Ojai Festival Goes Baroque--and Orcadian

First the bad news. It comes, even amid the alfresco splendors and musical adventures of the Ojai Festival, in threes.

1--The unofficial festival symbol--that wondrous, ancient, sprawling, long-ailing sycamore tree that flanks the stage of Libbey Bowl--has succumbed to rude amputation.

2--Electronic amplification, that most loathsome of modern musical diseases, has become an unquestioned way of acoustical life even in the rustic wild-bird habitat that masquerades as intimate amphitheater.

Natural sound may have been good enough for William Steinberg, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas and Calvin Simmons when they made music here. These days, however, microphones loom ominously and ubiquitously as lazy byproducts of the rock age.

3--The motherly culinary geniuses who used to outdo themselves producing paradisical pastries for intermission fortification and who, in the process, helped fill local educational coffers have disappeared. Last year the indulgent concert-goer could at least find some consolation in home-made lentil soup and carrot cake. This year (shudder) the common commercial offering was potato chips. To this we’ve come.

Even so, there was good news last weekend in this erstwhile haunt of the Chumash.

There was, in fact, plenty of good news: (1) A relatively ambitious marketing program has boosted attendance conspicuously. (2) For only $5, one could soothe the beleaguered Sitzfleisch and adorn the hard wooden benches with official, portable, foam-rubber pillows bearing the Ojai Festival logo. (3) Most important, of course, much of the music turned out to be stimulating and provocative; most of it sounded, if nothing else, stylish, and some of it proved uplifting.

Ojai ’88 was a festival with a split personality. Sometimes, we discovered, the disparate halves can be complementary.

Nicholas McGegan, the scholarly conductor of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of San Francisco and, on occasion, of the Long Beach Opera, was making his Ojai debut as music director. That ensured some authentic performances of old music.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the iconoclast who ignited the Fires of London and has found quirky serenity in his beloved Orkney Islands, was making his Ojai debut as composer in residence. That ensured some authentic performances of new music.

Despite the obvious type-casting, both British guests offered surprises. McGegan conducted Stravinsky as well as the inevitable Purcell, Bach, Handel and Rameau. Davies conducted Beethoven’s “Eroica” in addition to a sampling of his own compositions. The results, though decidedly mixed, were intriguing.

The festival opened Friday night with a spiffy, mildly irreverent bow toward the England of 1690--that is, the England of Purcell, Dryden and an operatic opus called “King Arthur.” McGegan conducted the ornate, occasionally poignant, sporadically heroic score with poise that never precluded vigor.

The Philharmonia Baroque bowed, thumped and tootled lustily on period instruments or reasonable facsimiles thereof. The fervor of the Santa Barbara Choral Society, trained by Steven Townsend, made up for what it lacked in finesse.

The soloists, who conveyed the essential dramatic impulses even in concert dress, balanced modest bravura with wry self-mockery. Nancy Armstrong projected a silly-goose persona and canary vocalism in the charming soprano curlicues. Paul Elliott brought taste and somewhat constricted tone to the tenorial duties. James Busterud dispatched the baritonal theatrics with point.

Malcolm McDowell--unforgettable alumnus of “A Clockwork Orange” and now an Ojai resident--tried wittily to unravel the plot convolutions during intra-opera recitations.

The only disappointments involved inadequate notes, skimpy credits and absent texts in the $2 program magazine. Annotation problems, not incidentally, remained a source of vexation throughout the festival.

A busy--perhaps too busy--Saturday agenda began at 11 with a free, suitably amateurish, high-spirited performance of Davies’ “Cinderella” (1980). Intended to be performed by children for children, it fuses clever Orffian endeavor with snappy show-biz routines. The mock-pop stuff suggests that Davies could easily out-Webber Andrew Lloyd if only the spirit moved him.

The deceptively informal chamber-music concert at 1 o’clock showcased the splendid, suitably augmented E.A.R. Unit of Los Angeles. The recipients of their virtuosic efforts were Davies and Stravinsky.

Typically, Davies’ “Ave Maris Stella” (1975) uses plainchant as its basic melodic impulse. The sextet begins with lovely, simple, elegiac tones. The sonorities wash against each other in waves of increasing complexity until impeccably orchestrated chaos emerges in the seventh of nine sections. The eventual resolution is dominated by the piquant pulsations of the marimba (deftly performed by Amy Knoles).

The only weakness of this engaging, sensitively colored piece involves excessive length. It is, apparently, a recurring Davies weakness.

Humor raised its cheeky head, and not a moment too soon, with his “Purcell: Fantasia and Two Pavans” (1968). Here, the antique graces of the original dances are filtered, with raucous glee, through the tawdry conventions of the fox trot. Even a honky-tonk piano gets into the act. It is fun.

Unannounced and casually clad in polo shirt and slacks, Davies conducted Davies with unobtrusive competence. After intermission, he passed the baton to McGegan, who presided over a crisp and spunky performance of Stravinsky’s “Histoire du soldat” suite.

Davies returned to the podium that night for the first of two concerts by the Ojai Festival Chamber Orchestra, an eager if emphatically uneven and probably under-rehearsed pick-up ensemble. For Beethoven’s “Eroica,” the unaccustomed maestro was content to sway rapidly and rhythmically from foot to foot, oddly accenting upbeats and asking for little but notes from his 45 players. Understandably, they gave him little but notes, in a square and sloppy approximation of the wondrous score.

Interpretive matters improved when he turned to his own music. The U.S. premiere of “Into the Labyrinth” (1983) sensitively charted another extended romantic voyage from introspection to confusion to something perilously close to transfiguration.

The emotional progress of the piece is reflected in the poetry of George Mackay Brown, which explores crucial changes in the Orkneys as modern technology threatens primitive innocence. Neil Mackie, for whom the tenor solos were written, sang with purity and taste in the exalted Peter Pears tradition.

It wasn’t his fault that the orchestra blanketed his slender tone in the agitated climaxes. Even the infernal microphones were of no avail here.

In a rousing finale for the common man, Davies offered the first American performance of the scaled-down version of his “Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise.” Written in 1983 for none less than John Williams and the Boston Pops, this little programmatic exercise plays beguiling games with instant storm music, folksy celebrations and kilted but off-kilter fiddlers. It reaches a crowd-pleasing climax with the simultaneous arrival of a glorious dawn and a bona fide Highland bagpiper (in this case, Nancy Crutcher Tunnicliffe).

Strathspeys go reeling boisterously into the night. Boozy bonhomie prevails. It is as if Copland somehow had gotten lost off the northern coast of Scotland and come up, as it were, with a Hoydown.

Traditionally, Sunday mornings in Ojai have been devoted to frivolity--a jazz concert, say, or a choral divertissement or a Scott Joplin marathon. This year, McGegan and his merry Baroque band serenaded the devout with great hits of Bach (the D-major Suite, BWV 1069) and Handel (“Water Musick”) interrupted by esoterica of Rameau (excerpts from “Pygmalion”).

The grand valedictory, Sunday at 5:30, began with Bohuslav Martinu’s Toccata e due canzoni (1946), conducted by the talented associate conductor of the festival, Diane Wittry. The buzzing ostinatos of Valkyrie wings, the lyrical slush and simplistic climaxes conjured odd but appealing images of Nixon in Czechoslovakia. Surface minimalism is not a strictly modern invention.

The concert ended with McGegan conducting a brisk, if not altogether idiomatic, performance of Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” in the 1947 revision. He tended to define the episodic nature of the ballet music in fits and spasms.

The piece de resistance came in between, with the U.S. premiere of Davies’ Oboe Concerto (1988). It has much in common with the poignant violin concerto, which Andre Previn and Isaac Stern introduced with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January.

Davies describes the work as a dialogue that treats the solo oboe and Haydnesque orchestra as equals. Chaste traces of plainsong develop into flashes of romantic passion. The oboe part--brilliantly realized by Stephen Colburn--explores the stratosphere with plaintive chants that eventually take extended bravura flight. The transformations are organic, the textures transparent, the dynamic and harmonic structures civil.

At 54, Davies isn’t an enfant terrible any more. He has mellowed. Arcadian Ojai provided an apt haven for his Orcadian tranquility.