MUSIC REVIEW : A Slimmed-Down 27th Cabrillo Festival

After exceeding its budget of $375,000 by $25,000 last year, the Cabrillo Festival leadership has tightened its belt for the 27th annual summer music festival, in and around this slow-paced, Central California beachfront town.

In the summers 1986-88, Cabrillo held forth in a tent on the University of California campus north of downtown, high on a hill overlooking the population center. In 1989, “for economic reasons,” according to executive director Michael Stamp, the festival has returned to locales mostly closer in and predominantly churchly: Of the 12 concerts this month, 10 of them are scheduled in houses of religion.

The basic problem, since the first Cabrillo Music Festival in 1963, remains. Viable concert halls seating more than 540 people--the capacity of Cabrillo College Auditorium, original home of the festival--simply do not exist at this end of Monterey Bay.

For 1990, no decisions have been made. “We may return to the tent, or we may not,” says Stamp. “Coming back to town is probably temporary.” Not coincidentally, he adds, the 1989 festival budget has been pared to a manageable $311,000.

The happy concertgoers at the second, third and fourth performances of the 1989 series, Friday and Saturday and First Congregational and Holy Cross churches, showed no outward signs of festival burnout.

Nor did they have any reason to. The Friday night orchestral concert, led vigorously by Neil Varon, an American conductor who has held major posts in Dusseldorf for most of the past decade, displayed the 1989 ensemble to best advantage in exposing scores by Robert Erickson, Shostakovich and Brahms.

The Saturday afternoon performance, also at First Congregational, gave the same orchestra more opportunities for showing off--colorful pieces by American composers writing between 1912 and 1948. Again, the ensemble shone.

And a stand-and-cheer reception erupted after the second and final installment in cellist Janos Starker’s and pianist Dennis Russell Davies’ Beethoven cycle Saturday night in Holy Cross Church, downtown. Holy Cross is arguably the spiritual home of this festival; many of the memorable performances in these 26 years have taken place here.

Since those early days--Gerhard Samuel was the founding conductor of Cabrillo--inspired cronyism has been a hallmark of the festival.

Davies, music director since 1974, while finding fresh compositional voices, esoteric scores and new musical personalities to present here, has also created a core group of solo and orchestral personnel. Continuity among its participants accounts for some of the high artistic standards the festival has achieved.

On Saturday night, Starker, a longtime Cabrillo visitor, gave, with his friend Davies, a memorable Beethoven performance, topped off by a seraphic and probing reading of the D-major Sonata, Opus 102, No. 2. In a world overfilled with cello virtuosos, Starker remains the model of musical elegance--noble of statement, gorgeous but lean tone and stylistic pertinence. Davies’ resourceful and commanding pianism matched his partner effortlessly.

Friday night, the 1989 orchestra supported Starker and violinist William Preucil strongly in a rousing and solid account of Brahms’ Double Concerto. Conductor Varon found the propelling elements in Shostakovich’s often-neglected First Symphony and, apparently, most of the colors in Erickson’s brilliant “Auroras” of 1985.

Music by Virgil Thomson, John Becker, Charles Wakefield Cadman, William Grant Still, William Schuman and Leonard Bernstein--much of it unfamiliar--made up the fascinating, 60-minute program at the Saturday afternoon concert. Ken Harrison, one of the festival’s founding musicians, conducted gamely, though he said more than he needed to between pieces.