Philip Glass and Tania Leon Open 1990 Cabrillo Festival

Between the 27th Cabrillo Music Festival and the 28th, which began here on Thursday night, a major historical event intervened. It was, of course, the devastating earthquake of Oct. 17. Still recovering and busily rebuilding, Santa Cruz will never be the same, many of the locals say.

The festival, however, goes on. As longtime music director Dennis Russell Davies said at the Prelude Concert in First Congregational Church, “We’re still here,” and the 1990 festival--12 concerts in and around the beachfront community through July 29--promises a rich continuation, in Davies’ 17th summer, of the Cabrillo traditions first established by founder-conductor Gerhard Samuel beginning in 1963.

Living composers are the stream from which these traditions flow. In 1990 the presence of three composers in residence, Philip Glass, Tania Leon and Lou Harrison, give the 28th festival its special character.

The inaugural concert began with an unscheduled premiere when Davies sat at the piano and played a piece called “Opening,” which Glass reportedly wrote this week.

It is a seven-minute prelude, in shifting harmonies and steady triplet-figures, of Schubertian directness and simplicity. Davies and Glass, the conductor-pianist told his audience, dedicate it to the people of Santa Cruz.

More music by Glass, the motoric “Similar Motion” (1969), in a version for four electronic keyboards--played by Emily Wong-George, Brenda Tom, Glass and Davies--concluded the program.

In between, an international and historical stew offered welcome hearings of chamber pieces from both ends of this century: Carlos Chavez’s “Energia” (1925), Silvestre Revueltas’ “Homenaje a Federico Garcia-Lorca” (1936), Leon’s “Parajota Delate” (1988) and the U.S. premiere of Nicolaus Huber’s recent “Trio mit Stabpandeira.”

Davies’ revival of the serious, colorful and highly individual music written by Chavez and Revueltas before World War II had to be, like so many of Davies’ programming decisions, tonic and bracing.

Juxtaposing them with Leon’s brief and perky birthday tribute to composer Joan Tower and the neo-abstract gloominess of Huber’s Trio--written for and performed here by Trio Basso, the virtuoso German ensemble of viola, cello and double bass--was brilliant, and ear-opening.

Traditionally, the Prelude Concert has been an extended presentation of musical appetizers. In 1990, and with a special sense of history, Davies continued the tradition, uninterrupted. In a year of trauma, the message, “We’re still here,” is touching.