Music Review : Ojai Diary II: Festival Finales, Intimate and Grand

The delirious festival in the rustic sun ended in a blaze of Stravinsky.

Before the grand finale on Sunday, however, Michael Tilson Thomas, the maestro in residence, repaid a few artistic debts. In the process, he reminded the adoring throng that little musical things can mean a lot. Not incidentally, he also offered a sampling of his own skill as a composer--modest, as it turned out.

The diary continues.

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Sunday at 11 a.m.: At an hour when most civilized people are brunching, Libbey Bowl is crowded with hungry adventurers. They don’t leave much sprawling room on the lawn behind the well-packed benches. The dress code is emphatically casual, on stage and off. The mood is as sunny as the weather.

The early-matinee attraction is a chamber-music program that cannily juxtaposes the soothing and the abrasive. Both concepts, of course, are relative.

The New World Brass Quintet opens the festivities with some stately Bach: “Contrapunctus I” from the “Kunst der Fuge,” as transcribed by Robert King. The tuba booms the bass line in subterranean grace.

At the end of the program, the quintet returns to introduce Tilson Thomas’ amiable “Street Song,” a network of overlapping bluesy-clunky fanfares that seem to make much ado about little. The applause is polite, and the quintet responds with an exit encore: “Simple Gifts” as arranged by Rolf Smedvig for the Empire Brass.

The music in between makes interesting billfellows of Aaron Copland (Ojai class of ‘57, also ’58 and ‘76), Toru Takemitsu, Franz Schubert and Luciano Berio.

Two faces of Copland are contrasted. First we see the lyrical, elegiac Copland of the Threnodies for Stravinsky (1971) and Beatrice Cunningham (1973), sensitively performed by youthful members of the New World Symphony. Here emotion, however subdued, triumphs over intellect. Later comes the agitated, abstract Copland of the Duo for flute and piano (1971), elegantly performed by Paula Robison and Timothy Hester. Here intellect triumphs over emotion.

Funereal images are further sustained with Takemitsu’s “Itinerant” (1989), written in memory of Isamu Noguchi. Robison makes much of this stark, ethereal plaint, which is neatly counterbalanced by the dense, still-forbidding complexities of Berio’s “Sequenza I” (1958).

The comforting centerpiece turns out to be Schubert’s justly little-known Introduction and Variations on “Trock’ne Blumen” (1824). For reasons obscure, the composer turned this poignant song from “Die Schone Mullerin” into an endless and almost mindless virtuoso duet for flute and piano. It is undeniably pretty on the surface. The inherent sentiment is oddly trivialized, however, and the melodic impulses are dissected and decorated ad absurdum if not ad nauseam.

Undaunted, Robison and Hester play the quaint period piece as if all Schubert were great Schubert. It’s the only way to go.

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Sunday at 5:30 p.m.: Benediction time. Tilson Thomas, who is about to take over the San Francisco Symphony, makes big valedictory gestures, figuratively and literally.

He opens with an imposing bow to the pioneering spirit of Edgard Varese, whose “Integrales” probably sound as cool, tough and modern today as they did when the composition was new in 1925.

Next, Tilson Thomas musters a sentimental nod in the direction of his late mentor, Ingolf Dahl (Ojai class of ‘57, also ‘64, ’65 and ‘66). Much neglected though certainly not maligned, Dahl will probably be better remembered as a teacher than a composer.

“The Tower of Saint Barbara,” written in 1954 for a ballet that was never performed, abounds in thoughtful historical references and interesting academic structures. Nevertheless, it ends up meandering in neo-romantic mush.

Tilson Thomas and his alert orchestra try bravely to undrip the droop. Still, there are limitations to what loyalty and devotion can do.

The mood improves after intermission with Astor Piazzolla’s “Tangazo” (1969), an endearing exercise in languid Latin exotica. Here, incidentally, the festival authorities provide model program notes by Eric Salzman.

Finally, for the climax of heroic climaxes, Tilson Thomas and friends offer an inspired performance of the Symphony in Three Movements by Igor Stravinsky (Ojai class of ‘55, also ‘56). The rhetoric skips and jaunts, breezes and bounces, rips and roars.

Every nuance is in its place. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing smudged. The detailing is subtle, the ultimate overview elemental.

After six demanding concerts packed into a period of only 47 hours, Stravinsky and Tilson Thomas finally provide a catharsis. It is uplifting.

It is reassuring.

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Next year’s festival will take place June 9, 10 and 11. Kent Nagano (Ojai class of ‘85, also ‘86) is to take over as music director, bringing with him his own opera orchestra from Lyons, France. After 47 years, Ojai goes international.