Aesthetic Ending

For those of us who view the Ojai Festival’s artistic mandate as one that celebrates the great music of our time, mixed with great music of all time, this year’s festival provoked, tickled, reassured and generally impressed.

In a sense, they saved the big guns for the last year of the century, as the Ojai Festival regained aesthetic consciousness after a period of finely realized but essentially staid programs.

Blame it on the visionary pranksters from Finland.

This was the year local and global heroes descended on idyllic Ojai. The transplanted local is conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the first L.A. Phil maestro handed the keys to the Ojai festival in its 53-year history. (Said keys were handed over by Ojai’s artistic director Ernest Fleischmann.)

In his seven years in Los Angeles, Salonen has maintained a proud, attentive allegiance to music and musicians from his homeland. But at Ojai, he retraced a musical path to his hellion days as a budding musician in Helsinki, bringing to Ojai several creative soul mates--composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg and the music unit they founded 20 years ago, the Toimii Ensemble.

We got a telling taste June 2 of what was to come, with the first of two concerts before the traditional weekend program began. In the Ojai Arts Center, the Toimiii easily soared over an improvisational score by Oliver Knussen, unleashed the cerebral dynamism of Lindberg’s “Decorrante” and captured the loopy madness of the noted dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate,” a maze of nonsense syllables delivered with keen musicianship and comic timing.

The Toimii continued to wow and surprise with each appearance in the festival. Saturday morning, the ensemble mixed virtuosity with goofball comedy, deconstructing opera, tossing about musical gags, stirring in the “Dallas” soap opera theme and generally making artistic whoopee. At one point, the musicians put on plastic paint suits and hopped around the stage like bunnies, underscoring the important point that serious intentions and funny antics are not mutually exclusive.

And closing the festival Sunday with a series of bangs was Lindberg’s grand and deliciously noisy “Kraft,” for the Toimii and the L.A. Phil, with Salonen, in tennis shoes, acting as conductor and athletic coach. The athletic aspect was key: It’s a very physical and spatial piece, with instruments scattered on and off the stage and a list of percussion tools that included auto parts.

Hearing the CD version is one thing, but being there at a live performance--and this was the U.S. premiere--is another. Here was an example of thoroughly modern music, in a “difficult” post-Stockhausen musical language, with an engaging intensity that lured applause even from new-music skeptics.

Lindberg is a commanding composer on his own terms, which have little to do with music with a typical narrative structure and strict adherence to either tonality or its evil twin, atonality.

His music buzzes with adventure and texture, weaves in and out of tonal environments and is charged with a bold sense of forward momentum, sometimes even with a post-minimalist energy. Those traits could be heard in his Cello Concerto, played with controlled abandon by Anssi Karttunen, and the Clarinet Quintet, featuring Kari Kriikku, heard on Thursday.

We also got a nice earful of Salonen’s own varied life as a composer, then and now. It began last Friday night with a revised work from his youth, “Giro, “ in which Impressionist and Expressionist energies were pitted against each other. In a very different vein, Salonen offered the world premiere of his song cycle, “Five Fragments After Sappho,” originally written for noted soprano Dawn Upshaw. When Upshaw canceled because of back surgery, Laura Claycomb filled in smartly, in a score of surprisingly lyrical luster and some John Adams-like rhythmic machinations in the delirious final section.

Saturday night, pianist Gloria Cheng brought a clenched lucidity to Salonen’s electrifying etude “Yta II.” Also that night, we heard Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “Amers,” full of imaginative and unsentimental color like Lindberg’s music, and Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Flute and Percussion Closing. Adams’ thrilling Looney Tunes-meets-Schoenberg romp, “Chamber Symphony” (heard in Ojai six years ago, when Adams was music director), closed the show on a mischievous but highly musical note.

Lest it seem that the modernists had seized control of the Libbey Bowl, the festival had older repertoire to present, including a two-hour “concept recital” by Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen. His clever and controversial interweaving of preludes and fugues of Bach and Shostakovich--whose pieces were dedicated to Bach’s example--was technically stunning and daring in interpretation, romantic and objective all at once.

Sibelius’ First Symphony capped off Friday’s concert, and Toimii guitarist Timo Korhonen gave an impressive mini-recital that included transcriptions of piano music by Chopin.

By default, the Sunday-morning recital shifted from Upshaw’s planned program, a modern-leaning one with Ives and Messiaen on the list, to more traditional fare by the glorious mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. She sampled 19th century art songs, operatic tidbits and a few gospel tunes and was beautifully accompanied by pianist Warren Jones (who will be in the area as part of the Music Academy of the West season).

The Schumann Piano Quintet opening Sunday’s concert, with Mustonen in the soloist chair, was lovely and refined in its delivery and wholly irrelevant to the clangor of “Kraft.” But that very stark contrast worked, where a piece closer in spirit to the Lindberg would have competed for emotional air space. This festival’s coherence hangs in the balancing.

The Ojai Festival is still the pinnacle, and the primary focus of international clout, in Ventura County’s music scene, and the 1999 model was a raucous beauty. Of course, more conservative listeners would beg to differ, but differing viewpoints make the world what it is, in music and life, in Ventura County and Helsinki.

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Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.