New advocate for new music
Any budding composers who came through school alongside the conductor Cristian Macelaru probably didn’t take long to figure out that the simplest way to get their music performed was to ask him. Macelaru is, by his own admission, a soft touch.
“I was always that guy in college that couldn’t say no to anything,” Macelaru said during a recent Skype interview. “I feel like I have premiered or done new music my entire life, by any composer who was ever in school with me.”
Now the Romanian-born maestro will be putting that practice to good use as music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the annual two-week new music extravaganza beginning Friday, Aug. 4, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. On the agenda are orchestral works — many of them world or local premieres — by such composers as Karim Al-Zand, Clarice Assad, Gerald Barry and Jörg Widmann.
But the other part of the agenda for longtime patrons will be the question of the festival’s coming artistic direction under its new leadership. Macelaru, 37, is stepping into the spot left by Marin Alsop, whose remarkable 25-year tenure at the festival’s helm transformed it from a scrappy bastion of California experimentalism into a sleek international venue for a more well-behaved brand of contemporary music.
On paper, Macelaru’s plans don’t seem to have diverged too far from the Alsop model; many of the composers on this year’s roster are familiar from past seasons. But clearly, the new guy is just starting to feel his way into the job.
“At first I thought, Marin has been doing this for so many years — how do you program nothing but living composers? Ordinarily conductors will do an occasional premiere, but not a whole concert of them, and certainly not five concerts! Then I started making lists of composers . ... The problem now is how to thin out my list instead of beefing it up.”
For six years, Macelaru has had a close association with the Philadelphia Orchestra, taking on a range of titles (assistant conductor, associate conductor, conductor-in-residence), and he has made a home in Philadelphia with his wife and two school-age children. Now he’s hoping the Cabrillo appointment will give him a laboratory in which to build up a body of less familiar music for which he can proselytize elsewhere.
“For a guest conductor to be able to bring a new piece with them is very rare, but being the head of a new music festival gives you credentials — and I’m fully planning to take advantage of that.”
Macelaru grew up in Timisoara, Romania’s third-largest city, as the youngest of 10 children in a musical family. Economic and social conditions in the Romania of the 1960s and ’70s were dire, and his father worked a factory job while leading a church orchestra with whatever musicians he had at his disposal.
“He would make his own arrangements of the music, writing every note by hand. We had no Xerox machines in those days, so he would sit and copy all the parts. That’s how I remember him, every night and weekend.”
The younger Macelaru took up the violin, serving as concertmaster in his father’s ensemble and in a high school orchestra. But his big break came at 17, when he was enlisted to serve as a translator and guide for a Michigan couple who were in Romania to adopt a teenager from one of the country’s orphanages.
He showed them around town for a couple of days and invited them to a concert at which he was playing, and the couple generously offered to buy him a plane ticket to Michigan so he could enroll in the renowned summer music camp at Interlochen.
The 18-page application seemed oddly long and detailed for a summer program, but Macelaru dutifully filled it out anyway. It wasn’t until he’d received an offer of a full scholarship for a year of boarding school that he realized Interlochen had sent him the wrong form.
“I arrived for the first day of school, and I thought, ‘I never want to go back home. I have found my place, and no one is taking it away from me.’ ”
“I had never played in an orchestra that good. I had never seen a published score, and here was the greatest score library in North America.”
From Interlochen, Macelaru went on to study at the University of Miami, knowing that he intended to trade his violin for a conductor’s baton but recognizing that “the violin was my ticket to a full scholarship and paying jobs.”
He spent that time, and the subsequent period as a master’s student at Rice University in Houston, leading small pickup ensembles as much as he could — but also soaking up the knowledge of musical style and technique that would support him as a conductor.
“The first time I conducted professionally was when I was 30. You know, so often conductors want to start when they’re 18 or 19. But my teacher, Larry Rachleff, said, ‘You have to become a musician first.’ And it’s hard to become a musician on the podium.”
Cabrillo promises to give him plenty of opportunities to expand his activities. One of the pieces in the opening season is an orchestral suite from Jake Heggie’s opera “Moby-Dick,” which Macelaru created when the composer proved too busy to do it himself. And he has other ambitious plans as well, including a recording initiative and an open door for composers to send him their work uninvited.
“I want to open up a portal on the Internet where any composer can drop a score, and as long as it doesn’t become overwhelming, I’m happy to look at every piece. We’ve got plenty of time to do whatever we want to do.”