Teeming, Polychrome

Twenty airborne hours after boarding Swiss Air in Tel Aviv (in Zurich, the Airtrain moos!  And yodels!) I materialized, dazed, in the garden of a little cottage by the sea in Capitola, California.  J’s been in residence at Marin’s Cabrillo Festival since July 26: here’s where Evelyn Glennie gave the local première of Conjurer, the concerto for percussion and string orchestra he composed for her.   I haven’t been to the Cabrillo since Peter Kazaras staged a lovely production of Little Women there in 2002: this year, besides J’s Conjurer and Mannheim Rocket, I dropped in rehearsals of Avner’s teeming, polychrome Variations Without a Theme and the West Coast début of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony, here narrowed to twenty-five minutes from its apparently forty-minute first draft.

That isn’t why I’m here, though.  I do think this journal will be most useful if it stays focused on musical rather than personal matters, but we’ve planned an event for Friday about which I feel as strongly as an American citizen as a private person.  Stay tuned till August 8th.