Wide-Ranging Music Styles Set Off Shakespeare Plays

Summer used to be San Diego’s open season on Shakespeare, and the Old Globe was the predictable location. But this fall the Bard is flourishing on local stages outside the confines of Balboa Park. At the La Jolla Playhouse, Des McAnuff’s eclectic, anarchic “Twelfth Night” runs through Nov. 19, and Wednesday the San Diego Repertory Theatre opens its production of “Cymbeline,” directed by Douglas Jacobs.

The musical approaches for these two Shakespeare productions, however, are as different as La Jolla’s unspoiled ocean vistas are from the grimy street scene outside the Rep’s front door in Horton Plaza Park. For “Twelfth Night,” Playhouse resident composer Michael Roth crafted a slick pop score, with a few tunes added by McAnuff. On stage, Roth plays much of his score seated at a gleaming Las Vegas-white grand piano, accompanied by discreet electric guitar riffs.

For his “Cymbeline” score, however, Los Angeles-based composer Jonathan Sacks has found inspiration at the other end of the historical continuum. Part of the score will imitate pre-Christian Celtic music, while other instrumental sections will create the distinct sound of early 17th-Century Italian music. Sacks justified using these two disparate types of music by appealing to the play’s own confused historical setting.

“Shakespeare set ‘Cymbeline’ in ancient Britain at the time of Augustus Caesar, but against it he painted an Italian Renaissance Rome, so the play has in it a built-in eclecticism,” Sacks explained. Among the instruments he will use are the deer-bone flute, a Viking lur (which is a primitive kind of trumpet), a Greek aulos (an early reed instrument), and another flute molded in the shape of the Aztec God of wind. Most of these bizarre instruments come from the collection of local musician James French, who will perform Sacks’ score along with Will Parsons and Jonathan Glasier.

“My goal is to invoke ancient, unworldly instruments and musical styles. This play is not realistic theater--it is a kind of pageant that involves myth-telling,” Sacks stated.

Working on “Cymbeline” marks Sacks’ return to the Rep after a long absence. In 1981, he wrote a score for an early Rep Shakespeare production of “Titus Andronicus,” and he composed for a number of early Rep “Christmas Carol” adaptations before the company moved into its new home beneath Horton Plaza.

Earlier this year, he composed a score for “Much Ado About Nothing” for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival. Sacks has also written instrumental music apart from stage plays. His quartet Variations and Chorale “Accursed, Ye Shall Glimpse Heaven” was well-received on a Pacific Composers Forum concert in June. Sacks stated that it was more rewarding, however, to write for the stage.

“I hate working alone in my studio with all of my equipment: my keyboards, computer and sampler. My musical imagination is stirred when I’m pushed to collaborate with actors and musicians.”

Experiencing music should be like an adventure into some new world, Sacks said.

“That’s also the function of what the church used to do--to get you out of the mundane and into something emotionally uplifting.”

For the Record. The San Diego Chamber Orchestra’s first recording will be released in January, 1991, by Koch International Classics. Music director Donald Barra and the orchestra recorded the all-Russian program last November in the University of San Diego’s Founders’ Chapel, but it took almost a year to locate a recording company to market the disc. Last week, the orchestra announced that it had signed a five-year recording contract with Koch to produce and distribute two recordings each year.

Koch International is an Austrian firm that produces five of its own labels and distributes about 50 labels in this country. Coincidentally, two other San Diegans have Koch connections. San Diego native Marsha Long’s first organ recording is on the Koch label, and local conductor David Amos has recently completed a disc of American composers for Koch.

Satire at UCSD. SONOR, UC San Diego’s acclaimed contemporary music ensemble, will give the premiere of composer Will Ogden’s “A Modern ? Fable” Wednesday at 8 p.m. in Mandeville Auditorium. According to Ogden, the work for two sopranos and instruments is based on the writings of 17th-Century French satirist Jean de La Fontaine, but it also comments on the current controversy surrounding the National Endowment of the Arts. In addition to Ogden’s new piece, pianist Aleck Karis, a new member of the UCSD music faculty, will perform two works by American composer Milton Babbitt.

Appearing this week. The “Cantata on Four Saints” by Kenneth Nielson will be performed at 8 p.m. today in Founders’ Chapel on the University of San Diego campus. The composer will conduct the combined choirs of Musique Classique and the Thomas Luis de Victoria Choir and members of the International Orchestra. Violinist Frank Almond, San Diego native and laureate of Moscow’s 1986 International Tchaikovsky Competition, will give a solo recital Monday and Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. at El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center. Almond’s program will consist of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Prokofiev. The Vienna Choir Boys, a musical institution that traces its roots to the late 15th Century, performs Thursday at 8 p.m. in Point Loma Nazarene College’s Brown Chapel.