MUSIC REVIEW : Ojai: Sunday in the Park With Kent

The park was alive, Sunday, with the sound of music. Most of it was sophisticated and genteel. All of it was stimulating. Well, nearly all. . . .

Libbey Bowl, bucolic home of the Ojai Festival, isn’t like that other bowl in Southern California. This one is small, rugged and unpretentious.

The sun may burn, and the wooden benches may menace the assembled Sitzfleisch . Never mind. The primary threat of aerial intrusion in this bucolic paradise comes from birds, not planes. No competitive picnickers inhabit family-heirloom boxes in this locale, and, thank goodness, no fireworks shatter the senses while embellishing conspicuous cultural consumption.

The stress here is on the music, pure and complex. (The musical menu in Ojai, not incidentally, doesn’t have to resemble a hum-along hit parade. It gives one faith.)

Kent Nagano, the resident maestro for this year’s long weekend, didn’t bring the sort of adventurous programming that has made this mini-festival something of an avant-garde mecca in past summers. But he did bring the Lyon Opera Orchestra.

Apart from a couple of early pieces by George Benjamin and a single tribute to young Pierre Boulez on the occasion of his 70th birthday (impossible!), Nagano concentrated on cautious conservatism. Luckily, it was enlightened conservatism.

Nagano is a serious musician equipped with a no-nonsense technique and blessed with a probing mind. In the Lyon orchestra, which was making its American debut en route to more elaborate projects in San Francisco, he commands a responsive instrument of uncommon refinement, vitality and sensitivity.

Nagano and his players ended the 49th Ojai Festival late Sunday afternoon in a blaze of symphonic finesse. The day began very differently, however, with tiny, introspective pleasures.

The 11 a.m. concert turned out to be an extended--perhaps overextended--duet between the singing flute of Eugenia Zukerman and the speaking voice of Claire Bloom. It was very sweet, very sensuous, very gentle, very precious and, after a while, a bit soporific.

Zukerman selected a program of compositions inspired by poems. In some cases, the words had been aligned to the music by the composer. In some cases, the words were imposed on the music by the performers. In some cases, the words merely served to set the scene for the music that followed. In some cases the music seemed to provide little beyond sound effects for the words.

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In Messiaen’s “Le merle noir,” the poetry actually proved intrusive. With a fortuitous obbligato contributed by winged creatures in the Ojai trees, this may have been a performance strictement pour les oiseaux .

The performances by flutist and actress were stubbornly exemplary. One admired Zukerman’s style, her flair and muted virtuosity in works by Debussy, Honegger, Vivian Fine, Tan Mi Zi, Miyagi and Faure. One admired Bloom’s poise, her impeccable clarity and exquisite passion in texts by Ovid, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Wallace Stevens and Pierre Louys. One admired the sensitive support provided at the piano, as needed, by Brian Zeger. One admired the unifying concept.

At the same time, one longed for a bit more dynamic variety. One also longed for some explanatory annotation.

A very different flute and a very different flutist opened the valedictory concert four and a half hours later as Philippe Bernold of the Lyon orchestra breezed with steely grace through the intellectual maze of Boulez’s “Memoriale” (1985). As a welcome if unexpected prelude, Bernold added two solo flights of frenzied fancy from “. . . explosante/fixe. . .”--which Boulez wrote 13 years earlier in tribute to Stravinsky and which eventually served as a springboard for the orchestral compression of “Memoriale.”

Nagano, spiffy in white tie and tails, coaxed maximum clarity and propulsion from his casually shirt-sleeved band on behalf of Boulez. Then he did his considerable best to sustain coherence amid the circuitous hectoring and swollen rhetoric of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906), a curious relic of a romanticism in gasping decay.

The revelations came after intermission, with an uncommonly leisurely and elegiac performance of Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” followed by an uncommonly sprightly and refined performance of Richard Strauss’ suite from “Le bourgeois gentilhomme.” Here, the Lyon orchestra proved, most emphatically, that drama need not preclude elegance.

Incidental intelligence:

* A surprisingly discreet amplification system made the alfresco music sound almost natural. Some wonders never cease.

* The notes by John Henken in the generous program magazine were models of informed concision. One can’t blame him for the absence of background information regarding the fluting matinee, or for the prominent gaffe that shaved 10 years off Pierre Boulez’s age.

* The 50th anniversary festival will take place May 31-June 2 next year, with Pierre Boulez returning to the podium for the fifth time since 1967. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will be the orchestra in residence, and the projected list of soloists is topped by Mitsuko Uchida. The able administrative corps will again enlist Joan Kemper as executive director, Ara Guzelimian as artistic director and the indefatigable Betty Izant as house mother and box-office manager.