In enchanted Ojai, the magic endures

This year’s Ojai Festival generated a few grumbles. Often a partner, the Los Angeles Philharmonic now provides it with competition, and some stalwarts were enticed away by the Phil’s Building Music project and the premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Wing on Wing.” Meanwhile, the Ojai sense of adventure -- new music, old music, unexpected music -- was not missing, exactly, but it was less evident. Bach was plentiful. The one fully venturesome program was, of all things, the Saturday morning family concert, featuring interactive electronic music.

But enchanted Ojai -- the scenic valley and the charmed festival setting in the rickety Libbey Park Bowl -- still seduces. The best musicians continue to come and return. Exceptional composers are, as always, expected and feted. The local ice cream and coffee are as good as ever. The dusty corners of ramshackle Bart’s Books have yet to deplete their supply of exceptional finds.

And despite a larger than usual dose of the usual in Sunday’s closing concert, performed under the shades of oaks on a perfectly glorious afternoon, the old Ojai magic cast its spell yet again.

The usual was supplied by the Overture to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and by Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. Another fourth was Kent Nagano, in his fourth time as the festival’s music director. He conducted his Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, which made its concert debut with this program. The performances were nuanced, full of body and soul, gripping.

The unusual was the premiere of Unsuk Chin’s “snagS & Snarls.” The 43-year-old South Korean composer, who is based in Berlin, is the sudden object of much attention. This year, her Violin Concerto won the Grawemeyer Award, which is a kind of Nobel Prize for music. Nagano is her most important champion, and wherever he is music director, he plays her work. He premiered the concerto with his Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin and will conduct its first American performance with his Berkeley Symphony in September.

In his role as music director of the Los Angeles Opera, Nagano also convinced the company to commission Chin’s first opera, scheduled to have its premiere in 2006. “snagS & Snarls” -- five songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra based on texts by Lewis Carroll -- is a hint of what is to come in the opera, which will be based on “Alice in Wonderland.”

Unfortunately, the songs did little more than whet the appetite. They contain only the faintest aura of the luminous sonorities that make the Violin Concerto so compelling. Nor is Chin’s entrancing love of acrostic cleverness and complexity, which has made her “Acrostic-Wordplay” her most performed work, as evident as it might be, given the source material. Moreover, these Carroll songs, however cute, may tell us little of what the opera will be like, given that it will use a libretto by David Henry Hwang.

The soloist was Margaret Thompson. Her singing was spirited, engaged and operatic, and that last quality was a problem -- but one that Chin appeared to play to. Musically, the composer took obvious routes. The Victorian poetry of the first song, “Alice-Acrostic,” was underscored by allusions to early music. The third song, “The Tale-Tail of the Mouse,” in which Carroll’s concrete poetry snakes down the page, was the most interesting, as if textural invention gave Chin permission to let voice and orchestra do some inventive slipping and sliding of their own.

In “Speak roughly to your little boy,” tongue-in-cheek nasty words let the mezzo have fun with nasty music. For the last song, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” Chin created her own baby-speak text -- “Twinkle, scrinkle, sprinkle, nibble-dibble, needle-noodle” -- and silly music to go with it.

It was nice to have as contrast something else that was unusual: Schoenberg’s short “Friede auf Erden” (Peace on Earth). Schoenberg wrote this as an a cappella choral work in 1907 to a Christmas text that decries how deeds of “rapine, pillage, slaughter” have “defiled the souls of men.” Whence comes peace, goodwill to men?

The choral writing, beautiful and emotive but full of dissonances, challenged early 20th century choruses, so Schoenberg added orchestral accompaniment to help them out. Modern choruses no longer need nor want the crutch, but Nagano discovered that the lusciously colored orchestration is wonderful music in its own right.

In the first half of the concert, the L.A. Opera Orchestra played this accompaniment as an orchestral solo, and sounded as if all aglow. To end the afternoon, a small chorus sang the vocal work urgently, just as Ojai turned its momentary sunset pink. The combination of setting and sentiment was spine-tingling.

Next year, the festival will bow to scheduling conflicts and be held during the second, rather than the first, weekend in June. Oliver Knussen will be music director, and the Cleveland Orchestra the resident ensemble.