ISLE OF MUSIC : Catalina Harbors a Festival of Chamber Music

How’s this for a historic site?

The spacious but intimate Casino Theater (1929) on nearby but far-away-seeming Catalina Island.

A room with twinkling, star-shaped lights on its domed ceiling, an auditorium seating 1,000 but looking much smaller--due no doubt to its curving lines--and decorated all around in Art Deco/Zigzag Moderne designs.

Decors representing all manner of 1920s fantasies--threatening shark; benign, hooded monks; Chinese princesses; naked warriors astride leaping horses; a tree sprouting scallop shells; spotted deer; a galleon and a midnight-blue unicorn.

From such settings, Chamber Music in Historic Sites, that dauntless, innovative concert series specializing in usually traditional programs played in offbeat locations, presented its two-day Catalina Festival of Chamber Music last weekend. As can happen with this series, the event opened eyes and ears.

With one exception, the programs were not forward-looking or particularly daring. At less than full length--with no intermissions, each program ran about 65 minutes--and at full prices (one event was priced at $50, the others at $30, $20 and $15), they were not exactly bargains. And concertgoers had the added expense of getting to Catalina and staying overnight.

Still, the combination of place and sound had to open vistas for even the jaded. Attendance at the smaller-sized locations ran to 50 and 60, at the Casino Theater to more than 200. By the standards of this series, those numbers represent success.

MaryAnn Bonino, who presides over the growing empire of chamber music activities of the Mount St. Mary’s College-sponsored Da Camera Society, has hosted the Historic Sites series in the most offbeat locations. You name it--places like 1920s residences, Victorian mansions, characterful libraries, hotel ballrooms, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Dolores del Rio’s Santa Monica Canyon house, the merry-go-round at Griffith Park, historic local churches and a number of city and county public buildings.

With pianist Delores Stevens (leader and principal of the Los Angeles-based Da Camera Players) and some interested Catalina residents, Bonino dreamed up a minifestival in Avalon after Stevens and violinist Kathleen Lenski performed there two years ago. The Historic Sites subscribers responded to the first, 1986 festival weekend “most healthily--they were virtually sold out,” says Bonino, and a second annual festival, June 6 and 7, became a reality.

It had to be one of Bonino’s wilder juxtapositions: Brahms, Ives, Schubert, Piston and Haydn in this resort-playland for tourists, sport fishermen, honeymooners and ordinary folks. Classical music side by side with the arcades, the T-shirt and souvenir shops, the ubiquitous cotton candy and soft-drink parlors, the noisy-but-fun rented electric cars.

With few exceptions, past decades--and Avalon has a fascinating history going back more than 100 years--have not seen extensive classical-music activity here. Furthermore, there are, by all accounts and personal search, no havens for gourmands in or around this little town that climbs the steep, Catalina hills. (One seeker of caffeine truth never found, in two days of looking, a strong and honest cup of coffee.)

But there is history here, most of it tied up, connected or inextricably bound to the fortunes and whims of W. K. Wrigley Jr., who founded many of the island’s traditions and institutions and whose family, through foundations, still controls Catalina’s destiny.

The shadow of Wrigley--”People here still always talk about Mr. Wrigley,” notes Bonino--still dominates the cultural life of the town. The opening concert of the 1987 series, for instance, took place in what used to be the ballroom (now a meeting room) at the Palms, the country-club-like former headquarters of Wrigley’s Chicago Cubs, the baseball team that trained every spring on Catalina from 1921 to 1951.

And after the 11 a.m. (on both festival days) concert masterminded by trombonist Miles Anderson and performed in Avalon School Auditorium--a functional but standard California school auditorium--listeners were shuttled to the Wrigley Memorial at the head of Avalon Canyon. There, in the resonant, sky-open space at the top of the 132-foot-high monument, flutist David Shostac played Debussy’s “Syrinx.”

Each of the seven sites offered its own character. Outdoors Sunday afternoon, the place was the former Wrigley mansion atop Mt. Ada (named after Wrigley’s widow), overlooking Avalon Bay and the town.

The night before, it was the spectacularly visual Casino Theater, with the designer of the decors, 90-year-old John Gabriel Beckman, in attendance, after being guest of honor at a pre-concert reception. Twice during the weekend it was the outdoor aviary, once touted as “the world’s largest bird cage,” at the abandoned Bird Park--a fitting and successful locale for a concert of chamber music for winds.

More important, in fact most important, was the caliber of the playing of 12 members of Stevens’ Da Camera Players, virtuoso musicians all, and flexible people. They took all hazards and vicissitudes of these peripatetic musical events in stride. When a small windstorm forced the four players at the Bird Park concert practically to lash their parts to the music stands, clarinetist David Shifrin, performing Messiaen’s “Abime des Oiseaux” (the Abyss of the Birds--for clarinet solo), commented unflappably: “This is an eight-clothespin piece.”

Nature collaborated, too, during two cloudy June days: No rain or natural electrical disturbance, as had befallen Avalon on the night preceding the festival, visited the concert sites. And, all around the fields and hillsides surrounding the town, one saw bougainvillea in rampant bloom.

Of course, there were birds. One bird flew into the Palms ballroom during the finale of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet just at that moment when the tonality changed from minor to major; a wag in the last row of listeners quipped, “That’s Joe Brahms, just checking up.” It could have been--the bird left, two minutes later, through an open door.

And at the Bird Park Saturday afternoon, numerous birds in nearby trees answered all wind calls emanating from the visiting quartet. In music by Gordon Jacob, Bach, Messiaen, Piston, Reich and Rossini, those answers seemed perfectly appropriate.

Catalina would not seem actually to offer the best circumstances for chamber music. The first and principal problem, as pianist Stevens points out, tactfully, is that “there are very few good pianos on the island. The result of that is that our repertoire has to be severely limited.”

With that limitation, and with the good cheer that experienced travelers try to bring to new locales, one found it easy to enjoy the second annual Catalina Festival of Chamber Music.

Some of the performances were stimulating; others actually became spectacular. Richard Todd’s handsome horn playing achieved that second category more than once in these two days. At the 98-year-old Avalon Community Church Saturday afternoon, he displayed breath, articulation, passionate statement and mellow tone in Robert Schumann’s fiery Adagio and Allegro, Opus 70, one of the composer’s many flowers of 1849.

Todd performed similar feats of tone and communication in works by Rossini and Haydn at surrounding festival events. In Rossini’s Quartet in F, which closed the Bird Park program, he was matched in ease and virtuosity by flutist Shostac, clarinetist Shifrin and bassoonist Ken Munday. In Haydn’s Divertimento in E-flat, his cohorts were violinist Ralph Morrison and cellist David Speltz.

Eleven o’clock on a sunny California June morning may be the least appropriate time to encounter the dark and autumnal rigors and ruminations of Brahms’ Quintet for clarinet and strings.

The performance at the Palms Ballroom--no dances have been held here in decades--though set distractingly in the middle of a golf course, and set upon aurally by passing trucks and electric carts, nevertheless found a plateau of repose and spiritual ease.

Shifrin, with his remarkable gift for illuminating a musical line without fragmenting it, led the way; his alert partners were Lenski, Morrison, violist Michael Nowak and Speltz.

Lenski and Stevens opened the Community Church concert Saturday with Ives’ Fourth Sonata, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting,” and let it speak for itself through an impassioned but controlled reading of high polish and warm tone. The program ended with an unfocused and accident-prone performance of Schubert’s E-flat Trio (Lenski, Speltz, Stevens). The next day, in the same room, the same piece flowed forth and sang out, as it can.

Violinist Erica Sharp was the assisting artist to her husband, trombonist/composer Miles Anderson, in an irresistible romp through avant-garde fields both mornings.

Heard Sunday, this program, beginning with Salvatore Martirano’s “Everything Goes When the Whistle Blows” for amplified violin and electronics and ending with a study for Anderson’s own “Hot Tubs--The Opera,” also included pieces by John Cage and the Australian composer, Martin Wesley-Smith.

The high point of this 11-event festival, however, came Saturday night, with the playing of a single work, Beethoven’s Septet, Opus 20, in Casino Theater.

Perhaps it was the Saturday-night frenzy, which seems to affect everyone on the island in summertime. Perhaps it was the late starting time--the event was scheduled to begin at 9:30 but did not get under way until nearly 9:55.

Whatever it was, this performance found a rare level of intensity and concentration. All seven players--Lenski, Nowak, Speltz, Ranney, Shifrin, Todd and Munday--kept a tight rein on strong feelings while wielding their sharpest technical powers with authority. There was lyricism of the brightest kind, but also a sense of daring and contrast and utter seriousness. In short, a genuine festival performance, just the kind for which we had come.