MUSIC REVIEW : Cabrillo Fest Moves to Mission San Juan Bautista

One day a year, the Cabrillo Music Festival brings the classical muse to this little fork in the road, 13 miles east of Watsonville.

In 1989, that day was Sunday and in two concerts Mission San Juan reverberated with music by Corelli, Frigyes Hidas, Olly Wilson and Mahler.

Anyone who has suffered through concerts at Carmel Mission, or the Mission at San Luis Obispo, needn’t bother to attend any here. Despite the welcome and inherent theatricality in Roman Catholic sanctuaries, the same acoustical distortions and physical discomforts plague San Juan Bautista. The one here is more than 220 years old and not particularly charming in its antiquity. It stands, but without distinction.

One will do one’s duty, however. The two concerts featured Bay Bones, a trombone ensemble from San Francisco, and the Festival Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, playing Olly Wilson’s Sinfonia and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Heard from a poor acoustical vantage point at the rear of the sanctuary, Wilson’s half-hour Sinfonia, commissioned by the Boston Symphony, still makes a stunning first impression.

Stark, relentless, atonal and angry, the 5-year-old work provides little let-up in its aggression. As it proceeds, it seems to gather hostility. The grieving middle movement--an elegy for the composer’s father and for conductor Calvin Simmons--achieves no consolation. And the finale finds no peace. Ultimately, this Sinfonia sounds like Penderecki without the optimism.

Davies conducted an intense, cumulative and apparently immaculate performance. He came close to doing the same with Mahler’s bucolic Fourth, but seemed hampered by the orchestra’s often turgid instrumental textures and its frequent lack of delicacy. True lightness was seldom achieved. Soprano Renate Gola, a regular Cabrillo visitor from West Germany, brought clarity of word but heaviness of tone to the wonted simplicity of the finale.

Despite many opportunities, the 28 trombonists of Bay Bones failed to make a case for its eclectic repertory.

Conducted by Billy Robinson, the group offered thick transcriptions of works by Ginastera, Corelli and Vaughan Williams, original pieces by Hidas and Carl Nosse and the world premiere of Earl Zindar’s “Transitions.” None of the performances rose above the pedestrian; several suffered vaguenesses of pitch and attack; most emerged merely lugubrious.

The promised premiere of Henry Brant’s “Flight Over a Global Map” was canceled three weeks ago when the composer did not meet his deadline.