Worldly Considerations at Ojai

Is it an arrogantly nationalistic conceit or a proud, soul-cleansing truth to consider the United States as the musical center of the world? That was an unanswered, and I think unanswerable, question that ran through the 2001 Ojai Music Festival over the weekend.

This year, the festival deposited a huge amount of baggage upon this ethereally beautiful valley. Its theme was music of the Americas in the broadest sense--music made on the continents north and south, and music made anywhere else in the world with some connection to the U.S. or its music, which could include its landscapes, personal friendships, even the lure of the dollar. It was not difficult--after hearing a great deal of music and talk, some of it wonderful, some patronizing, some inept and some simply irrelevant--to know why much of the world has a love/hate relationship with our country.

The festival, the 55th, had many ingredients. One new one was a full-day symposium, titled “The New Musical Immigrants: A U.S./Latin-American Dialogue.” For the concerts, there was an intimate recital, in which British pianist Paul Crossley built a multinational program around Copland’s Piano Sonata; a recital of American song by Upshaw; chamber music of the Americas played by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano; and two programs by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

The obvious response to all this is that there is no single identifiable thing that is American music, but we search for meaning anyway.

On Saturday, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano presented the West Coast premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Yiddishbuk.” This composer comes from Argentina, studied music in Israel and now lives near Boston. His 12-minute string quartet is a lamentation, its three movements dedicated to children who died in concentration camps, the Yiddish writer, I.B. Singer and to Leonard Bernstein. It was written in 1992 for Tanglewood. It’s effect on the listener can be haunting, with shattering sound effects from the strings that linger as an ethereal luminous glow.

Listening to it in Ojai’s outdoor Libbey Bowl, with the faint sounds of children playing in the distance and in a mist that kept trying, unsuccessfully, to lift, I felt connected to the atmospheric heaviness and gray light where I sat and yet also painfully aware of the current tragedy in Tel Aviv. It was preceded by the local premiere of a recent string quartet by Steven Stucky, “Nell’ombra, Nella Luce” (In Shadow, In Light), mellower music with evocations of Italian light, that did not sound out of place either.

Later that evening, Salonen conducted Messiaen’s “From the Canyons to the Stars,” a nearly two-hour work written by a French composer depicting his spiritual revelations from a trip to Bryce Canyon in 1974 and commissioned by Alice Tully to be premiered in the chamber music hall named after her at Lincoln Center in New York. The crickets and a dark night seemed just what was needed for this nature-inspired score.

Golijov made a remark at the symposium that proved to be one of the most helpful things said all weekend. “If you want to be universal,” he suggested, “paint your village,” namely, show the world who you are and what you know. That remark came near the end of a trying day: Three musicologists had given formal presentations. Karen Painter set an uneasy tone by describing what was once an enthusiastic--though to our sensibilities now, patronizing--response to Latin American music in the U.S. by reading reviews of works by Carlos Chavez. Elizabeth Crist explained how Copland adopted Mexican folk music into his personal language; Gerard Behague struggled over the ins and outs of native influences on composers such as Villa-Lobos--who once said, “I am folklore.”

The composers who were on hand were livelier. John Adams eloquently spoke of learning Spanish in order to set Mexican poetry in his oratorio, “El Nin~o,” but he also spoke of setting it in his own musical language, not a borrowed one. Tania Leon, who left Cuba many years ago and has long been a major figure in the New York music scene, bristled against all the labels that are regularly used to describe her--color, gender and nationality--before her name is mentioned.

These three composers were given a small role in the festival, but were, in fact, its true center. On the final Sunday afternoon concert, Upshaw sang an aria from Leon’s opera, “Scourge of Hyacinths,” Adams’ “El Nin~o” and Golijov’s “La Pasion Segun San Marcos,” (The Passion According to St. Mark). Each is deeply emotional and personal music that is almost impossible to localize specifically but that reveals a distinct voice. Upshaw’s internalized performances given in her all-American voice only seemed to double the power of trans-nationalistic music.

Had the festival focused more strongly on these composers, it might have helped us get past the nationalistic issues. Better performances might have helped too. The Philharmonic’s playing was surprisingly substandard. Messiaen’s epic score sounded under-rehearsed. Salonen has a clear vision of it, but only the strings responded with a clarity of their own. Jerry Folsom, the orchestra’s co-principal horn, was ineffective in his big solo movement; Crossley was the capable but not charismatic piano soloist. On Sunday, the full Philharmonic also struggled, insecure in Julian Orbon’s Concerto Grosso for Orchestra and String Quartet, with the Cuarteto Latinoamericano. The piece is a charming Neo-classical entertainment that had nothing to say of the revolutionary fervor in Cuba in 1958, where and when it was written.

“La Noche de los Mayas” by the revolutionary Mexican composer, Silvestre Revueltas, is more striking entertainment, with its masses of percussion. A Philharmonic favorite that Salonen conducts with increasing looseness and comfort, it closed the festival with an exciting bang. I love this piece and so did the audience. But do we also appropriate a culture in loving such a work?

The closest answer to that question was found in the two recitals. Crossley, who performed not just Copland, but the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, Villa-Lobos and even, as an encore, Vaughn Williams, banged loudly through everything in the small Ojai Arts Center, making it all sound vaguely French.

Upshaw, however, for her Friday night recital managed to make the large Libbey Bowl feel like an intimate space with her collection of American songs. She brought her own sound technician, Mark Grey, and with his help she made us feel as if she were singing to each of us individually. It didn’t matter whether the song was a masterpiece or trivial, she had something to say in each. When Upshaw sang, on Friday and Sunday, we were released from issues of authenticity.