier percussion ensemble works used similar instrumentations, so this concerto represents decades of honing and exploration—the result is that Harrison’s Violin Concerto is one of the most distinctive and memorable by an American composer.
– D. Riley Nicholson
sources include program notes by Eric Salzman, Fred Cohen, and the PostClassical Ensemble.
CATAMORPHOSIS (2021)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977)
[West Coast Premiere]
The core inspiration behind CATAMORPHOSIS is the fragile relationship we have to our planet. The aura of the piece is characterized by the orbiting vortex of emotions and the intensity that comes with the fact that if things do not change, it is going to be too late, risking utter destruction—catastrophe. The core of the work revolves around a distinct sense of urgency, driven by the shift and pull between various polar forces—power and fragility, hope and despair, preservation and destruction.
The relationship between inspiration and the pure musical feeling and methods, for me, tends to shift at a certain point in the creative process of every work. The core inspiration provides the initial energy and structural elements to a piece, and then the music starts to breathe on its own and expand. In CATAMORPHOSIS this point in the process became more apparent and tangible as it aligned with an event that has had such dramatic impact on our lives and reality. The notion of emergency was already integrated into the music, and to counterbalance that a sense of hope and belief. The meditative state of being needed to gain focus in order to sustain and maintain the globally important elements in life also became increasingly important and provided another layer to the inspiration.
CATAMORPHOSIS is quite a dramatic piece, but it is also full of hope—perhaps somewhere between the natural and the unnatural, between utopia and dystopia, we can gain perspective and find balance within and with the world around us.
– Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Flowercloud (2025)
Darian Donovan Thomas (b. 1993)
[World Premiere | Festival Commission]
“Partly
adream I think,
he daily walks the world
as in a flowercloud of thought
& sight.” – Lou Harrison
Flowercloud is a symphony in four movements. The piece starts with solos, simple breaths amidst wind chimes, until finally a voice—The Elder sings “There used to be so many…” The first movement is Hyacinth Memory, a sound world of waking and frustration from loss. I was thinking about the loss of queerness resulting from the AIDS crisis, and how long it has taken us to get back to a place of queer prominence in culture.
The joy and parties and brightness that must have been before the epidemic make up the origin of the second movement: Marigold Joy. There’s joy—and in thinking about the happiness of generations past and lost, I can start to hear the hum of our queer ancestors. There’s peace—and we lean into it finally in the third movement, Sunflower Sky. Finally, less cryptic messages are coming from the Elder—with texts I’ve made, and some found in Lou Harrison’s work, this speaker for the orchestra remembers lovers returning with flowers, and helps the orchestra find their voice.
We arrive at the final movement: Lotus Sea. Everyone is here—everyone has come out. And we all remember—and see that there is still foolishness in the world towards our community. In writing this, I came to an internal realization: queerness is eternal. It always has been, and it always will be. Whereas yes there is much we have to fight for now, “I’m not fighting to prove” we exist—“I’m fighting to remind.” There’s sanctuary in our eternity—and calmness there. We can fight, but also… I look forward to the day that we can just sit on a bench by the sea and be.
There was a time that seeing older gay men was rare. Very few were left on stage. But we’ve regained strength. And now our trans siblings are under violent attack. And the political climate of 2025… Age and location has nothing to do with it—“what’s the excuse”? Regardless, and despite many flowerless fists, we’ll grow.
Hyacinth: the flower born out of Apollo’s tears for his dead gay lover Hyacinthus.
Marigold: a joyful flower and beloved offering to Xochipilli, the Aztec god for flowers, games, music, and gay men.
Sunflower: happiness, warmth, loyalty, vitality, and good fortune.
Lotus: Purity, rebirth, and strength. No matter the mud, we’ll grow.
– Darian Donovan Thomas