Arts Fest Cheers Tucson in Winter : 150,000 expected at events that bring established artists and emerging ones to a $1.2-million celebration

Forget cowboys and retirees. Tucson in winter may not rival Paris in spring as an image for sophisticated escape, but it’s not all rodeos and golf, either.

Tucsonans point out with pride that their city is one of the few in this country with a resident symphony and ballet, opera and theater companies. It has a wide range of museums and galleries and at this time of the year--between snowfalls--crisp, clean air and implausibly vivid sunsets.

Tucson also has a new, ambitious arts festival. The first $1.2-million “Festival in the Sun,” opened Feb. 11 with a free all-day, open-air arts fiesta and runs through March 4.

A winter arts festival is a canny and logical counter-programming move, giving Tucson tourism a major, celebrative event during its high season, a time when most other arts organizations are deep in business-as-usual subscription seasons. Festival organizers expect a cumulative audience of 150,000 from visitors and residents in a metropolitan area with a population barely more than 500,000.

Grandiosely subtitled “The American Southwest’s International Celebration of the Human Spirit,” the festival was designed around a theme of artistic “Turning Points.” It juxtaposes commissions for such cutting-edge artists as composer Daniel Lentz and choreographer David Parsons with safe showcases for touring stars such as Isaac Stern and Jessye Norman. It brings emerging artists such as pianist Anthony de Mare and the Hexagon ensemble together with all the local groups in far-flung sites around a University of Arizona hub.

And if empty seats are any indication, it is a festival with plenty of room for Tucson to grow into. Brainchild of UA president Henry Koffler and cultural affairs director Alexandra Jupin, the festival was born and nurtured on campus and seems to have had a rather ambivalent impact on the town outside. The introductory editorial in the current issue of Tucson Magazine, for example, notes that “two major events happening in Tucson this February are the Rodeo and Gem & Mineral Show.” Not a word about the festival.

However, if the audience for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra last weekend in Centennial Hall was about half the 2,264-seat capacity, it was an alert, sophisticated audience. Conductor Hugh Wolff, the festival music adviser, formed taut, imaginative programs around the major festival music premieres and delivered them to listeners amazingly free from premature applause and coughing.

The festival commissioned “Apache Wine” from Los Angeles-based composer Lentz, and the St. Paul ensemble--the festival orchestra-in-residence--presented it Feb. 16. Previously a noted exponent of techno-minimalism, Lentz here turns into a stream-of-consciousness orchestral colorist, illustrating the festival theme, “Turning Points.”

Cast in three movements labeled White, Blush and Red, “Apache Wine” is no vintage varietal. Rather it is a bold blend, an aural crazy-quilt of generally bright snippets in a variety of styles. Lentz says that he deliberately sought a break with traditional structures, and there is little repetition here, either of the iterative minimalist kind or large-scale formal determinants.

The effect, however, is spontaneous rather than chaotic or purposeless. There is a general increase in tempo across the three movements, and color and metrical shifts shape the piece in intuitive ways.

The scoring includes self-parodying synthesizer washes that ape the choral parts of Ravel’s “Daphne et Cloe” in the first movement and provide potent punctuation elsewhere. The sound drops off quickly in Centennial Hall, but the explosiveness of the score was still readily apparent.

The next night, Wolff and his orchestra introduced John Adams’ “The Wound-Dresser” as a Southwest premiere. The piece is not as radical a stylistic break for Adams as “Apache Wine” is for Lentz, but it does show the continued growth of the post-minimalist aesthetic.

“The Wound-Dresser” is an introspective, subtly urgent setting of Walt Whitman’s poetic recollections of his Civil War work caring for wounded soldiers. The composition presents a tightly unified vision of compassion for suffering, connected through the expressive vocal solo, musically long-breathed and rhetorically understated. It does have a slow, gentle pulse and is tonal in a typically flexible, easily ruffled way, but the arching, aching-but- clear-sighted vocal line and narrative assurance are its dominant characteristics.

The soloist was baritone Sanford Sylvan, the estimable Chou En-lai of Adams’ “Nixon in China.” He brought restrained lyric point, clear enunciation and warm, ample sound to the music composed for him.

Wolff and his players accompanied with ruminative grace, providing the steely shimmer and mysterious rumbles that Adams calls for from the orchestra. Concertmaster Romuald Tecco soared in his limpid obbligato, and Gary Bordner and Tom Rolf offered clarion purity in the crucial, Coplandesque trumpet solos.

Touring with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is cellist Carter Brey who illuminated--no, ignited--both evenings. Saturday his vehicle was the Shostakovich Concerto No. 1, in a fiery, big-boned, deeply felt performance. Brey proved equally fluent Friday in Schumann’s Concerto, treating it as an instrumental aria. There though, portamento introduced a maudlin element with a frequency that suggested a dubious interpretive device had become a phrasing crutch.

Mozart’s “Posthorn” Serenade, K. 320, and Haydn’s “Miracle” Symphony, No. 96, brought the orchestra to center attention. Wolff and Co. are persuasive classicists, nimble in articulation and crystalline in texture, with wind-dominated balances. The performances were models of point, though one could wish for something warmer and deeper in both.

The festival performances all have educational reflections. Both Lentz and Adams were present to discuss their music. The festival brought them together Saturday afternoon for a putative symposium titled “The New Chamber Music.”

In reality it proved a loosely guided question-and-answer session, moderated by Armando Tranquilino of the UA faculty. A coherent focus was lacking, but the wit, commitment and relative openness of the composers made it a stimulating 90 minutes, though their views went unchallenged by the receptive audience.

Though both could be self-effacing about their work, both insisted that minimalism was a style of overwhelming artistic significance. Lentz said that through minimalism “we’re building toward a common practice,” while Adams asserted that he expects that in the eyes of history, “atonality will be seen as a rather brief tributary to the mainstream.”

Adams has gone back and forth on his acceptance of the term, but this time said he found minimalism “a very useful label.” He gave it a three-point definition: 1) music that is tonal, with a harmonic design that tends to move slowly; 2) music that uses regular pulsation; 3) music that reiterates small fragments. He went on to say that minimalism is the “only truly distinct, truly new stylistic development in the last 30 years.”

Much of Tucson is generic suburb--the San Fernando Valley with cactus. Home of Speedway Boulevard, long and widely touted as “the ugliest street in America,” Tucson itself is not a city of great visual distinction, despite (because of?) an affection for flat roofs and mock-adobe.

South of the city, however, is the Mission San Xavier del Bac, a.k.a The White Dove of the Desert. A striking piece of late-colonial Baroque architecture begun in 1789, decorated in a mixture of folk and rococo styles, it is still functioning as the parish church for the San Xavier Indian Reservation.

It is also a tourist mecca, with a rustic Indian arts-and-crafts bazaar surrounding it. The confluence of worshipers, tourists and concert-goers made it a rather lively concert site Sunday afternoon, for the local heroes of the Lane Justus Chorale. With people walking in and out of the distinctive church throughout the performance, the festival had a concert of real site-specific character.

It also had a full house, partly due perhaps to the influx of an accidental audience in the form of unsuspecting tourists, but also suggesting a keen community interest in the resident companies.

In any case, the free program was a peculiar pleasure. The singers were technically inconsistent--sustaining rapt musical lines with soft, pure sound in the flattering acoustic one moment, unraveling the next in genteel disagreements over pitch and articulation--but their a capella repertory was well-chosen, though they did not venture any works by New World colonial-era composers. Such things prove much more memorable than performances by touring artists that could be heard anywhere.

There is also a border subtext to the festival, manifested in some museum exhibits and in performances by Folklorico Durango and Repertorio Espanol. That, and appearances by pianist Nikolai Petrov, give the festival its much belabored internationalism. Petrov will give a recital Tuesday and play the Tchaikovsky B-flat-minor Concerto with the Tucson Symphony Monday, on a program that also features the U.S. premiere of Rostislav Boiko’s Symphony No. 2.

Also still to come is the world premiere of “The Kiss” by David Parsons, the other festival commission. The David Parsons Dance Company presents it Friday at the Tucson Convention Center, with additional performances twice Saturday--including a free matinee in a park--and next Sunday.

Music and dance are the key to this festival, and the next as well. Already planned for 1991 are commissions for Edward Villella and the Miami City Ballet and the Kronos Quartet.

In addition to arts, the promoters expect the festival to bring Tucson a business windfall of $3.6 million. That projection may be as inflated as some of the hype, but encouraging such a seedling to grow anywhere requires hefty amounts of cash and fertilizer.

Given that, the potential here is enormous. The festival has bestowed its clearly limited commission largess with care on important, progressive, populist artists and seems to be providing a supportive structure for its resident companies.

Now if only it can compete with the rodeo. . . .