Ojai Festival to Offer Century-Hopping Feats : Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas returns to the event, bringing with him his all-embracing musical overview.

“What’s this?” the music lover wants to know, looking over the program for this year’s Ojai Festival. Mahler, Brahms, Bach, Schubert coming to the traditionally 20th Century-minded Ojai Festival? Is it a shameless bid for a broader audience, or a serious typo problem?

No, it’s just the year Michael Tilson Thomas comes to town, returning to the festival that he has steered no less than six times in the past quarter century. He’s bringing with him the generous, all-embracing musical overview that holds him in good stead as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, and will likewise do when he takes over the San Francisco Symphony in 1995.

There still will be plenty of 20th-Century music heard in the Libbey Bowl this weekend, from Takemitsu to Berio to Piazolla. Notably, Thomas will also perform the music of such past Ojai Festival music directors as Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Lukas Foss and Thomas’ own teacher, Ingolf Dahl.

Although he hasn’t officially been at Ojai since 1977, Thomas is well-entrenched in the festival’s history, having played a critical role there throughout the late ‘60s and most of the ‘70s. Over the years, he has done his share to keep alive the beleaguered cause of living music, but not at the expense of the wholesale history of classical music, an attitude clearly reflected in his schedule for the 48th Ojai Fest.

This year, there will be an additional family concert outside the main festival schedule, by SouthBeat, the percussion ensemble from the New World Symphony. The concert will take place at Libbey Bowl on Saturday at 10 a.m.

As always, the Ojai Festival is the obvious highlight of the cultural calendar in the area--Ventura County’s bountiful gift to the musical world, in the largest sense of the term.

What follows is a blow-by-blow, concert-by-concert account of what’s in store:

FRIDAY, 8:15 P.M.

New World Symphony Orchestra; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Thomas Hampson, baritone.

Kicking off the festival in a fittingly cross-historical way, the very living Charles Wuorinen offers his piece “Machault Mon Chou”, in homage to the 14th -Century composer Guillame de Machaut. We’re then flung into the 19th Century and into the lap of late romantic impulses with Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer,” sung by renowned baritone Hampson, once a student at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West. Brahms’ Serenade No. 2 in A, Opus 16 closes the program.

SATURDAY, 4:30 P.M.

New World Symphony Orchestra; Michael Tilson Thomas conductor; Thomas Hampson, baritone; Margaret Lattimore, mezzo-soprano; Paula Robison, flute.

Another century-hopping feat is embodied in “Phorion,” a piece by Lukas Foss, based on material from Bach’s canon. Following Leonard Bernstein’s late-period work, Arias and Barcarolles, and Leon Kirchner’s Music for Flute and Orchestra, the concert ends with another new/old musical grafting, “Rendering,” in which Italian modernist Luciano Berio reshapes Schubert.

SATURDAY, 9 P.M.

New World Symphony Chamber Players; Michael Tilson Thomas and Ralph Grierson, pianos.

Here, Thomas trades his baton for a grand piano for a concert under the heading “O Pioneers!” This program focuses on music of the United States--the West Coast, even--with music by John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee and Los Angeles-based, encyclopedic musical gadfly Nicolas Slonimsky, who recently turned a ripe, young 100.

SUNDAY, 11 A.M.

New World Symphony Brass Quintet; Paula Robison, flute; Timothy Hester, piano.

This year’s chamber music program for a Sunday morning at Ojai is a typically mixed musical salad. It opens with Bach, closes with a piece by Thomas himself--”Street Song”--and makes stops along the way with music of Aaron Copland, Tori Takemitsu, Schubert and Berio’s “Sequenza I for solo flute,” performed by Paula Robison.

SUNDAY, 5:30 P.M.

New World Symphony Orchestra; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor.

A staple of 20th-Century repertoire, Edgard Varese’s “Integrales” opens the final concert, which also includes Ingolf Dahl’s “The Tower of Saint Barbara,” relevant to both Thomas’ student days at USC under Dahl and also the legacy of Santa Barbara. Astor Piazolla, the Argentine nuevo tango master, died a couple of years ago in the midst of a general public discovery of his music. His “Tangazo” represents another branch of American music at the festival.

Closing the festival with Stravinsky, in this case his Symphony in Three Movements, is nothing new. Stravinsky, who appeared at and championed the Ojai Festival during his Los Angeles residency, is something of an honorary saint of the Ojai Fest. His music, jubilant, tough, and forward-thinking, embodies the ideal Ojai spirit.

Details

* WHERE, WHEN: Ojai Festival, Friday-Sunday, at the Libbey Bowl in Ojai; 646-2094.