Ojai’s Two-Nation Summit

Cross the English Channel from Britain to France and everything changes in ways many tourists prefer--food, art, culture. A more musical people, too, on the French side, it was once almost universally felt. The 2000 Ojai Festival was designed as a crisscrossing of the Channel, but with the trip made on a British conveyance.

Its composers-in-residence and music director are British stars. The extravagantly gifted Thomas Ades, 29, is the most celebrated composer of his generation. Eleven years older, Mark-Anthony Turnage, is losing his bad-boy image and maturing into a major voice. The famous and popular conductor, Simon Rattle, is now, in his mid-40s, making the spectacular move from Birmingham (the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) to Berlin (he takes over the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002).

With Brits running the show, France was represented by older masters--most notably Ravel, Messiaen and Boulez. But the fact is, Britain is where a lot of the musical action is today. The French simply don’t have younger composers or conductors producing this kind of international impact.

That said, nationalism is a curious and slippery subject, and it proved an interesting exercise during the first two days of the Ojai weekend to try to identify just what it is that makes these British musicians so successful. It was also somewhat unnecessary. Ojai is a place of idylls. And its sheer seductiveness--the dilapidated charm of the outdoor Libbey Bowl (now less one beloved old oak that expired this year); the mountains turning heavenly pink at sunset; the cheerful, if not always expert, staff; even the alluring ambient noise of barking dogs, bickering neighbors, the stray firecracker--supplies its own persuasion, confusing the issue of geography even further.

Yet perhaps one conclusion could be drawn from the three concerts on Friday and Saturday--evening programs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its New Music Group and an afternoon piano recital in the warm sun by Gloria Cheng. French music has a recognizably French sound, British music does not. The cliche is that Britain is insular; France, continental. But the music tells the opposite story. As Ades once put it in an interview, composers on the Continent tend to get wrapped up in technique but the British are more interested in the subject matter.

In Ades’ case, that means a rich assimilation of musical material from all over, including and especially France. But what gives Ades such an absorbing and contemporary voice is the sheer depth of that assimilation. He defies pigeonholing to the extent that even “eclectic” is an unsatisfactory label.

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Friday night, his largest orchestra piece, “Asyla,” was given its first West Coast performance by Rattle and the Philharmonic. A four-movement symphony in all but name, it has taken the musical world by storm since Rattle presided over its premiere in Birmingham 2 1/2 years ago. The piece, which takes its title from the plural of “asylum,” in the sense of both refuge and madhouse, is, in fact, something of a French programmatic symphony, a later-day Berlioz “Symphonie Fantastique.”

Ades tests extravagances in “Asyla” and takes the audience along as voyeurs. He plunges into his own psyche, obsessing on weird sounds, luxuriant melodies and captivating rhythms. His is inward music and music of the outside world at the same time. The third movement, “Ecstasio,” a trip to a rave club, is a legal high.

“Asyla” was followed on Friday night by a repeat of Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortileges,” with which Rattle ended the L.A. Philharmonic’s season a week earlier. It too is surreal dream music that casts a magic spell, and Ades has learned its language but rejects its quaintness. At 18 minutes, his symphony is less than half the length of Ravel’s opera, yet it says more.

In Cheng’s recital, two short Ades piano pieces, “Darkness Visible” and “Still Sorrowing,” reinforced the impression of a composer with outsize but French-flavored sonic imagination. The first is a 17th century John Dowland song as psychedelic piano spray, the second is darker and percussive, the piano “prepared” with tape applied to the middle strings. Both works were made more relevant by Cheng’s illuminating programming of modern French and British piano music. The French--examples by Messiaen, Boulez and the spectral composer Tristan Murail--all featured cool but brilliantly colored sonorities produced by various kinds of fluttery patterns. The number of notes Cheng played in one afternoon was astronomical and her own cool precision in the face of it all was riveting. The British composers were more playful--cloying in the case of Judith Weir’s “The Art of Touching the Keyboard” and fantastical in Jonathan Harvey’s haunting microtonal “Tombeau de Messiaen” for piano and tape.

Turnage takes his cue from American jazz, with a special influence by Miles Davis. Like Ades, he is neither one thing nor another--his music is not jazz but uses it to the point that it sometimes sounds like jazz. “Kai,” for cello and orchestra, comes from an aborted opera on the life of bassist Charlie Mingus. Its slow music has a magical lyricism, its fast music tries very hard, and it ends with a gorgeous moodiness that is difficult to forget, even though, after 22 minutes, one can easily tire of the idiom. Ben Hong played the solo part with great skill.

Saturday night was devoted almost entirely to Turnage’s “Blood on the Floor,” a work for chamber orchestra (beefed up with lots of jazz winds, brass and percussion) and three jazz soloists (saxophonist Martin Robertson, guitarist Mike Miller and drummer Peter Erskine). This is one of the most ambitious attempts in the literature to create a third stream between jazz and classical, and when it succeeds--again more in the slow music, which makes a seamless blend between distant mediums, than the pushy fast music--it does so brilliantly. But it’s long; its nine sections last 72 minutes. On the soprano sax, Robertson’s elegant yet heady sound was the performance’s highlight. Rattle conducted with the kind of enthusiasm that helps persuade, and then when the Philharmonic players caught the mood, they were fine.

The Turnage was proceeded by an Ojai innovation this year: the premiere of a new work by a young composer. A 10-minute piano concerto, “Deluge,” by Naomi Sekiya, a Japanese-born doctoral student at USC, demonstrated a direct, lively new voice with a crowd-pleasing immediacy. She was fortunate to have Vicki Ray as the soloist playing the difficult piano part.