Art and Music Intermingle at Ojai Festival

On Wednesday night, the Ojai Festival officially began with a concert by the Toimii Ensemble in the Ojai Arts Center, and an atypically cosmopolitan aesthetic air befell the place.

The Arts Center is a fine facility, traditionally dedicated to local arts. Here, though, we had a striking new music group from Finland, performing music with conceptual subplots, including a piece by Magnus Lindberg in which conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen appeared only “virtually,” keeping time on a synchronized video monitor. The art element reached its peak with a performance of dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate,” a sonata of primal sounds and phonemes given a precise, and therefore slightly loony, reading.

In short, this was music neatly suited to an art gallery setting, and it suggested that more such music could be programmed into this space.

Meanwhile, the exploratory atmosphere spread to the visual realm as well. Visiting Finnish sculptors Brita Flander and Elina Sorainen are exhibiting their work here, as an adjunct to the festival’s musical component.

Flander’s blown-glass sculptures draw their energy from a surreal blend of elements. Long, smoothly contoured and iridescent-colored glass shapes are delicately cradled in metal armatures.

A graceful liquidity of form belies the intense creative process behind glass-blowing and the physicality of the end result. Her art can suggest pieces of taut sinew or tissue or ambiguous forms of sea life but are ultimately expressive on their own abstract terms.

Sorainen’s work is, by definition and material, earthier, made from clay and porcelain. Her vessels, sometimes topped with horses or including other figurative touches, are subtly ornamented with the ancient Chinese method of nerikomi, involving ash glazes added to the clay.

The work carries a special interest in Ojai, where the ceramic art scene has been galvanized by such legends as Otto Heino and the late Beatrice Wood.

DETAILS

Brita Flander and Elina Sorainen, through June at the Ojai Arts Center, 113 S. Montgomery St., Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; 646-0117.

Over at the G. Childress Gallery, the Ojai Festival has another, less official but undeniably event-specific visual art tie-in. In his exhibition titled “The Rehearsal,” Seco, the gifted Mexican-born and Ojai-based artist, shows a series of sketches and paintings with a clearly musical theme, with Esa-Pekka Salonen the center of attention.

This spring, the artist was granted access during rehearsals of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his natural flair for portraying musicians flourished. Music is the thing, as a literal subject but also as a springboard for visual gesture in the art.

Seco’s sketches offer a loose, impressionistic portrayal of the Philharmonic in action, giving a sense of the fleeting dynamism of orchestral music but also showing slices of life within the ensemble microcosm.

His paintings go deeper in trying to convey the essence of music in visual terms, always a tricky and elusive business. “Esa-Pekka Cubist” is a swirling assembly of planes and facets, using to good effect the Cubist notion of depicting a scene from many angles. What is music, after all, but an omnidirectional medium?

“Conductor in Flames” pushes further toward abstraction, as the conductor is consumed in an apparent musical inferno, the heat of the moment translated into a fury of red and dark-hued brush strokes. Elsewhere, Salonen is seen with arms up-stretched, coaxing a crescendo from the ranks in “Phil in Reds.”

The largest canvas here is “The Dorothy Chandler,” in which the artist pulls back from his close-up perspective to take in the full effect of the orchestra in position, onstage at the Music Center in Los Angeles. It’s an almost ritualistic setting, in which the stage gives the impression of a hearth-like enclosure, like a symmetrical, embracing womb wrapped in gold.

The sum effect of Seco’s exhibition is an unabashedly romanticized, energetic view of the orchestra--and Salonen’s L.A. Phil, specifically--as a living, breathing entity, rather than as a musical museum. That aspect alone makes it an auspicious companion to the Ojai Festival, which tries oh so hard to show that classical music ain’t nearly dead yet.

DETAILS

“The Rehearsal,” by Seco, through June at the G. Childress Gallery, 319 E. El Roblar, Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday; 640-1387.