A Weekend For Kids at Cabrillo
The Cabrillo Festival continues this weekend:
- Friday: the works of three composers in their 20s, conducted by “emerging conductors.” Listen in particular for the work of Michael-Thomas Foumai.
- Saturday: Discovery concert — and if you only have time for one event this weekend, this is it — featuring four works, including two world premiere commissions. Listen in particular for John Wineglass’ Someone Else’s Child, a symphonic poem with narration, based on poems by children held in the Santa Cruz juvenile detention center.
- Sunday: an annual free family concert featuring The Animated Orchestra doing a piece with narration about “a cartoon score being performed as a symphony concert.” A play within a play as it were: The hero in the cartoon is a ferret that sneaks into an instrument repair shop. Children under 6 are not allowed to other Cabrillo programs, so this free concert is ideal for all.
But wait. That’s all inside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, in the late afternoon or evening. What about the ‘children of paradise’ outside in the streets? A whole other world unfolds. That’s why you could make a true day of it. Street fair all afternoon; hoity-toity in the evening. It's all in downtown Santa Cruz, “the city that, when it grows up, wants to be Berkeley,” as Brett Taylor put it. “Or does it want to be Carmel? It can’t decide.” Mr. Taylor, a retired firefighter, is the MC at the street festival and has been for 15 years.
“Here’s what it’s like,” he said about the festival: “One time I remember, it was toward the end of the day and some of the musicians were just jamming, we had this Brazilian musician playing a tabla and an Indian finger drummer, and then somebody arrived with some sort of bagpipes and started played Celtic music. Everybody was dancing, from Brazilian to swing. I just looked at this and said to myself, you know what? This is Santa Cruz. Everybody’s in a common groove. And that’s what you’ll see this weekend, you’ll have the Santa Cruz ballet theater one minute and belly dancers the next.”
The festival will be in the streets around the Civic Auditorium. Church Street is the place. Two days, one stage, one act after another from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. There will be food in every direction and art workshops. It’s a kid-centered event if ever there was one. Parking is 50 cents an hour. Walk six blocks or else pay a quarter for a trolley to the Boardwalk, which opened in 1904 and was supposed to be the spitting image of Coney Island or Atlantic City. It’s neither, for better and for worse, but there are more than 30 rides, not to mention the beach and the restaurants on the pier, and the whole languid, gauzy, summer vibe.
Why not? Put all the old, tired, musty worries back in the trunk, they’ll keep. And if you’re to the north, drive south, ever so carefully, over Route 17.
Cabrillo Festival: Free Family Concert, Sun. Aug. 9, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.
Young Performers at the Music@Menlo Festival
It’s not easy to get tickets, but on Saturday afternoon there is another free concert at the Center for Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton, sponsored by the Koret Foundation. The concert spotlights terrific young talent in trios, quartets and quintets, playing Schumann, Smetana, Borodin, Haydn, and Dvořák — his Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 26, written after the death of his first daughter.
Which brings us to Sarah Ghandour, 18, with family in Istanbul, and just now on her way to Bard College, up along the Hudson River, to study with Peter Wiley and join that special in-crowd of musicians and poets, including the incomparable Robert Kelly. Sarah is the cellist in this Dvořák trio. “It’s not one of his well-known trios,” she told us, “but it’s very intense, and there’s much to discover. It has a stormy quality, particularly the first movement, which is what we’re playing. It sounds like he’s remembering wistful moments with his daughter.”
Ghandour took up the cello at four, the piano at six, and more recently, voice, with Pamela Alexander. She’s a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Program and has won a dozen competitions. She returns for her sixth summer as a Music@Menlo Scholarship Young Performer. In the trio on Saturday afternoon, the pianist is 15, the violinist, 17. If you have young musicians in the family, this is a worthy adventure.
For tickets for the concert of the day go here, Sat. Aug. 4, 1 p.m., Center for the Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton.
Dream at the Music Discovery Workshop
Photo by Amy Luper
Summer music programs are coming to a close, but if you’re curious about the possibilities for next year you might drop by the Crowden Center For Music in Berkeley this Friday, at 5:30 p.m. to hear a recital, followed at 7 p.m. by a performance of the Pyramus and Thisbe portion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The recital features students playing the recorder, harpsichord, violin, viola, cello, and viola de gamba.
The Children's Music Discovery Workshop, which is run by the San Francisco Early Music Society, lasts one week every summer, usually in late July or early Aug., from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“It’s challenging,” Annike Braucher, told us, “but they put you in classes where others are at your level.” She’s 14 and has been coming to the camp for the last four years. She plays the recorder, that starter instrument, but stayed with it, and gradually fell into early music ensembles. “It’s my favorite kind of music. I can’t tell you why; it’s just always touched my heart. I love listening to it and I love hearing other people perform it and then just going home and playing.”
As for the camp she said, “I think it’s a good option for kids, even if they’re not that excited about music; there’s games and theater and crafts. And it’s a wonderful introduction to music. I think we should be exposed to all kinds of music, not just classical.”