2025 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

NEWWORKS IN THE WORKS CABRILLO FESTIVAL’S NEXT CREATIVE LAB: SARAH HENNIES 2026 will see the third iteration of Cabrillo Festival’s groundbreaking “Creative Lab” with a new work by composer Sarah Hennies. The Creative Lab provides uncharted opportunities for partnerships with artists to focus on creative, experiential orchestral events that transform how the orchestra, artists, and audience engage in the creation of new works. “My new orchestral work for the Cabrillo Festival will take advantage of the large-scale forces of the orchestra to evoke the complexities of human brain activity, drawing on psychological and musical studies related to existence, identity, and memory. By writing individual parts for each member of the orchestra, the work will create an immersive sound world evocative of involuntary neurological activities that play a role in how we perceive music and constitute a fundamental part of human existence.” —Sarah Hennies EMERGING BLACK COMPOSERS PROJECT PRIZE Launched in2020, EmergingBlackComposers Project (EBCP) is a ten-year commitment to spotlight early-career Black American composers under age 35. The Cabrillo Festival remains committed to EBCP—investing in the next generation and future of our field, recognizing orchestral music’s urgent need to celebrate composers of color proactively. To this end, we will announce a Cabrillo Emerging Black Composers Prize for 2026 in the coming months. Cabrillo Festival’s commissioning prize, and the San Francisco Symphony’s Michael Morgan Prize, are both made possible through the generosity of Michèle and Laurence Corash. KONTROL by CLARICE ASSAD The Festival will commission Clarice Assad to write a new work for violinist Philippe Quint—a medium-defying narrative work for projections, narrator (performed by Clarice), violinist, and orchestra. Kontrol explores timely and unsettling themes of how technology can influence us, with the narrator cast as CEO of an app controlling the violinist as the work unfolds—bringing speculative fiction (sci-fi) into the concert hall, commenting on the immediate power of tech in our present and future lives. CLARINET CONCERTO by PEDRO EMANUEL PEREIRA The Festival will commission Portuguese composer Pedro Emanuel Pereira to write a new concerto for his long-standing collaborator and virtuoso clarinetist, Carlos Ferreira. The concerto promises to blend tradition and innovation captivatingly. “This concerto will draw inspiration from traditional Portuguese music, weaving these elements into my distinct musical aesthetic, which embraces polytonality, atonality, and the pursuit of novel timbres. An intriguing aspect of this composition is the incorporation of innovative performative elements, such as integrating the conductor’s gestures into the concerto’s cadence.” —Pedro Emanuel Pereira CABRILLO FESTIVAL CONTINUES TO ADVANCE ITS NEW WORKS INITIATIVE, SUPPORTING COMPOSERS AND BRINGING NEW MUSIC TO LIFE In our 63rd season we are proud to have commissioned more than sixty new works throughout our history. More than fifty of those were created in just the last fifteen years! And there is more to come… There is something uniquely rewarding about supporting a composer in their creative process and experiencing the realization of a new work from the extraordinary vantage point of a commissioner. We welcome donors to explore the possibilities with us. Before we can dream about commissions, we must ensure the health and wellbeing of the Festival itself; hence, all commissioning gifts must be above and beyond an annual general operating gift that supports the core activities of the Cabrillo Festival.