A MIDSUMMER TALE OF TWO FESTIVALS

Cypress and pine, sand and surf, artichokes and olallieberries, fog and sea-breezes, calamari and sand-dabs. Life is sweet on the Central Coast of California.

In midsummer, there is also music, some of it paradisiacal, to go with the scenery, some of it merely mundane. Commuting between the Carmel Bach and Cabrillo Music Festivals, last week, one found both kinds, as well as some irritants.

Among those last would be the hard and unforgiving wooden benches in Carmel Mission Basilica, seats not intended for sensitive 20th-Century backsides. A couple of symposia--one at each festival--neither particularly engaging nor informative, just overextended. And, for length, a program of “Music for Computers and Instruments” that went on for 144 tedious minutes.

Nevertheless, festival-hopping has its moments.

What is new at the 24th annual Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz County is not the director. Dennis Russell Davies continues as leader in 1986, as he has since 1974, despite his still-burgeoning European career (he takes over as artistic director and chief conductor of the City of Bonn, West Germany, in 1988) and his expanding American activity (he presides over the Saratoga Festival, outside Philadelphia, beginning this month).

Nor has the traditional focus of Cabrillo on the new, the recent and the unfamiliar, especially from living composers, changed. This summer, that focus fell on Arvo Paert, the Estonian composer now living in West Berlin, and on William Bolcom, the American musician.

Brand-new at Cabrillo in 1986 was its performing home. After 23 summers headquartered at Cabrillo College Auditorium (capacity: 540), the festival has now moved 10 miles north, to the hilltop campus of UC Santa Cruz, where a tent seating 885 listeners ostensibly represents its future.

On the basis of three long exposures--evening concerts Aug. 1 and 2, and the closing matinee concert of Aug. 3--one can say that the tent’s sound-amplification system works, that the festival orchestra holds to the standard one has become used to (at the festivals of 1977, 1981, 1982 and 1983), and that Davies’ leadership retains its strongest features.

Choosing living composers with whom Davies has affinities is one of these features. Such affinities do not always guarantee satisfying or long-lasting compositions, of course, but they do mean that Davies will usually believe in the music he conducts in Santa Cruz.

He certainly seemed to believe in the three works on the festival-closing program, last Sunday afternoon. Bolcom’s recent Fantasia Concertante, in its United States premiere, Lou Harrison’s year-old Piano Concerto and Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony (begun in the year Davies was born, 1944) made a bold finale to the 1986 season, and showed the festival orchestra at its most virtuosic.

The Fantasia Concertante, commissioned and first performed by the Mozarteum of Salzburg (Austria), is attractive, derivative and perfectly charming, though it might have been written by Richard Strauss 60 years ago. Entertaining and melodious, it fills 14 minutes with bright and witty sounds which could easily be dropped into a 1980s film score without attracting undue attention.

Conducted joyfully by Davies, this American premiere put the solo spotlight on two stalwarts of the Cabrillo festival, principal violist and cellist Kenneth Harrison and Lee Duckles, who made the most of all their opportunities.

Keith Jarrett, returning to Cabrillo for a fourth appearance, took the solo duties in Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto with that seriousness and intensity--and superfluous vocal noises--which are his trademarks.

Harrison, who for several decades has been writing music using the components only recently discovered by minimalists, once again has made much of little. Yet, his inspiration seems never to flag.

In the opening movement, he creates haunting lyricism out of pentatonic scales. In a macabre scherzo, he builds complex, Brahmsian structures. The brief slow movement seems to hint at greater depths than it delivers, and the epigrammatic finale falls short of genuine substance. Yet the total work fulfills its mission more straightforwardly than did Harrison’s Third Symphony, introduced here three years ago. At 68, Harrison continues to fascinate.

Computer-generated compositions by David Jaffe, William Schottstaedt and Doug Fulton, and instrumental pieces by Somei Satoh and Paolo Ugoletti made up the overlong Aug. 2 program, put together by Robert Hughes.

The three computer-created tapes displayed the huge dynamic and textural range of the new technology, but Jaffe’s other work on this program, his “Bristlecone” Concerto No. 2, which combines two live soloists with computer-generated tape and live players, takes risks. Though the two-year-old piece fails to make all of its parts mesh, it is a signpost to the future.

Ugoletti, a 30-year old representative of the “nuova consonanza” (new consonance) school now thriving in Italy, seems, on the basis of one hearing of his “Garden of Epicurus” for solo piano and seven winds, to be a minimalist in the making.

As played with panache and stamina by pianist Emily Wong and members of the festival orchestra, “Gardens” entertained in a neo-Debussy, post-Respighi idiom, but offered nothing novel.

James Tuggle, the 34-year old American music director of the Stuttgart Ballet, made his U.S. concert debut conducting a Ravel-Paert-Bolcom program, Aug. 1. Showing clear and calm authority in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” and “La Valse,” Tuggle also brought illumination to Paert’s “Tabula Rasa” for two violins and orchestra and Bolcom’s revised Symphony No. 3 (1979).

“Tabula Rasa” is another exploration of Asian-inspired instrumental textures and scale-derived melodies. It moves slowly, but offers subtleties along the way. Romuald Tecco and Elizabeth Baker were the unfazed violin soloists who made 28 minutes seem short to some listeners.

Bolcom’s expanded, large-orchestra version of his Third Symphony reiterates a neo-Romantic credo. It is both easy to like and easy to forget. Because it is reminiscent of Mahler and Barber, and because it extols the virtues of D major, one wants to praise it. But to do so would be to ignore the fact that it is a pastiche.

Fifty miles south, off Highway 1, the Carmel Bach Festival ended its 49th summer season last Sunday afternoon with a performance of Bach’s “St. John” Passion. In the four days preceding that matinee, this observer attended two evening concerts, an afternoon symposium on “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Janina Fialkowska’s recital on Saturday morning, and two acts of the “Nozze” performance, Saturday afternoon.

Things change at the Carmel Festival, but slowly. In 1965, for instance, music director Sandor Salgo added opera performances to the annual programs. In time, opera became a tradition. This summer, Salgo conducted three performances of Mozart’s “Nozze”--in the year of its 200th anniversary--on July 19, 26 and Aug. 2.

These performances featured Andrew Porter’s serviceable but charmless English translation, a promising and unfinished cast, pointed and detailed staging by director Albert Takazauckas (in his fourth Carmel summer) and pleasing costumes. A few pieces of furniture substituted for sets.

Takazauckas had coached his young singers thoroughly in the comedic nuances of the work; their understanding seemed clear, though much of their singing emerged one-dimensional.

The most cohesive performance came from Patricia Schuman, a charming, vulnerable and legitimate Countess. Mark Delavan’s brash and strong-voiced Count dominated the action appropriately; Jacob Will’s boyish, resonant Figaro and Ruth Ann Swenson’s attractive Susanna upheld the staging. Despite clear acting, the remainder of the cast failed to exceed basic musical values. Salgo conducted smoothly, but genuine Mozartean sparkle eluded him.

The traditional Wednesday evening concert held in Carmel Mission Basilica (and heard at the third performance, July 30) offered in 1986 a program devoted to music associated with Rome: works by Nanino, Frescobaldi, Victoria, Stradella, Allegri, A. Scarlatti, Palestrina, Corelli, Geminiani, Pitoni and Handel.

A pageant-heavy affair in which members of the Carmel community (and their children) also take part, this evening can be tiresome. As performed listlessly by Festival forces led mechanically by Salgo, the latest Mission concert proved uninspired. Too many notes, too many candles, too little passion . . . Now in his 31st season as music director of the festival, the septuagenerian Salgo sometimes peppers his Carmel programs with music from periods other than Bach’s. This year, he paid homage to Mendelssohn, who as early as 1829 rescued some of Bach’s sacred compositions from obscurity and without whom, as Salgo says, “none of us would be giving Bach festivals.”

The homage, of course, makes sense, but the presence of Mendelssohn on Carmel agendas still discombobulates. Earlier in the week, there was the Violin Concerto; later, there would be the “Italian” Symphony. On July 31, the Colorado Quartet closed its program with the irresistible and triumphant D-major Quartet, Opus 44, No. 1.

The four players of the Philadelphia-based ensemble--violinists Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Redding, violist Francesca Martin and cellist Sharon Prater--brought boldness and grace to this score.

Janina Fialkowska’s piano recital in Sunset Center Theater (home of the festival) on the morning of Aug. 2, revealed strong programming skills, a personable young artist of broad interests and what may be unlimited pianistic horizons.

Fialkowska’s Liszt-playing lacks a sense of the demonic, but is otherwise on-target. Her performances of the “Weinen, Klagen” Variations and the Variations on B.A.C.H. at the beginning and end of the recital displayed technical solidity and stylistic savvy.

Her essaying of Beethoven’s A-flat Sonata, Opus 110, showed precocious divination of the composer’s late idiom, and tremendous promise. And her playing of Mendelssohn’s Fantasy in F-sharp minor combined fleetness, lightness and unperturbed musicality in a way few pianists can.