MUSIC REVIEWS : Convention Gives Way at Southland Festivals : The Changing of the Avant-Garde in Little Ojai

The big news at the overstuffed-weekend festival in this deceptively sleepy town should have been the new aesthetic profile.

Last year, the music director was the uncompromisingly cerebral, essentially Gallic Pierre Boulez. This year, the baton was passed to the ultra-American John Adams, a mild-mannered maestro and refugee from minimalism who seems to like things trendy, funky and sometimes even funny.

Everyone here was talking, however, about the weather. The forecasts mentioned the dreaded R-word. Rain. The modest amphitheater in verdant Libbey Park might be awash in more than modernist adventure.

Lukas Foss, one of Adams’ illustrious predecessors, once delighted the local boosters by observing that heaven was just a local call from Ojai. On Friday, John Sharp, the genial manager of the Ojai Valley Inn, worried that the line might be busy.

As a friendly fate would have it, he worried in vain. The raindrops fell between the first four (of seven) concerts. For the devout, sprawled on the lawn or crammed atop the torturous benches, it was Ojai business as usual.

Stimulating business. Provocative business. Busy business.

Adams was assuming leadership here for the first time (next summer will mark the return of Michael Tilson Thomas, absent since 1977). Most of Adams’ programs reflected a unifying theme: the influence of so-called popular impulses on our so-called serious music.

Of course, the composer could have demonstrated how Bach, Beethoven and Brahms made similar use of vernacular elements. That, however, might have damaged Adams’ theory of contemporary relativity, not to mention relevance.

“Popular culture is indeed an American invention,” he claimed in a program-booklet essay. This turned out to be just the first of numerous flights of silly hyperbole. During a podium chat, he went on to declare that John Cage, the second hero of the 1993 festival, was a genius comparable to Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. In the same breath, he ascribed “indisputable greatness” to Steve Reich.

Gosh.

The inaugural event, Friday night, was a concert by the Kronos Quartet, replete with the usual eclectic challenges, jukebox-lighting, high-energy bravura and push-button ovations. The relatively familiar repertory included John Zorn’s witty “Cat o’ Nine Tails” (the first of several loony-tunesque distortions on the weekend agenda), Hamza El Din’s “Escalay” (an engaging assimilation of Middle-Eastern ritual), Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s Chang Music IV (brashly percussive) and, saluting our latest crossover icon, Henryk Gorecki’s “Already It Is Dusk” (folsky-moody simplistic).

The action moved at 11 the next morning to the intimate and informal Ojai Valley Art Center for a tribute to Cage. Reading the 90 one-minute jokes and anecdotes that comprise “Indeterminacy,” Charles Shere proved himself a charming catcher of the wry. Meanwhile, Amy Knoles banged an occasional gong, popped some corn on a hot plate, toyed with a vacuum cleaner and provided other bits of presumably appropriate punctuation in an echt Cagean manner.

The exercise didn’t have much to do with music as we customarily define it. Still, it was engaging--at least for an hour.

The late-afternoon concert, back at Libbey Bowl, found Adams beating time efficiently, if a bit inflexibly, for the ever-dazzling New Music Group of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The festivities began with Silvestre Revueltas’ cheeky “Homenaje a Garcia Lorca,” which also happens to be a spiffy homage to the social traditions of Mexican dance. This served as an innocent prelude to Adams’ forbidding Chamber Symphony (1993), an unlikely fusion of Schonbergian severity and animated-cartoon fantasy. The finale, “Roadrunner,” is hectic above and beyond the call (too many notes, dear Amadeus), and it refuses to deliver the wonted Leitmotif (what, no beep-beep?). Even so, the piece is never less than wily.

The tone turned timid after intermission. Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite of 1934 didn’t seem jazzy at all, just sweet. Honky-tonk sleaze also turned out to be the missing element in a rather prim, all-too-operatic performance of Kurt Weill’s “Mahagonny Songspiel.” Stephanie Vlahos, sexily seconded by Carmella Jones, turned the chantoozie satire of the “Alabama Song” into something dangerously akin to Dalila-vamping. The languid impact was hampered further by Adams’ brisk tempo and by microphone distortion.

The duties of the male quartet were dispatched with finesse, and more pearly tone than necessary, by Jonathan Mack, David Kress, Mallory Walker and Michael Gallup.

The audience, understandably fatigued, shrank noticeably for the subsequent (9 p.m.) exploration of percussive permutation. It began with “Temazcal,” an exhausting and somewhat gimmicky duet for maracas virtuoso and snap-crackle-pop tape by Javier Alvarez. The composer served as his own miraculous maracas-shaker. Later, he provided the stoic pianist Gloria Cheng with an equally daunting challenge in the formulaic form of “Papolotl,” a dialogue between keyboard pounder and electronic insects.

The golden oldie on this program was John Cage’s “First Construction in Metal” (1939), an iconoclastic exercise that now looks more engaging than it sounds.

The Friday and Saturday night concerts both closed with music by Steve Reich. The Kronos Quartet offered his “Different Trains” (1988), which fuses static chugging and taped echoes thereof with fragments of a poignant Holocaust text. The assembled percussion virtuosos bruised their way through the innocent, equally pesky patterns of Music for Mallet Instruments (1973).

Reich’s repetition marathons strike some listeners as a liberating force, others as minimalist water torture. On both occasions, this listener--who happens to have a very low tolerance for hammers banging on his head--wanted to go screaming into the night.

But this was Ojai. We were already in the night.