A retreat charges on

IN the summer of 1955, “Stravinsky scarcely moved from Wetherly Drive,” writes Stephen Walsh in the newly published second volume of his biography of the composer. Stravinsky scarcely moved because his arthritis was acting up and because he had music to write. But that spring, he had moved enough from his West Hollywood home above Sunset Boulevard to drive the 80 miles to Ojai, where he was briefly rejuvenated.

The 72-year-old composer heard Monteverdi’s magnificent “1610 Vespers,” which was just being rediscovered, and it proved an influence on his own late style. And despite the arthritis, he coped with a tent for a dressing room and conducted his own music on a primitive outdoor stage, behind which ran the whistle-tooting “orange train.” This was, after all, the Ojai Festival, which will begin its 60th season Thursday.

Walsh doesn’t seem to think much of Ojai. He dismisses it as a health resort and mentions it only in passing, despite Stravinsky’s important connection with the festival.

The premiere of the final version of “The Soldier’s Tale” opened the second season in 1948. “Von Himmel Hoch,” Stravinsky’s audacious instrumental arrangement of a Bach organ work, was given its world premiere at Ojai in 1956. The same spring there, Stravinsky conducted “Les Noces,” which he didn’t do often, and the performance was broadcast nationwide by CBS Radio.

Although the involvement of the world’s most famous composer added invaluable prestige to this little festival in a little town in an out-of-the-way scenic valley near Ventura, neither Ojai nor its festival is, sans Stravinsky, exactly chopped liver. Twenty-five years before the festival’s founding in 1947, the Ojai Valley, which the native Chumash tribe thought a pathway to heaven, began its curious and sometimes surreptitious involvement with the cultural and spiritual life of Los Angeles.

It is easy to overestimate the importance of the Ojai Festival, just as it is easy to be dismissive of it. I’ve sometimes felt from East Coast and European visitors a slightly condescending attitude about the quaintness of the festival, which is still held in a primitive band shell in Libbey Park -- although the trains are long gone, latter-day amplification helps those who sit on the lawn, and cramped basic dressing rooms have been built.

Accommodations in town are no longer inexpensive. But Ojai remains the most informal and modest of all world-class festivals. Much has changed, of course, since I first started attending the festival in the ‘60s, but not nearly as much as the rest of the world.

Somehow, a bohemian and spiritual aura can still faintly be sensed at this gathering. In the early ‘20s, Annie Besant, who headed the mystically eccentric Theosophical Society, had discovered Happy Valley in upper Ojai. She bought 40 acres and brought along from India her young protege, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she proclaimed the reincarnation of Christ and Buddha.

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Spirituality and bohemianism

ON his first visit to Ojai, Krishnamurti immediately found enlightenment, which helped him throw off Besant’s preposterous baggage and become one of the world’s most respected spiritual leaders for the rest of his long life. Ojai became one of his bases (he died there in 1986), and his presence proved a magnet for Hollywood celebrities and artists in the ‘30s and ‘40s. His talks at Ojai attracted the interest of Greta Garbo, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Charles Chaplin, Bertrand Russell and Charles Laughton, as well as Stravinsky.

Would someone please write a book about Ojai in the ‘30s? By middecade, it had become a mecca for bohemian artists. One of them was Pauline Schindler, who moved there after breaking up with her husband, famed architect Rudolph Schindler.

Among her lovers was a passionate young composer, 19 years her junior, who had just begun studying with Schoenberg in Los Angeles. “I was walking and thinking of you in Ojai, an open space of country, and suddenly I knew what wildness was,” John Cage wrote to her in 1935. “I am sure there is something unexplainably and mysteriously sacred about the Valley, something including evil.”

Seventy-one years later, conductor Robert Spano, this year’s music director, will begin the 60th Ojai Festival by reading Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” which contains the Ojai-apt line, “beware of that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane come down in a vacant lot.”

The phone rang and the plane landed in Ojai a year after Cage’s letter to Schindler, as film crews began capturing the valley’s sacred beauty. In Frank Capra’s 1937 classic, “Lost Horizon,” it serves as Shangri-La. When the Ojai Festival began a decade later, the town had grand homes and had become a mix of high society, spirituality and outsider art. The ambitious initial plans for the festival were to create a Salzburg of the West, eight weeks of music, opera, dance and theater.

That, of course, was out of the question. But Ojai’s allure made it easy to attract not only name soloists but the best Hollywood musicians for its ensembles. By 1949, the New York Times was running a composite sketch of participants in that year’s festival, illustrating the Juilliard String Quartet rehearsing, the pianist Shura Cherkassky performing and Thor Johnson conducting. Ladies in capes and fancy hats paraded. Bohos in sandals sat under oak trees.

Though founded by an East Coast impresario, John Leopold Jergens Bauer, the festival as we know it was the product of Lawrence Morton, who took over in 1954. Morton also ran the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, and what he wanted was new plus old plus unusual.

He was close to Stravinsky. At Ojai, he talked Copland into conducting for the first time. He brought the French composer Pierre Boulez to the festival in 1967, when Boulez’s career as a conductor was just beginning, and Boulez has been back six more times, most recently in 2003. Last year, I asked Boulez, who is 81, if he would ever return to Ojai. He said yes, he hoped so.

That summer of ’67 was the first time I saw Boulez conduct. I was a student with no money. I camped out and bought lawn seats, which were only a dollar or two. I also snuck into Boulez’s rehearsal of Stockhausen’s avant-garde “Zeitmasse.” But I got caught by a guard, and a ruckus erupted when he tried to eject me. Boulez turned to see what was going on and, noticing a scruffy teenager with the hard-to-get Stockhausen score in hand, said I was more than welcome to stay.

At the break, Boulez asked me who I was and told Morton that I should be given seats close up. Morton then invited me to sit with him; he wanted to follow the score along with me.

Ojai has always been a place where barriers, artistic and social, can be pushed -- but where they might shove back as well. Like wealthy patrons most places, Ojai’s often have traditional tastes, and Morton pushed some donors too far in the ‘50s. He left for Paris in 1960 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the festival immediately went pop with acts such as Anna Maria Alberghetti and Family.

But it quickly swung back to the other extreme. In 1962, when Luciano Berio was the composer in residence, he, Milton Babbitt and Gunther Schuller debated for four days the direction of music and where the 12-tone technique, jazz and tradition all fit in. The great jazz flutist and clarinetist Eric Dolphy played Edgard Varese’s flute solo, “Density 21.5,” that spring.

The next year in Pasadena, a 20-year-old student stripped bare and played chess with French artist Marcel Duchamp. I bring this up because Eve Babitz’s father, Sol Babitz, was the first concertmaster at the Ojai Festival. An unjustly forgotten figure in L.A. music history, Babitz was a pioneer in Baroque period performance practice. He was also part of Stravinsky’s circle, and his researches into early music fascinated the composer.

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Festival firsts

MEANWHILE, back to Ojai. From 1948 until her death in 1998 at 105, the potter Beatrice Wood was, after Krishnamurti, its most famous resident. Called the mama of Dada, she met Duchamp in 1916 in a New York hospital room occupied by Varese (who had broken a leg), fell for the artist instantly and eventually moved to Paris to be part of his crowd. As with so many others, Krishnamurti was what eventually drew her to Ojai.

The sacred and the profane, Krishnamurti and Wood, became Ojai’s unofficial patron saints. I felt Krishnamurti’s presence when Copland conducted Mahler’s Fourth in 1976, as if this great spirit were easing the way for one major composer to live through another. For years, a symbol of the festival was a drawing by Wood of a stick figure thumbing her nose -- another interpretation of Cage’s idea that the nature of beauty is to be interrupted. That happens at every concert in the park. And yet I’ve never felt closer to music than I have at Ojai.

A list of festival firsts could go on and on. Ojai further enters history through having fostered West Coast talent, most notably conductors Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano and Calvin Simmons at the very beginnings of their careers.

But thoughts of Krishnamurti and Wood make one want to praise strange bedfellows. In 1972, the German Richard Lert was the conductor, and a Balinese gamelan orchestra was also in residence. In 1979, Ravi Shankar, the Firesign Theatre and actor Werner Klemperer were on hand. Sitting under a tree, Lert told me about Brahms while the gamelan rehearsed in the background. Klemperer spoke of his father, Otto Klemperer, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, the same afternoon that Shankar shared anecdotes about Ringo.

In the 19 years since Morton’s death, the Ojai Festival has retained its distinctive character. It continues to attract visionaries. It contains itself within a weekend and a day. You still sit on either benches or the lawn. The town still fights the inevitable incursion of chain stores, which means the local ice cream is delicious. But there are more ways then ever in modern life to interfere with beauty. Now we must learn to ignore motorcycles parading down the street during concerts.

But 60 is also an age of maturity, and not all the seat-of-the-pants, chance-taking adventure survives. Big names are needed to draw crowds. This year, the Atlanta Symphony will be on hand, as will soprano Dawn Upshaw and the composer Osvaldo Golijov. We pretty much know what to expect.

Questions about the future can’t be avoided. As the area becomes more and more fashionable, will the festival lose its funkiness? Will all the new money support it? Might it be not just discovered but overrun? So far, however, Ojai has managed to fight for modern music while fighting off the temptation to modernize.

Sooner or later, it will modernize; everything does. Nor does nostalgia serve a positive purpose. The important thing to remember is that all along, Ojai drew audiences because of the music. The venue’s charm was always icing on the cake -- and when it’s really cold or really hot or the mosquitoes are biting, that charm diminishes rapidly.

Let the phone ring and the airplanes land. Ojai’s beauty proved long ago that it can take it. And so too can the music, if the music is great enough. That has always been Ojai’s magic formula.

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Ojai Festival

Where: Libbey Bowl, Signal Street and East Ojai Avenue, Ojai

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday;

11 a.m. Saturday; 11 a.m., 5:30 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $15 to $85

Contact: (805) 646-2094 or www.ojaifestival.org