MUSIC REVIEW : All That Gallic Jazz : With Lyon Opera Orchestra, Ojai Fest Is Easy on the Ears

It was another balmy Friday night in the sleepy valley. The ancient sycamore--gnarled but still stately sycamore, discreetly trimmed and bravely braced--stood guard once more over the modest orchestra shell in Libbey Park. Central lighting came courtesy of an almost-full moon, reminding the devout that the Chumash word for moon is Ojai .

A surprisingly large crowd endured posterior punishment with cheerful stoicism on the wooden benches that represent prime seating up front. Another convocation of equally ardent music-lovers sprawled amid blankets, pillows and picnic paraphernalia on the lawn at the rear.

Curious birds chirped ostinatos in apparent benediction. For a while, a distant radio blared rude and rocky counterpoint, but no one seemed unduly disturbed.

The 49th annual Ojai Music Festival was under way. Bucolic culture was in full swing and temporary bloom. Everything seemed serene in the valley that Hollywood once cast, quite logically, as Shangri-La.

The serenity had come, however, at a certain price, and not a moment too soon. The local gossip circuit was buzzing with reports of backstage strife that had threatened to turn the festival into a makeshift fiasco.

The resident ensemble this year was the Lyon Opera Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, an American veteran of Ojai festivals in 1985 and 1986. The French players, on their way to perform some elaborate opera and ballet in San Francisco in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations charter, had agreed to a weekend of rustic foreplay in Southern California. Apparently, they had not been prepared for the simplicity of the Ojai setting.

First they threatened to strike for higher per-diem expense payments, but relented at the last minute. Upon arrival, they balked at accommodations in a local dormitory, opting instead for motel luxury and a chartered-bus commute to beautiful downtown Ventura. The French campers weren’t happy.

The atmosphere behind the scenes, we were told, remained tense. Luckily, it did not spill onto the stage.

The Ojai Festival has always been noted for its spirit of adventure. Pretty tunes and comfortable harmonies could be encountered here, to be sure, but they were usually offset by modernist experiments. Ojai, after all, has served as a historical haven for Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Ingolf Dahl, Pierre Boulez. Peter Maxwell Davies, John Harbison and, yes, John Adams.

Nagano and his Gallic friends chose a far more conservative path than tradition would dictate. They concentrated on golden oldies, mostly oldies bearing a suave French accent. They toyed affectionately with the quaint export influence of Le Jazz Hot

They did turn, briefly, to a couple of mildly avant-gardish explorations by a Wunderkind named George Benjamin--a Briton who spent formative time studying with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Paris. There was little demand, however, for serious ear stretching. The list’nin’ was easy.

The festive scene was set Friday with an evening of Ravel, Milhaud and Weill. Nagano and his generally youthful charges looked incongruously formal in white tie and black tails (and the feminine equivalent). They made music elegantly, too, even when the expressive tone was fashionably decadent.

The orchestra sounds unmistakably French. That means slender string tone, nasal winds and timid brass. It means transparent textures, delicate phrasing and, in general, grace without pressure. The Lyon orchestra may not be a world-class virtuoso ensemble--not yet, anyway--but it is an unusually suave and sensitive instrument.

Nagano did much to underscore the subtle appeal of Ravel’s “Ma mere l’oye,” a.k.a. “Mother Goose.” He supervised a jaunty romp through the syncopated dissonances of Milhaud’s “Le boeuf sur le toit” in its violin version, with Yukiko Kamei making the most of the dressed-up funky solos.

The climactic attraction, however, involved Weill’s “Die sieben Todsunden,” a.k.a. “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a stellar period-piece showcasing the soprano Angelina Reaux. The funky-cynical score, designed in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht for a narrative ballet, stretches the jazz idiom beyond surface amusement, and it may have been performed here with finesse beyond the call. Still, it exerted a nice aura of exotic decadence.

Reaux is a gutsy singing-actress who can magnetize attention just by sitting still and staring blankly. Dressed in sexy-sleazy black and equipped with a few simple props, she mimed the dramatic plight of the dual heroine adroitly. More important, she sang her seven songs with considerable floozie-chantoozie wit. Lotte Lenya, the original Anna, may have invested the score with more bite and less voice, but Reaux asserted ample charms of her own.

Her German was careful rather than idiomatic. Even if it had been perfect, however, it would have alienated an audience that sat literally in the dark, unable to follow the all-important translations printed in the program. Singing in English would have made much more sense, on all levels.

A quartet from the Music Center Opera--Greg Fedderly, Mallory Walker, John Atkins and Michael Gallup--provided knowing support in the family episodes.

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Saturday morning in Ojai began with an extracurricular family concert. The energetic protagonists were members of the West African Dance Ensemble, Sona Sane, from faraway Los Angeles, performing rituals from Senegal and Gambia.

The focus returned to Paris at 4:30, when Nagano and his players--he still in tails, they now in shirt sleeves--offered a matinee predicated on suave sophistication. They brought mellow restraint to the dramatic abstractions of Faure’s “Pelleas et Melisande, and gentle bravura to the secondhand bluesy bravura of Milhaud’s “La creation du monde.” Sanford Sylvan’s lyric baritone breezed with enlightened wit and a touch of sensuality through the whimsical nonsense-patter of Poulenc’s “Le bal masque.”

Benjamin’s “A Mind in Winter,” written in 1981 when he was a precocious 21, turned out to be a fragile yet affecting exercise in mood imagery. The orchestra tinkled and shimmered in pointillistic economy around the the ethereal, disembodied, vibrato-less tones unerringly emitted by the soprano, Susan Narucki.

Benjamin’s music of 1981 returned during the chamber concert Saturday night via “Sortileges,” a dramatic thump-ripple-and-sigh exercise for virtuoso pianist bearing an obvious French accent (the piece is dedicated to Loriod). Mari Kodama, who happens to be married to Nagano, was the splendidly refined keyboard protagonist.

This central novelty was surrounded by familiar masterpieces. The Miczka Quartet, comprising members of the Lyon Orchestra, performed Debussy’s G-minor Quartet, Op. 10, with haunting melancholy at the beginning of the program. At the end, Karol Miczka, Jean-Luc Bourre, Jean-Michel Bertelli and Ariane Jacob invested Messiaen’s shattering “Quartet for the End of Time” with pathos ennobled by understatement.