SOUNDS AROUND TOWN / OJAI FESTIVAL : A Weekend in Focus : Leave it to Pierre Boulez to take the event firmly in hand after the mixed results of the past two years.

The pianist sat down to the spinet and began playing Chopin for the patrons at the Anglophiliac haunt known as Tottenham Court in Ojai. A man browsing in the jellies section joined in an uncommissioned duet, instinctively whistling the long, rhapsodic melody along with the pianist.

This is a scenario that would most likely occur during a weekend such as the one that just passed.

During the annual, world-renowned Ojai Festival, now 46 years old and counting, music lovers from far and wide descend in droves on the town. Thankfully for the festival’s welfare, the droves were especially thick this past weekend.

For many, this reporter included, attending the Ojai Festival is tantamount to a perennial religious retreat.

Even when the music itself wavers in purpose, the collective experience is cleansing.

All in all, the 1992 Ojai Festival amounted to a marshaling of forces and focus, thanks to conductor Pierre Boulez.

At the closing concert, he was presented with a plaque from the city of Ojai commemorating 25 years since his first visit back in 1967. This year’s visit was his fifth.

Accepting the award, Boulez stepped to the microphone--a rare occurrence--and, in broken English, expressed his appreciation, saying “the best gesture I can do is to play for you.”

Leave it to Boulez to bring the festival firmly back to its feet after the mixed results of the past two years, with 1990’s uneven contemporary music circus and the reactionary Mozartean detour of last year.

Over the course of the festival’s five concerts, a delicate balance was created between touches of daring and solid 20th-Century programming. Principally it was held together by Stravinsky, a former Ojai visitor who, by now, is a sort of honorary court composer of the festival.

His music was bolstered by doses of Schoenberg, Bartok, Debussy, Copland, and the recently deceased Olivier Messiaen.

But this will also be remembered in Ojai annals as the year that Peter Sellars came to town, and it has not yet recovered.

News that Sellars would take on the staging of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”) elicited a high level of curiosity. With Sellars, unpredictability is the byword. We wondered: Would this be one of Sellars’ elegant productions, or one deploying his guerrilla tactics? It was the latter.

Acting on impulse and the imperative of current events, Sellars designed his production in a post-riot mode.

Operating with a rough-hewn, fresh-from-the-street-to-you aesthetic, Sellars radically revised the original text, rap-ifying it into hip-hop iambic pentameter for female rappers Suggah B and T Love, who also did a rubbery marionette dance to Stravinsky’s music.

Sellars also engaged an all-black cast and inserted references to Ross Perot, Uzis and the recent L.A. riot. The action took place from a pickup truck on stage, with makeshift painted placards providing a suggestion of set changes.

Meanwhile, Boulez attended to the business of bringing to life Stravinsky’s exquisite score from the primly dressed ensemble off to stage right. There were moments of glorious, irreverent symbiosis between the two poles, amid stretches of head-scratching bizarreness.

What would Stravinsky think? What did Boulez think? What are we to think?

However unpolished the end result of Sellars’ rush job, it at least served to inject social sting and new blood into a familiar classic.

What it also did was to fuse the too-often insular world of classical music with vernacular culture. In the end, this “Tale” was an audacious, mind-opening experiment, albeit a hit-or-miss one.

From start to finish, Friday’s opening concert proved to be a study in contrast.

Schoenberg’s classic high culture cabaret opus “Pierrot Lunaire,” written in 1912, was one of the oldest pieces of the weekend. Still, it was one of the most challenging pieces amid an otherwise fairly accessible celebration of 20th-Century music.

Soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, an Ojai vet, extracted the pristine dance of German language and the theatrical veneer of irony. At one point, a heckler on the bike path behind the stage mocked her sprechstimme with warbling hoots. Such are the risks of outdoor concerts. The real world intervenes.

Unlike in Boulez’s last visit to Ojai three years ago, when a fair amount of his own music was played, Boulez the composer made only a sparse appearance, but it was potent.

At Saturday night’s intimate concert at the Presbyterian church, Messiaen--an early mentor for Boulez and also the guest composer at Ojai in 1985--was supposedly the centerpiece. But the real expressive power lay in Boulez’s own two works. His 1945 piece “Douze Notations pour le piano,” played by Gloria Cheng, was icily profound.

“Dialogue de l’ombre double for clarinet and tape,” written in 1985 to honor Luciano Berio’s 60th birthday, involved a surreal interplay between clarinetist John Bruce Yeh and digitally recorded clarinet parts dispersed throughout the church space on multiple speakers. In its own cerebral way, it was a theatrical experience.

Oddly, the least effective piece all weekend was Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” violin sonata on Sunday morning’s program. Though marvelously performed by violinist Cho-Liang Lin and pianist Andre-Michel Schub, it was a fish out of water amid a thrilling program of Debussy and Stravinsky (including a pithy encore of an unpublished tango).

Here, Beethoven’s proto-romantic language was actually hard to listen to. Context is everything.

There were modernist pillars propping up the festival, but little of what could be termed “difficult” for those listeners disinclined toward atonal music.

Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella Suite,” Copland’s “Short Symphony,” Ravel’s “Sheherazade,” Bartok’s “Four Pieces for Orchestra,” Schoenberg’s tonal piece “Chamber Symphony No. 2,” added up to an agreeably diverse and palatable tour of our musical century.

Debussy’s sonorous “La Mer,” as brought to a level of prickly clarity by longtime Debussy specialist Boulez, closed the festival on an appropriately dreamy note.

As if on cue during the last concert, a butterfly fluttered from stage to sky, a tidy kind of metaphor for the sound waves that ascend from this humble stage one weekend a year.

Next year, John Adams will make his debut in Libbey Bowl. If there was any doubt, the Ojai Festival is back on track.