In Ojai, a mystic unwraps his magic

Ojai

The 57th Ojai Festival -- Ernest Fleischmann’s last as artistic director and Pierre Boulez’s seventh, since 1967, as music director -- began Friday night with the sound of a close-up cricket soloing along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Stravinsky, Ravel and Bartok. A jiving Jiminy jumped on a microphone at Libbey Bowl, and there it remained.

The festival ended Sunday with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. It took off on the wings of a cawing crow in the golden late afternoon sunshine. Eighty minutes later, as the hills turned momentarily pink in the dying light, Mahler’s ethereal closing page faded out into the croaks of distant frogs. Nature insists upon a part when music is played outdoors, even in this musically blessed valley. But no matter. Boulez is his own force of nature. The Ojai Festival is often special and occasionally great. Last weekend was one of the great ones.

Commercial development threatens Ojai, so long a retreat for artists and spiritualists and a land of sages. The town’s popular resort, the Ojai Valley Inn, is, for instance, is currently adding 100 rooms and building a “fantasy” pool. Again, no matter. Ojai, once home to the Indian spiritual figure Krishnamurti, still cherishes art and wisdom.

Boulez, at 78, has entered the realm of Ojai lore. He has now been music director of the festival more times than anyone else (Michael Tilson Thomas was also music director on seven occasions but twice shared the title). As both composer and conductor, Boulez is, I think it is safe to say, the most spectacular musician alive. No one among us has had a greater impact upon the direction music has taken since World War II.

Intellectually dazzling and utterly rational, Boulez has never, of course, been accused of being a mystic. At the end of the war, he burst on the scene as an angry young man in Paris, writing violent, ultra-modern, ferociously complex music. He not only helped pioneer the mathematically forbidding avant-garde style of the ‘50s but became its most vigorous and unforgiving spokesman. When he conducted, his exacting ear kept musicians in a state of something close to terror.

Today, Boulez radiates nothing but warmth, wisdom and the unflappable centeredness of, yes, a mystic. His performances of 20th century classics are as transparent and exacting as ever, but they contain exceptionally deep levels of expression as well. As does his own brilliant music in all its resplendent, even transcendental and spiritual, beauty.

This year’s Ojai Festival offered a wonderful opportunity to experience what Boulez is and always has been. In his long career, he has followed a very great arc of development. But what we can now witness is that this has been a logical evolution more than a great transformation.

The key to appreciating Boulez is found in his music, and Saturday was devoted to Boulez as a composer. It began with an afternoon recital by the Italian pianist Marino Formenti meant to place Boulez’s early music in the context of music history. A nearly three-hour concert in the evening began with solo pieces -- early and late -- and ended with Boulez conducting his most recent major work, “Sur Incises.”

The earliest piece Boulez has allowed to be published is “Twelve Notations” -- piano miniatures, some less than a minute, he wrote in 1945 when he was still a student. The work is really 12 sketches for a career. Each is the embryo of a musical gesture, and Boulez’s music has been, more than anything else, the development of brilliant sonic gestures. All the complexity has been a way to give his work texture.

The “Notations” were played with stunning focus and intensity by Mark Robson, a last-minute replacement for Mitsuko Uchida, who was ill. Also taking part in the evening concert were members of the Philharmonic. Flutist Catherine Ransom and pianist Joanne Pearce Martin gave a slightly understated but flowing performance of the furious early flute sonata. Concertmaster Martin Chalifour did a stunning job of making a fleeting eight-minute solo violin piece, “Anthemes 1,” create a kind of violinistic electrical energy skipping through the air. In “Dialogue Between a Shadow and Its Double,” clarinetist Lorin Levee reacted with lightning responses to prerecorded clarinets bouncing around the speakers surrounding Libbey Bowl. The outdoor setting proved amazing, as clarinets and nature seemed to become one supernatural force.

It has been Boulez’s habit to expand on short works (several of the “Notations” have been turned into more extensive orchestral pieces or used as the seeds for other scores), and one of the most spectacular instances of that way of working is “Sur Incises,” a 40-minute magnification for three pianos, three harps and much percussion, of a short piano piece. This is a score that sets up metallic vibrations, and the resonances seem to take over a listener’s nervous system. The performers were the CalArts New Century Players, who played with a tense and exciting energy.

Boulez began the concert with a tribute to Luciano Berio, his contemporary and close colleague: a performance of the chamber piece “O King,” a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. No singer could be found in time for this performance, so Boulez transcribed the vocal part for muted trumpet; the effect was not only very beautiful, but it sounded all the more like a Boulezian tribute to his friend.

Formenti’s attempt to evoke a Boulezian aura through music history was less successful. Everything from performances of an early 16th century four-voice motet by Pierre de la Rue played on the piano to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31 to pieces by Stockhausen, Messiaen, Webern, Bach and two young composers -- Michael Jarrell and Brice Pauset -- served as a prelude to Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 1, written in 1946. Formenti brought his colorful lyricism and dynamism to all he played, but his style this time was too intimate for the outdoor venue.

Boulez’s performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic were sensational. Friday night he gave Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements a tremendous rhythmic power. With mezzo-soprano Susan Graham as the delightful soloist, he produced a rainbow of sensual colors with Ravel’s “Sheherazade.” Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra was the weekend’s most memorable performance. Boulez has conducted this score often, but I have never known him or any other conductor to be able to make every detail seem to tell its own story and yet succeed in making the work coalesce into a seamless whole.

Graham was the recitalist Sunday morning. She can seem to try too hard, and when she brings out her boa and gets cute, look out. But in a program that included late Brahms, early Debussy and Berg, along with Poulenc and French operetta, she sounded magnificent. The Philharmonic sounded magnificent as well. Sunday afternoon’s long concert began with Helene Grimaud as a fluent soloist in Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto (a replacement for Uchida and a Mozart concerto) as a prelude to the Mahler.

The Philharmonic, its season ending, showed a few signs of fatigue. Still, the intensity never ebbed in Mahler’s late symphony. Boulez conducts it not as a farewell to life but as a life being lived. Invited inside the symphony, one listens and listens and listens. Everything was clearly laid out, yet I think I have never understood this great symphony less. It became like the nature that surrounded us, something to be experienced.

As this Boulez year proved, Ernest Fleischmann, who has led Ojai for five seasons, will be a hard act to follow. Thomas Morris, the executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra, succeeds him. Kent Nagano will be music director next year.