MUSIC REVIEW : American Varieties in Opening of Ojai Fest

For more than four decades, a kaleidoscopic variety has characterized the annual Ojai Festival.

In 1990, for the 44th edition of the late-spring gathering of musicians in this mountain-sheltered valley, variety in abundance is again the main offering.

Under the latest music director, Stephen (Lucky) Mosko--who was born in the year of the first Ojai Festival--it is a versatility spread over that area of the musical map described in the festival’s title: “Recent Views From America.”

Nothing illustrates this better than the Saturday-night program in Festival Bowl--the sixth event in the eight-concert series this weekend.

That program juxtaposed a filmic score by Mosko himself with an Apollonian new work by the 81-year-old Elliott Carter, composer in residence this year, and a Dionysian one from 1984 by Steve Reich.

Now, the cerebral Carter and the visceral Reich are at opposite poles of contemporary composition, despite their general acceptance in the musical world as mainstream writers. But the aridity of Carter’s recent Violin Concerto (given its premiere in San Francisco last month) and the expansive lushness of Reich’s “Desert Music” provided an object lesson in density, sobriety and formula versus airiness, articulation and naturalness.

Ole Bohn, the Norwegian fiddler who played the San Francisco premiere, was the resourceful and intense protagonist in the concerto. Mosko led both works with quiet, concentrated authority. His own “The Garden of Time,” a colorful occasional piece written for the 150th anniversary of the City of Sacramento, proved only fitfully engaging.

More violent contrasts marked Friday’s opening-night program, a so-called marathon concert in Festival Bowl, when distinctive works by Frederic Rzewski, Arthur Jarvinen, Joan La Barbara, Rand Steiger and Rachel Rosenthal collided in a lineup performed by the California E.A.R. Unit, backbone of the 1990 festival, plus guest performers.

Rosenthal’s “Amazonia,” a new, environment-obsessed performance-art piece introduced in Los Angeles recently to general acclaim, became the climactic moment in this agenda. But it was set up strongly in Rzewski’s brief but potent “Aerial Tarts,” Jarvinen’s jaunty, rock-based “Murphy-nights,” La Barbara’s atmospheric “October Music,” Steiger’s dense and complex “Thirteen Loops,” but, especially, Rzewski’s pure-music “Mayn Yingele,” an old-fashioned but powerful work for piano solo, performed by the composer.

Three daytime events on Saturday--when temperatures in the mid-’90s and clear, unsmogged skies made this resort town seem more idyllic than ever--kept festival-goers on the run.

A children’s concert in Festival Bowl showed the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players expert at performing, less successful at holding the interest of the young listeners gathered for this 10 a.m. event. Too often, the chosen works proved too gentle for the outdoor setting and exuberant audience.

Rzewski returned to the Bowl at 1 p.m. to play another solo piece, his “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” which seems not to have lost its power to mesmerize in the 15 years since it was written.

Most popular of the daytime events was the program of chamber music by Carter given in a packed Ojai Presbyterian Church, Saturday afternoon. This generous, 80-minute agenda, played energetically by the nine members of the E.A.R. Unit, reminded one again of Carter’s pre-eminence at this moment in American musical history.