The Mainstream--and Beyond

Its reputation precedes it like few other cultural institutions in Southern California. The weather usually behaves beautifully. Festival-goers bond and ponder the music, clutching programs that will probably become fondly regarded keepsakes. The annual weekends tend to proceed with an air of potential importance on a scale much grander than you’d expect in a small town on the western fringe.

All of this is not to say that the Ojai Festival, proudly celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend, is an easygoing, eager-to-please, garden-variety classical music affair. Over the course of its life, the festival has committed itself to exploring the prominent music of this century, from staples of the modern repertoire to ink-still-wet new music.

For some would-be festival-goers, the Ojai Festival’s stubborn interest in the 20th century is an alienating factor; for others, it’s a raison d’etre, and that which ensures its international renown.

Over the years, the festival has played host to, and been shaped by, such notable composers as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, John Adams and famed conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, who returns to Ojai this year for his sixth appearance.

By this point in the festival’s development, as well as in the modern music world, the 71-year-old Boulez’s reputation looms large as an ardent crusader for the serious music of a century whose hour glass is about to run out.

“We have four years to go,” Boulez pondered with bemusement in an interview last week, “and still the term ‘20th century’ suggests something horrible for many people. If you say you are doing 20th century music, they are screaming or something.”

Boulez’s regular appearances in Ojai, a pattern broken during the ‘70s only because of his time-consuming orchestral commitments in New York and London, have occurred primarily because 20th century music has found a happy home in this town, one weekend per year.

Does Boulez have fond memories of his first encounter with the Ojai Festival, back in 1967?

“Yes,” he said, “therefore I came back. It was a very strong, small community, very much behind this festival and they were very cooperative and eager to do the best they could. I think it’s remarkable that they have this spirit, and especially to also be committed to contemporary music.

“A small community like that could rely on just classical fare and have no adventure whatsoever, but they are interested in having a mixture. I was first brought there by [early Ojai Festival organizer] Lawrence Morton, who was a typical representative of this kind of spirit.”

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That spirit of mixing the new and the timeless is an important aspect of the Ojai Festival mandate, and one that is sometimes overlooked. The festival’s reputation for dealing in overly intellectual, modern-minded work to the exclusion of music from other eras and of accessible sonorities is unfair. The 1991 festival, for instance, offered a fresh spin on the Mozart-mania then rampant in the composer’s bicentennial year.

The old-meets-new trend continues this year. For the opening concert Friday night, the bulk of the program belongs to the sprawl of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, but is counterbalanced by Boulez’s own tonality-challenging “Livres pour Cordes.” On Saturday afternoon, piano soloist Mitsuko Uchida will delve into the romantic loam of Schubert--along with Schoenberg. Sunday morning, the Julliard String Quartet will perform Mozart and Beethoven, sandwiching a piece by modernite Elliott Carter.

Sunday’s finale will be an agreeable feast of lesser-known music by Stravinsky and sensuous favorites by Ravel, closing with the wily fun of “La Valse.”

Did Boulez have any particular themes in mind in designing the overall festival program this year? “There was not really a theme,” he said. “Programming is really a mixture of constraints, possibilities, limitations and so on and so forth. It’s like walking on a tightrope. There will be a Stravinsky Festival in Paris in October, with the [Los Angeles Philharmonic] participating in concerts with [Esa-Pekka] Salonen and performing ‘Rake’s Progress.’ I will lead a concert in the festival. So, partly, this program is related to the program in Paris.

“The program in Paris was conceived as works written by Stravinsky in Los Angeles, and a big ballet. Therefore, in Ojai, I’m playing ‘Agon’ (a serial ballet) and the ‘Huxley Variations,’ and also the Four Etudes, which were not written in Los Angeles. But they are all rarely performed works of Stravinsky. And then there is Ravel because it is Ravel, and because Stravinsky and Ravel go well together.

“And then we have my own music, which I don’t dislike,” he said, laughing.

When last we saw Boulez in Ojai in 1992, he shied away from performing his own music entirely: The conductor and musical champion prevailed over Boulez the composer. This year, however, the balance tips slightly toward his own music. The Saturday evening concert, featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, is devoted entirely to his own works, including his large-scale from the ‘90s, “. . .explosante-fixe. . . .”

Boulez commented, “I don’t want to impose my music all the time, but if it is possible to perform it, and it works in conjunction with the program, then I do it. I’m not against it, certainly.”

Even if the mainstream classical audience knows or cares little about Boulez’s own music, a compelling extension of the serialist school, Boulez is virtually a household name. In the ‘70s, he was in the spotlight as music director of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He slid from general public life to a more esoteric profile in 1977 when he founded the think tank and electronic music haven known as IRCAM, and the Ensemble InterContemporain, which he still leads.

Around these parts, his public presence has been strong this past month because of his residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, involving several concerts and, at his insistence, rigorous rehearsal schedule. When Boulez--a quiet, hype-resistant but powerful figure--comes to town, the town tends to know it.

His California visit comes to a head in Ojai, just in time for the semi-centennial celebration. But leave the hats and hooters at home. For its 50th anniversary, the festivities are of a subdued sort, befitting the generally serious intent of Boulez. He is a conductor of demanding precision, whose determined lack of show-biz tactics and legendary attention to detail and control can, with the right players at his command, give the music he conducts a startling clarity.

In previous years, the Ojai Festival has presented concerts in peripheral venues such as Thacher School and the Ojai Arts Center--as during the John Cage tribute concerts three years ago. But this year the festival focuses on concerts at Libbey Bowl, with a fairly no-nonsense roster of music.

The last time Boulez was here, he struck up the band in an engaging and controversial staging of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat,” staged by iconoclastic director Peter Sellars with an all-black cast and much of it adapted to rap-cant. The timing, soon after the Los Angeles uprising over the Rodney King verdict, gave it a nerve-tingling and topical resonance not characteristic of the festival.

Don’t expect a similar theatricality to descend this year, but we can anticipate more revelations about the music of Stravinsky, whose modern-yet-gutsy, brainy-yet-muscular music plays very nicely in Ojai’s great outdoors. Besides, Boulez conducting Stravinsky is one of the happier marriages in classical music.

In general, Boulez is a conductor who follows his passions, in part because the composer in him demands attention, and because he can carve out his own agenda by this point.

“After all,” he said, “conducting is not my only function in life. It’s only a part of my life, and sometimes a small part of my life. Therefore, if I devote this amount of time, I prefer to devote it to works that need to be performed.

“The other ones, I can perform from time to time. I’m not against that, especially if it’s a challenge. The Vienna Philharmonic asked me to consider playing Bruckner with them. I have never conducted Bruckner in my life. Therefore, I said, ‘Yes, why not?’ With them and under special circumstances, I will try. So I don’t always refuse offers. It is like when Wilhelm Wagner asked me to conduct ‘Parsifal’ in Bayreuth a couple of years ago.”

But, unlike other conductors who perform new music on a token basis, Boulez sees it as a main course, with other, older music as the exception. “I try to be mainly concerned with the 20th century,” he said, summing it up, “because I find that that is the part of the repertoire which is the most neglected, and unjustly, in my opinion, because the works are as good as the works of the past.”

That opinion seems to be shared by the aesthetic muse who keeps the Ojai Festival alive and kicking.

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