Courtesy KSO
Cabrera.
“If I were to describe my aesthetic as a conductor, it would be about trying to find the narrative first,” said New Haven Symphony Orchestra guest conductor and candidate for NHSO music director Donato Cabrera in a phone interview last week. “It’s a reflection of how I believe music can be connected to the community.”
Friday, Jan. 20 — when Cabrera will conduct Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, Emmanuel Séjourné’s Concerto for Marimba and Strings, Anna Clyne’s Stride for String Orchestra, and Richard Strauss’s Serenade in E‑flat Major at Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts — begins a run of four concerts in which Cabrera and three other visiting conductors will lead the orchestra in a program designed to test their interplay with the orchestra and their draw with New Haven’s current and future classical music audiences. (The other candidates are Tania Miller on March 10, Perry So on March 26, and James Blachly on April 16.)
The Lyman concerts all feature a similarly structured program: one famous piece of orchestral repertoire, one concerto, and one or two pieces by living or underrepresented composers, although this similarity appears coincidental at this time.
The narrative of a concert program, Cabrera believes, is essential to meeting audiences where they are and making listeners much more willing to engage with a wide variety of language, including modern, unfamiliar pieces.
For Cabrera, that narrative began with a piece that had already been selected for him: the Concerto for Marimba and Strings by Emmanuel Séjourné, with NHSO principal percussionist Aya Kaminaguchi performing as soloist.
“What [Kaminaguchi] achieves — what one can achieve — with a solo percussion instrument is really phenomenal,” Cabrera said. The work features bubbling, playful marimba lines against lush string harmonies, taking advantage of the timbral differences between featured instrument and accompaniment. “All of the orchestras around the country are full of these incredibly talented people that also have solo careers, and I love having the opportunity to help share that story with the audience.”
Cabrera chose to round out the program by featuring other sections of the orchestra in other short pieces. The most recent work on the program, Stride by Anna Clyne, features the strings creating a kind of hallucinatory remix of motifs from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. Woodwinds and french horn are the focus of Richard Strauss’ Serenade, which features only 13 players, but stretches their sound to symphonic heights due to creative part writing and chord voicing.
The entire orchestra is brought together for Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, which demonstrates the height of timbral interplay that the symphonic form is known for, while still featuring a strong sense of folk melody inspired by the composer’s Czech heritage. Cabrera believes that lay audiences, now armed with a greater appreciation for what the individual sections can do alone, will have a sense of the structure that holds a 65-person orchestra together.
There’s boldness here, though not in the obvious ways. Most notable is the feature of only one “arch-orchestral” work on a program that at times could be mistaken for chamber music. Cabrera’s pedagogical hypothesis is sound, though, and also addresses potential audience desire for timbral variety.
Cabrera spoke about other types of narratives on programs he’d presented in the past — for example, digging deep into individual composers with distinct eras, or looking for thematic links that tied, say, Beethoven’s revolutionary spirit to the historical traditions of political music that classical music has long been connected to. Perhaps the logistical obstacles of switching performers, concert marimba, and chairs on and off stage will prevent Cabrera from presenting this kind of variety on every program, but it demonstrates an inviting consideration toward audiences that may be exploring classical music.
It’s also notable to program two living composers, but the works by both Clyne and Séjourné seem well equipped to engage respectfully with the classical tradition. Clyne especially is an established and well recognized composer, who brings in splashes of modern string writing as a color for the material by Beethoven, in itself almost a pedagogical act to place the familiar melodies in more modernist surroundings. And the marimba’s role in the emergence of percussion music in the 20th and 21st century cannot be understated — Séjourné is an active percussionist himself, reflected in the intricacy of the solo part.
The orchestra may be the most visible, recognizable representative of what classical music is to the general public, but it does not have the exclusive domain of large ensemble works. It may be helpful to casual listeners to engage with some of the other musical forms in which 10 – 40 musicians may come together to realize a single goal, to better understand the expectations and the possibilities of each. Changing the size of the ensemble also opens up wider selection of works to choose from, even from well known orchestral composers of the classical and romantic eras. And, when pursuing a narrative in a musical program, it offers plenty of thematic and stylistic variety.
Cabrera gives off a genuine excitement about the contemporary works he’s leading on Friday as well as the more canonical works. But you also get a real appreciation for the connections that music leads him to — that these are not secondary to the job of music director, but an indistinguishable part. He is also “genuinely excited to meet members of the community during intermission and after the concert. I know how much of an impact it has had on my life, and the more I can connect with people and share that passion — that’s my goal as a conductor.”
Cabrera Conducts Dvořák happens on Jan. 20 at 7:30 p.m. at Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. Visit the NHSO’s website for tickets and more information.