MUSIC REVIEW : Diary of an Ojai Weekend : The Music Remains the Focus at Festival

The sun blazed in the land of the Chumash. The birds sang, the gnarled sycamore clung to dignity in decay, and the audiences--gratifyingly large and amazingly sophisticated--cheered.

The sleepy little town that once, in a flight of inspired typecasting, portrayed Shangri-La for itinerant Hollywood isn’t all that sleepy any more. Or all that little.

Ojai has been hosting an annual music festival for nearly 50 years. Your faithful scribe has been attending for nearly 30. The lovely locale seems to be weathering the passage of time better than the bleary-eared reporter. But the stimulation lingers on.

This year’s long yet hardly lost weekend began with a Friday night concert that was stellar in at least two obvious senses. The festival ended early Sunday evening, five uncompromising, overstuffed programs later, with a symphonic tribute to a characteristic master who had worked here in 1955 and 1956: Igor Stravinsky.

Michael Tilson Thomas--a proudly progressive product of Southern California (typically neglected in Los Angeles)--returned for his seventh season since 1968 on the podium in the modest bowl in verdant Libbey Park. Additional glamour was provided by an internationally celebrated guest who happens to have received some crucial training in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles: the baritone Thomas Hampson.

Tilson Thomas brought along his own orchestra from Miami, the youthful, exuberant and versatile New World Symphony, which employs very few players over the age of 30. He also brought an aesthetic conscience that respects the old but really probes the new-- new being anything influential to inquisitive musicians and relatively unfamiliar to inquisitive audiences.

Some things have changed in Ojai. The ever-dedicated Betty Izant doesn’t run the box office out of a cigar box any more. For better or worse, the air of cheerful improvisation--”Golly, Igor, let’s get the kids out of the park and put on a concert!”--has evaporated with the pink mountain mist. Amplification has become a common if nasty fact of life.

Joan Kemper, the tireless executive director, has turned the festival into a sleek professional operation. Ara Guzelimian now minds the late Lawrence Morton’s store, and the young man isn’t nearly as dour as his lamented predecessor.

Other things haven’t changed. The wooden benches, which represent the good seats, still provide a hard trial for the assembled Sitzfleisch, though posterior challenges can be mitigated with the purchase of a $10 souvenir pillow. The spacious lawn at the rear still provides friendly accommodation for those who prefer to take their culture lying down. And, despite increasing urban distractions, the music remains the central focus.

Ojai, thank goodness, is still Ojai.

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Friday at 8:15 p.m.: The festival begins with what turns out to be a recurring theme: yesterday’s music filtered through today’s sensibilities. In this case it is “Machault Mon Chou” (1988), a modest yet sweetly cheeky re-creation of some 14th-Century inspirations by Charles Wuorinen. Next comes an agreeably mild-mannered, gently dissonant Andante for String Orchestra (1931) by Ruth Crawford, the only female composer on the festival agenda and apparently an afterthought (she wasn’t listed in any advance announcements).

The central attraction involves Mahler’s haunting “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,” sung with exquisite poise, sensitivity and lyricism by Hampson--in the best Fischer-Dieskau tradition. One may worry a bit about initial tempos that seem slower than slow, and about expressive indulgences that teeter on the brink of precious mannerism. But Hampson’s poignancy triumphs over all risks, even if it cannot triumph over some noisy intrusions--children screaming on the nearby playground and a band tootling on the patio of a nearby Mexican restaurant.

Brahms’ second Serenade, Opus 16, serves as a blissful benediction. Tilson Thomas conducts with stylish conviction and obvious sympathy throughout. His orchestra encounters some passing pitch problems and the brass tend to sound raucous in the warm night air. Somehow it doesn’t matter.

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Saturday at 10 a.m.: The Southbeat Percussion Group of the New World Symphony presents a “Family Program,” a.k.a. kiddie concert. It begins, rather ponderously, with an amateurish quasi-dramatized tale of a Scrooge who hates music. It ends with a clever audience-participation exercise in which the kiddies out front (kiddies of all ages, of course) get to make their own music, on cue, by shaking chow mein cartons containing a few pebbles. A good time is had by some.

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Saturday at 4:30: The concert begins with music by a distinguished Ojai alumnus, Lukas Foss. His “Phorian” (1967/1994) turns out to be a decreasingly amusing essay in scrambled Bach. The Kapellmeister of the Thomaskirche meets the Keystone Kops. A little irreverence goes a long way.

Leonard Bernstein’s “Arias and Baracarolles” (1988)--bittersweet on wry--engage Hampson and mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore in a set of sometimes witty, sometimes sentimental songs. The singers make the most of their flimsy opportunities, sympathetically supported by Tilson Thomas. The unobtrusive orchestration by Bruce Coughlin, written after Bernstein’s death, apparently supplants the more abrasive version by Bright Sheng. The annotations, here and elsewhere, are ridiculously inadequate, and a crucial page of text is missing from the program booklet.

After intermission comes Leon Kirchner’s ardent and intricate Music for Flute and Orchestra (1978/1994). The otherworldly chirping of Paula Robison’s virtuosic flute is nicely echoed by some worldly, equally virtuosic chirping by birds inhabiting the amphitheater trees. Talk about chance music.

The concert ends prettily, and not a hemidemisemiquaver too soon, with Luciano Berio’s “Rendering” (1990), a brilliant realization of Schubert’s sketches for his 10th Symphony gently fused with modernist “cement.”

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Saturday at 9 p.m.: Musical indigestion beckons for at least one tiring listener as Tilson Thomas embarks on a seven-part mini-marathon of chamber-music self-consciously labeled “O Pioneers!” Although the individual components fascinate, the sum, in context, seems less than the parts.

The pioneers in question are John Cage, Adolph Weiss, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell and Nicolas Slonimsky. Despite chronically misleading or incomplete program notes by Jim Svejda, one admires the funky vitality of Cage’s “Credo in Us” (1942) and the circuitous suavity of Weiss’ obscure Concerto for Bassoon and String Quartet (1949). One savors the repetitive nod to Asian formalism in McPhee’s “Balinese Ceremonial” (wonderfully played by pianists Tilson Thomas and Ralph Grierson) and, more subtly, in Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Flute and Percussion (1939). One is engaged by the quirky mock-folk impulses in Henry Cowell’s String Quartet No. 4 (1936).

In each instance, one applauds the easy elegance of the soloists, all members of the New World Symphony.

“Studies in Black and White” (1929) by the beloved iconoclast Nicolas Slonimsky, now 100, reflect a dry and brittle wit engaged in brain games. Grierson plays the eight little pieces crisply.

It is fun. And it is enough.

The concert has gone on without intermission for an hour and 50 minutes. It is nearly 11. Cage’s presumably climactic “Third Construction” (1941) still looms. The audience, however, has dwindled drastically.

Reluctantly but wearily, I join the dwindlers.

The Ojai diary will be completed in Tuesday’s Calendar.