Sound’s Up on Catalina : Only 26 miles across the sea, a scenic festival settles into comfortable contradictions

In its third incarnation, the Catalina Festival of Chamber Music has settled happily into comfortable contradictions, rejoicing in dichotomies such as outdoor chambers and sending its clientele--and performers--breathlessly scurrying to supremely relaxing concerts.

Produced by the Da Camera Society as the finale to the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series this season, the festival last Saturday and Sunday crammed in 12 concerts at seven widely dispersed sites, plus assorted peripheral events. The spirit of the affair--a complex gestalt formed from the convivial interactions of musicians and audience, sites and sounds--was much too easy-going for true frenzy, but at times it came close.

The festival had little impact on the resort consciousness of Avalon, but among the crowds of day-trippers one could spot clusters of chamber music fans, identified by black canvas carryalls stamped with the Historic Sites logo and much worried consultation of schedules and watches. The plaintive cry of “Is there another shuttle?” was the theme song at Island Plaza, the hub of festival audience transportation.

Even the most well-organized or speediest of would-be listeners could not get to everything, however. Tickets ($12-$50) were available for most events, but the schedule forced some hard choices, pitting interesting repertory against intriguing venues.

The most difficult decision had to be made for Saturday evening, when a strong program of music for oboe and/or guitar at the Inn on Mt. Ada went up against concerts at two sites new to the festival, the Airport-in-the-Sky and the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel.

For tourists, the remote mountaintop airport offered the lures of a scenic journey, plus a preliminary barbecue. The musical payoff, however, was quartets by Haydn and Mendelssohn, played by Angeles String Quartet. Considerable cheering greeted the Angeles advent last year, but the ensemble spent the season diligently overexposing a limited repertory, of which the airport offerings were frequently played examples.

That left a recital of Americana at the hotel created from two houses built for Zane Grey in 1926, as the concert that best combined unfamiliarity of music and place. As a concert hall, the open terrace between the two wings of the hotel provided nice views--plus interruptions from the nearby bell tower twice and a resident cat.

Stalwarts of the Da Camera Players battled the distractions, including wind-battered music, with unflappable zest. Gary Gray gave a suitably sweet-and-sour reading of Leonard Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata, bassoonist Kenneth Munday tossed off John Steinmetz’s blithely fiendish “Streets of Laredo” Etude and a similarly themed, neo-classical Sonata by one Romeo Cascarino with plangent aplomb, and David Shostac blew sweetly through Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano and the Sonatine, Opus 100, by Dvorak.

Delores Stevens, artistic director of the Players and keyboardist extraordinaire, accompanied as accommodatingly as a thinly amplified Yamaha electric piano allowed. She turned to an even less tractable instrument for a brief and tinny solo turn with John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano.

The festival offered more opportunity for stretching legs than ears. The afternoon programs in particular were filled with eine kleine nap- musik , affectionately played and received. A repeated program in Bird Park presented further engaging woodwind tootling, with real style and zest from Shostac, oboist Victoria Tenace, Munday and Stevens in a Trio Sonata by Telemann and moody authority from the omnipresent Shostac in Messiaen’s “Merle noir,” interspersed with crisp French Baroque (electronic) harpsichord solos courtesy of the equally indispensable Stevens.

Sunday afternoon at the Inn on Mt. Ada, where the Pacific Rim is not a trendy concept but a breathtaking view of sea and rock, plucked strings took precedence. The former residence of island mogul William Wrigley Jr. and the summer White House for Presidents Harding and Coolidge, the Inn is now an ultra-posh--$440 a night for the deluxe suite, booked far in advance--bed-and-breakfast hotel, and an incomparably gently elegant setting for chamber music.

Harpist Amy Shulman matched the elegance with a fluent, varied solo set, and accompanied violist Michael Nowak and hornist Paul Stevens in suave easy-listening duos. Guitarist James Smith played works by Moreno-Torroba and Albeniz caressively, and teamed with Shostac in some of his own irresistible arrangements of popular American songs, ranging from “You and the Night and the Music” to “I’ve Got Rhythm.”

The most ponderable program had to be that of the Angeles Quartet--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--Sunday at the Avalon Community School. From their season-long repertory they offered Bartok’s First String Quartet, and with Nowak, played Mozart’s Quintet in D, K. 593. The day before at the school, Wilkie and Dembow played Mozart’s Duo in B-flat, K. 424 with mellow grace, on a program further distinguished by Gray’s urgent, eloquent account of Berg’s Four Clarinet Pieces and Tenace’s piquant elan in Poulenc’s Oboe Sonata.

The Avalon Community Church was the scene for the opening concert of the festival, presented by Lenski, Dembow, Erdody and Stevens. The church will be 100 years old in September, and the concert there Sunday was to celebrate that centennial, beginning with music from 1889 and ending with the premiere of Mark McGurty’s “Catalina Cantilena,” commissioned for the occasion by Stevens. McGurty, however, never finished the composition, according to MaryAnn Bonino, director of the Da Camera Society.

There were other holes in the festival schedule. Actor Stuart Whitman was to have read some of Zane Grey’s fishing stories at the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, but canceled to attend his son’s graduation that weekend. A repeat of one of the concerts was also canceled.

Despite the cancellations and a thoroughly gloomy Saturday, there was little sense of adversity. The final concert of the festival, in the heroically gaudy art moderne movie palace of the Casino Theater, proved a celebratory climax, and the fittest merging of aural and visual stimuli, the Bird Park extravagances notwithstanding.

There the Angeles Quartet demonstrated some of the virtues of living with a limited repertory in a well-thought, finely-spun account of Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet (some unevenness in the Presto aside), and the audience of putative sophisticates demonstrated the perils of a diet of short works and excerpts by clapping between movements, until waved off by Lenski. Festival heroes Shostac, Gray and Shulman joined the quartet in Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro,” Shostac and the strings gave a richly textured reading of Arthur Foote’s gloriously gooey “Night Piece,” and Stevens and her ubiquitous electronic keyboard joined the strings in the suite from Milhaud’s “Creation du monde.”

From there it remained only to seek transportation back to the mainland. The physical separation on Catalina, though relatively easily achieved, is one of the crucial spiritual elements of the festival. Look for the next one in 1991, however. The Da Camera Society is planning other festivals for next season, says Bonino, and is thinking of the Catalina Fest now as a biennial event.