To air is divine

The summer festival season is upon us. Orchestras and opera companies, victims of recession, retrench, but not festivals. They’re more like crops; plant them, and if the physical and artistic conditions are right, they grow. This year’s harvest is bumper.

In the last two weeks of June, I dropped in on several festivals. In the clubhouse of San Francisco’s Forest Hill neighborhood, L.A. Opera’s Kent Nagano invited members of the Vienna Philharmonic to play chamber music. In the quaint village of Lewes, England, Glyndebourne Opera presented Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” performed to the highest international standards. In the depressed German industrial towns of Duisburg, Oberhausen and Bochum, there was big-name avant-garde music theater and video. As part of the City of London Festival, an audience of 300 gathered in a medieval church for an all-night concert, hoping that composer John Tavener could deliver on his promise of cosmic exaltation.

Those events represented just a tiny fraction of what’s out there. For example, this is a three-”Ring” summer: Valery Gergiev conducted a new, all-Russian production of Wagner’s four-night “Ring” cycle at his Stars of the White Nights festival in St. Petersburg last month; the cycle will be performed next month at the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth, Germany; and new stagings of the four operas are planned at the Edinburgh International Festival. The British magazine Opera lists nearly 75 summer festivals in America and Europe -- from St. Louis to Savonlinna, Finland -- at which opera can be found.

There are the massive festivals -- White Nights and the ones at Lincoln Center and in Edinburgh, to name a few -- that can consume a devotee of music, theater, opera and dance night after night for weeks on end. There are highly intriguing boutique festivals, such as the one in Lahti, Finland, devoted to little-known orchestral and stage works of Sibelius.

Here’s something that could occur only at the Verbier Festival & Academy, which takes place in a small Swiss Alps town where classical-music stars gather: On July 22, Martha Argerich, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove Andsnes, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, James Levine, Mikhail Pletnev and Steffan Scheja will perform works for one to eight pianos. And if you are in the Alps, you might as well drop by Bregenz: Lively American director Francesca Zambello is staging “West Side Story” on an immense floating stage in Lake Constance.

In late August, Esa-Pekka Salonen will start a busy weeklong festival in Stockholm with some of his pals, including violinist Gidon Kremer, who happens to run his own festivals in Austria and Sweden (and who will be at Verbier and elsewhere). In New York, a festival at Bard College’s new Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center will focus on unusual Czech music, theater and opera. Berlin is gearing up for its ambitious citywide festival, which begins in mid-September.

Although it sometimes seems a secret to the rest of the country, the California coast is also a major summer festival destination, beginning in Ojai the first weekend in June. It’s not too late to vacation with Mozart in San Luis Obispo or Bach in Carmel. La Jolla’s SummerFest is my West Coast pick, with its extraordinary multicultural composer lineup: Tan Dun (China), Chinary Ung (Cambodia) and William Bolcom (America) participating. Santa Cruz’s Cabrillo Festival was founded by Lou Harrison, who died this year, and pays tribute to him this summer.

You can, of course, market anything as a festival. The Hollywood Bowl season of symphonic chestnuts and pops programs is a festival. Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer home in Massachusetts’ green Berkshires, has grown so mercantile that some people call it Tangleworld. The outdoor opera house in Santa Fe, N.M., where Bright Sheng’s “Madame Mao” will have its premiere this month, is a tourist attraction. So is Mozart’s hometown -- Salzburg, Austria. Taking in a performance is a sightseer’s obligation.

All festivals have this in common: Whether they mean it or not, whether they are egregiously commercial or artistically sincere, their message is that their setting, their programming -- or something! -- is special.

That’s not always a good thing. The Hollywood Bowl’s picnic fetishism can lead to the music being treated, at best, as an accompaniment to another glass of wine or, at worst, as an annoyance.

But for all the hype that festivals generate and for all the grief they sometimes bring, I love them.

Often worth the hassle

Take Glyndebourne. An Angeleno might be even more put off by its rituals than by the Bowl’s. If you are coming from London and don’t have a car, you must arrive at Victoria Station nearly three hours before a performance; standard dress is black tie. There is a 75-minute train ride south to Lewes, where a shuttle bus meets opera-goers and takes them to the festival grounds. The performance is interrupted by a 90-minute dinner break, when serious picnicking is practically mandatory. The only other option is one of the facility’s expensive restaurants, which must be booked far in advance. “Idomeneo,” from Victoria and back, was a 10-hour jaunt.

Tickets are astronomically priced (upward of $400) and extremely hard to get. Yet when Glyndebourne is great, as with the “Idomeneo,” it is incomparable. The 1,200-seat opera house is the perfect size. Performances are thoroughly rehearsed -- the care that conductor Simon Rattle took with Mozart’s score, the playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the singing of the Glyndebourne chorus were all remarkable. Anish Kapoor’s provocative set and Peter Sellars’ transcendent production were in a class all their own.

Of course, a sexually suggestive scenic backdrop and a politically and spiritually biased interpretation are not exactly what many Glyndebourne swells have in mind for their civilized blend of opera, food and Champagne. Boos are common at Glyndebourne, as they are at Salzburg, Bayreuth and other big-ticket, high-society festivals. Yet these are the places where some of the most controversial, most meaningful and best-prepared works can be found.

Bayreuth, for instance, is Wagnerian holy ground. The composer founded the festival so that his operas could be produced under ideal conditions, and it has remained in the Wagner family’s handssince. Lately, the heirs have been arguing up a storm, but the 83-year-old scion, Wolfgang Wagner, still reigns, and he has some wild ideas.

Next year, he will turn “Parsifal” over to Christoph Schlingensief, a German director known for his clownishness and gross humor. In 2005, Wagner will put “Tristan and Isolde” into the hands of the more serious and inspired but wacky Swiss surrealist Christoph Marthaler. In 2006, a new “Ring” will be directed by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who recently told an interviewer that he planned to actually see an opera one of these days.

How far can this kind of thing go? In their lust to attract attention and stir controversy, the most exalted festivals might appear to have become self-indulgently perverse and maybe even self-destructive. Wealthy socialites, after all, may not want to indefinitely support work that insults much of what they stand for. Or will they?

It’s all in the timing

In 1976, an updated “Ring” cycle directed by Patrice Chereau was the source of much derision and Wagnerian hair-pulling at Bayreuth. By the next year, it was already an enormous success, and it has come to be regarded as a classic. Its influence on opera and theater direction can be felt to this day.

During his 10-year reign in Salzburg, irrepressible innovator Gerard Mortier shocked the staid festival with daring productions and its first series devoted to avant-garde and cutting-edge composers.

But once again, there has been artistic trickle-down. Mortier now heads the RuhrTriennale, where he is turning abandoned gasworks, power plants and iron foundries into fascinating performance spaces in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley.

Mortier now offers the kind of work he did in Salzburg to ordinary audiences, thanks to inexpensive tickets. In doing so, he is beginning to make the economically depressed area a hip destination. And by converting visually imposing factories into cultural centers, Mortier is determined to help the region transform itself through art.

His plan appears to be working, if slowly. Last year, the first of Mortier’s three-year stewardship, tickets sold slowly. This year, the festival is picking up steam. Along with the many offerings of theater, music and opera, there is Bill Viola’s video work “Five Angels for the Millennium,” which was recently at the Getty in Los Angeles. Mortier persuaded Viola to install it in a looming, multistory gasoline storage tank, built in Oberhausen in 1928 and closed 60 years later. The odor of petroleum lingers and is disturbing, but what a powerful effect Viola’s videos have on extra-large screens in this vast structure. On a weekday afternoon, I found maybe 30 or 40 visitors, far more than I encountered at the Getty.

What made the biggest impression on me during a two-day visit to the RuhrTriennale, however, was what happened the night I attended a performance of “Sentimenti,” an overwrought play by the Dutch team of Johan Simons, Paul Koek and Jeroen Willems that is an ode to both Verdi and Ruhr Valley workers. It was performed at a power plant in Bochum that had been splendidly turned into several theatrical spaces.

Just as the performance was about to begin, Mortier saw two teenagers on skateboards hanging around outside. Before they knew what had hit them, the festival director, ever eager to develop new audiences, had lured them into the theater. In the end, they didn’t stay through the whole play: Mortier hadn’t warned them that “Sentimenti” was 2 1/2 hours without an intermission, and nature called.

It’s not likely that their lives were changed by what they did see. But the very fact of their having had a new experience just might end up meaning something to them. And that’s ultimately what festivals are for.

Swed is The Times’ music critic.