A Pipe Dream Come True

Fifty years ago, it must have seemed like the silliest, the flimsiest of pipe dreams. A preposterously ambitious optimist named John Bauer wanted to create a music festival in a sleepy little town called Ojai.

The rest, as they say, is history. Unlikely history. Bizarre history. Astonishing history.

Abetted and no doubt prodded by his wife, Helen, Bauer decided that Southern California needed a little Salzburg to call its own. He wanted to bring a sophisticated program of music--perhaps, dance and drama, too--to a rustic retreat in the erstwhile land of the Chumash.

Ojai already served as an artists’ colony of sorts, and, situated only 85 miles from beautiful downtown Hollywood, the locale invited a quick escape from the rigors of commercial reality. Observers called it a case of obvious type-casting when Frank Capra chose otherworldly Ojai to portray otherworldly Shangri-La in the 1937 film, “Lost Horizon.” The peaceful inland valley produced oranges and avocados with natural, abundant ease. Why not a little culture?

Why not indeed?

The obstacles were forbidding. Bauer had to contend with convoluted logistics problems and with potential financial disasters. He also had to cope with a crucial housing shortage. Ojai, which had existed in its present civic guise for only a quarter of a century, could offer no performance facility bigger or better than a 400-seat school auditorium. Finally, there were potential irritations involving the scarcity of hotel rooms, restaurants and complementary tourist attractions.

But pipe-dreamers are seldom discouraged by trivial concerns like these, and Bauer was a dauntlessly stubborn idealist. He wanted his festival. Contrary to all logic and contrary to all local precedent, he got it. And, for better or worse, Ojai kept it.

On Friday, Pierre Boulez, whose fruitful association with the festival dates back to 1967, returns for the fourth time to host a brief but splashy 50th anniversary season. The formidable Gallic intellectual--known in certain quarters as “The French Correction”--brings with him an elite ensemble from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to crowd the tiny open stage in Libbey Bowl. Stellar soloists have been engaged, and, as usual, the choice of music, new and old, promises provocation in the best sense of the term. A discerning audience of 1,000 or so will endure Sitzfleisch punishment on wooden benches in the so-called good seats, while hundreds more will sprawl on the lawn at the rear.

Some things change. Some don’t.

Bauer, who died in 1978, was able to lead the festival for only seven summers. Still, his pioneering spirit lingers on. So, incidentally, do his ashes, buried in two sites on his estate property nearby. The intrepid founder had promised at the outset to “begin a fresh tradition where the word ‘Ojai’ will come to mean something unique.”

For those less inclined to hyperbole, the word “Ojai” merely means “moon,” or “nest” or, most poetic, “nesting moon.” The precise translation depends on which Chumash scholar one happens to trust. The picturesque image is appealing in any case. Also apt.

The first Ojai Festival opened on May 4, 1947. The prospectus listed Thor Johnson as conductor, the self-effacing Bauer merely as festival coordinator. Concerts continued, in the school auditorium and in private homes, until June 15. The soloists included Martial Singher, finesse-baritone of the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Doriot Anthony, who, as Doriot Anthony Dwyer, would soon be celebrated as super-flutist of the Boston Symphony.

Bauer intended to build a 1,200-seat festival theater that would make the school auditorium obsolete. He hoped to keep the festival spread over several weekends each year. He planned to sustain a relatively conventional agenda in matters of repertory and performance idiom. Although he fought the good fight with gusto, the fates frowned. His summers were numbered.

The eighth Ojai Festival, held in 1954, represented a crucial turning point. The maestro on duty for the first time was Robert Craft, whose primary claim to fame involved a useful Stravinsky connection. Bauer found himself abruptly replaced as artistic director by Lawrence Morton, an inquiring impresario, annotator, musicologist and contemporary-music enthusiast whose aesthetic profile would cast a sporadic shadow over Ojai for 30 years.

Morton, the creative force behind the esoteric, modestly supported Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, was a deceptively mild-mannered leader, a testy Superman habitually masquerading as a timid Clark Kent. Professorial in demeanor, he seemed to threaten no one. But he suffered fools--or anyone he deemed a fool--ignobly, and he could be dour and prickly as well as wry and waspish if he felt he was being challenged.

For all his brilliance and dedication, he did not invariably have his way in Ojai. Nor did he always endear himself to the funding fathers--or mothers.

He made no secret of his disapproval of the alfresco amphitheater that came to serve as Ojai’s central symbol and primary showplace.

“Though an audience may think it is charmed,” he sniffed, “it is really distracted by the waving of branches in the breeze, the movement of clouds, the flickering of sunlight on a lawn, or spiders crawling up a neighbor’s sleeve. I love nature as much as the next fellow, but I take it straight; and I like my music straight.”

Ojai never built an indoor concert hall. And after a few sprawling seasons in the Bauer era, the festival permanently confined its presentations to one bloated weekend each year--stuffing as many as six events into a single 46-hour period, and threatening the pilgrims with severe cases of artistic indigestion in the process.

Morton’s visionary predilections often pleased aficionados of the avant-garde, both amateur and professional; at the same time, his progressive sympathies often alienated listeners who preferred to sit (or lie) back, relax and enjoy a pretty sonic ride. The stress on repertory experimentation often caused anxiety, moreover, at the box office.

Box office? I take that back. The stress on experimentation often caused anxiety at the cigar-box in which the indomitable Betty Izant stored essential tickets and small change. For most of its five decades, the festival prided itself on a cheery air of improvisation. It was as if Vera had turned one happy day to her husband and said, “Golly, Igor, I have a great idea. Lets get the kids and bikes out of the park and put on a concert.”

The improvisatory air isn’t what it used to be. In recent years, with a smart, no-nonsense administrator named Joan Kemper dealing with extra-musical concerns, Ojai has shuffled off many of its amateurish coils. A stately ticket booth, souvenir counter and standard-brand refreshment stand now loom at the entrance to the verdant bowl. Civilization has marched on. (The refreshment stand, it might be noted, has lamentably usurped business from the ever-virtuosic PTA tyros who used to run a conspicuously competitive bake sale on the premises.)

Over the years, Lawrence Morton’s ideas and ideals triumphed over programmatic caution. Yesterday’s scandalous discord became today’s easy harmony. The public gradually took experimentation in stride. Still, unevenness remained a way of life in Ojai. There were good summers and bad, rich summers and poor. There were scattershot festivals and carefully focused festivals.

For the pipe-dreamers, the low point must have come in the summer of ’60. While an outraged Morton hid out in Paris, Ojai explored presumably lucrative pop detours. Henri Temianka functioned as accommodating maestro for an agenda that included a cutesy mime troupe, a slick piano duo and a Broadway-hits extravaganza. The show-bizzy dramatis personae included Anna Maria Alberghetti cum family, John Raitt and Dorothy Kirsten. Ojai had never presented anything like this before, and, significantly, never has since.

Libbey Bowl, previously known as Civic Center Bowl, is not easily confused with its distant SoCal cousin, the Hollywood Bowl. The mega-amphitheater in Cahuenga Pass attracts as many as 18,000 concert-goers per night, some of whom come to hear the music. The modest amphitheater in Ventura County attracts a tenth of that number, at best, and most concert-goers in Ojai come to hear the music. Ear-stretching, unknown at the Hollywood Bowl, is a common, healthy exercise in Libbey Park.

Ojai audiences have come to sample unfamiliar music, new and old, and occasionally to reassess the familiar. Ojai audiences have come to worship at the feet of giants such as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, even when the latter conducted Mahler. Ojai audiences have come to marvel at the all-American versatility of Michael Tilson Thomas, not to mention Lukas Foss (“The Leonard Bernstein of music,” one wag called him). The devout have come to savor the work of underrated masters such as Ingolf Dahl and Daniel Lewis, to welcome distinguished emissaries such as Peter Maxwell Davies, and to catch up on well-hyped trendsetters such as John Adams (“the Andrew Lloyd Webber of classical modernism,” another wag--this one, actually--called him).

Audiences in Ojai do not necessarily embrace novelty for its own sake. But they approach new challenges with good humor and open minds. Good humor is, of course, an accessible commodity in a setting where the sun almost always shines, where equal-opportunity birds chirp blissful benedictions for Mozart and Messaien (the “merle noir” is just the beginning), and where the stage is flanked by an ancient, gnarled, ever-decaying yet eminently dignified sycamore on crutches. Open minds are imperative for the delectation of cool and thorny Boulez one summer, simple and simplistic Adams the next.

A critical churl might note that some festivals have lacked focus, that fewer performances per weekend might produce higher performance standards, that there has been little continuity of tone, theme or style from year to year (sometimes from concert to concert), and that the constant changing of the artistic guard has tended to preclude a subjective identity.

A benign chronicler might want to forget the summers when too many podium cooks spoiled the cumulative broth. An aged purist might wonder why microphones have become a necessary evil in such intimate and innocent surroundings. A pragmatist might ask if a festival like this one can ever--should ever--make fiscal and artistic sense.

Not all experiments are created equal, even in Ojai. It wasn’t a good idea in 1980, for example, to bring fledgling ballet dancers to the minuscule stage where they almost went splat against the wall during flying exits. It wasn’t a good idea in 1992 to let Peter Sellars turn Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” into an amateurish agitprop exercise. It wasn’t a good idea to introduce rags and ragas and all that jazz to the passing agenda. But, as Confucius (or was it Lawrence Morton?) said, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Ojai has ventured a lot and gained a lot. After 49 years, the festival remains a wondrous mirage, a stimulating source of close encounters with disparate challenges from Schoenberg to Berg, Bach to Bartok, Cage to Stockhausen, Carter to Harbison, Britten to Kurtag. Occasionally, however, the most striking revelations involve a performer rather than a composer.

An obscure mezzo-soprano named Grace Bumbry came, sang and conquered in 1958. A whiz-bang pianist named Andre Previn drew special attention in 1962. A tragically short-lived conductor named Calvin Simmons won all hearts in 1978.

Even more noteworthy in retrospect, perhaps, was the unheralded debut of a young keyboard virtuoso who joined the La Salle Quartet for a little Schumann in 1968. Albert Goldberg described him in these pages as “a magnificent ensemble player and a pianist of such comprehensive musicianship, unerring technique and tonal solidity that one would like to hear him in solo assignments.” The newcomer? James Levine.

The nesting moon always was fertile terrain for discovery.

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Ojai at 50: The Festival Program

The 1996 Ojai Festival, the 50th spring festival in the town about 12 miles inland from Ventura, presents five concerts and a special family event, all in the Festival Bowl in downtown Ojai, Friday night through next Sunday afternoon.

Friday at 8:15 p.m.: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez conducting. Program: “Livre pour cordes” (Boulez); Symphony No. 5 (Mahler).

Saturday at 10 a.m.: Danza Floricanto. Program: Songs and dances of Mexico.

Saturday at 4:30 p.m.: Mitsuko Uchida, piano; members of the L.A. Philharmonic. Program: Two Impromptus; Sonata in D, D. 850 (Schubert); “Verklarte Nacht” (Schoenberg).

Saturday at 9 p.m.: L.A. Philharmonic New Music Group, Pierre Boulez, conductor. Program: Boulez: “Derive” I and II; “Anthemes”; Sonatine for Flute and Piano; “. . . explosante-fixe. . . .”

Sunday at 11 a.m.: Juilliard Quartet. Program: Quartet in C, D. 46 (Schubert); Quartet No. 2 (Carter); Quartet in F, Opus 135 (Beethoven).

Sunday at 5:30 p.m.: L.A. Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, conductor; Mitsuko Uchida, piano. Program: “Agon”; Four Etudes; “Variations, Aldous Huxley in Memoriam” (Stravinsky); Piano Concerto in G; “La Valse” (Ravel).

* Tickets: $12-$35. Box office and information: (805) 646-2094.