Ojai’s spiritual entertainments

When the unofficial patron saint of this charmed valley, Jiddu Krishnamurti, gave outdoor public talks at his foundation here in the 1970s and ‘80s, birds sang and the mountains in the background seemed especially radiant. But the stern spiritual leader would put up with no New Age mellowness, insisting that his laid-back listeners get serious for an hour. What he had to say about human nature, he would repeat again and again, was not entertainment.

The Ojai Music Festival doesn’t exactly scorn entertainment, and the 60th edition of this short and relaxed but significant festival produced its unapologetic share of entertainment last weekend in the Libbey Bowl. The featured composer was the enormously engaging Osvaldo Golijov, who takes some of his inspiration from popular culture.

Dawn Upshaw, the most down to earth of sopranos, was the star soloist. In residence was the excellent Atlanta Symphony, which, under its likable music director, Robert Spano, proudly puts a happy face (even a smiley one) on new music. The new music ensemble known as eighth blackbird, which has a tendency to theatrically glad-hand new work, was also there.

Nothing, though, could have been truer to Krishnamurti’s insistence that fanatical identification with religion is a source of violence than Upshaw’s astonishing, possessed performance of “Ayre” on Sunday morning. Golijov’s song cycle -- based on texts from 15th century Spain, where Jewish, Arabic and Christian cultures intermixed -- is only 2 years old and a smash hit. Upshaw has recorded it, and she performed it at Walt Disney Concert Hall in November as part of a national tour with eighth blackbird.

Barricades come down in striking songs of love and sorrow, heaven and earth, conquerors and the conquered, the sacred and the profane, and the inexplicable ways of men. A mother roasts her son for a sacrificial feast. A wife turns out a philandering husband. The “silvery waistline” of a barefoot girl is embraced.

The music is eclectic and wild, replete with electronic wails, loopy Space Age lounge music, a weeping guitar, a dancing klezmer clarinet. Upshaw’s voice is known for its sweetness and honey, but Golijov asks for the vocal cords to be scrubbed with sandpaper, for wailing and meditative quiet.

Upshaw’s commitment onstage is no surprise, but something happened Sunday morning to her and eighth blackbird that I’m not sure can be explained. The ensemble, which had been disappointing in Disney, came to pulsating life this time. It was a gray, unfrivolous morning, and Upshaw became no less than a channeler for these archaic cultures.

A large subtext of the festival was Latin culture. Friday night, the Atlanta Symphony presented a concert performance of Golijov’s opera, “Ainadamar,” about the death of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by the Fascists in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Sunday afternoon, the orchestra presented Golijov’s 1996 cantata, “Oceana,” which sets a poem by Pablo Neruda.

Saturday night, the Brazilian singer Luciana Souza began the evening with a breezy jazz set and ended by joining the Atlanta Symphony in “El Amor Brujo” by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. She was also the spellbinding soloist in “Oceana.”

On Thursday night, the German sound artist Trimpin realized some player piano studies by Conlon Nancarrow, the American composer who fought in the Spanish Civil War and settled in Mexico City. Trimpin also set up his remarkable sound-producing sculpture “Conloninpurple” at the Ojai Valley Art Museum. (Thursday night, which I missed, also included Spano reading John Cage’s aesthetically provocative “Lecture on Nothing.”)

Golijov has the remarkable ability -- and one that is very closely tied to Spanish and Latin American culture -- of treating very serious, somber, life-and-death issues as accessible “entertainment.” “Ainadamar” is the “fountain of tears” where Lorca perished. And it is a long meditation on death, Lorca’s last moments seen through the eyes of the dying actress Margarita Xirgu, but the music is full of seductive dance rhythms.

The opera, which was given in its first version by the Los Angeles Philharmonic two seasons ago, was revised for Peter Sellars’ production at Santa Fe Opera last summer. In the Libbey Bowl, I missed the intense staging and the phantasmagorical mural created by Gronk for the production, but the cast was the same -- Upshaw (Xirgu), Kelley O’Connor (Lorca) and Jessica Rivera (Nuria, a student) -- that has sung all the performances, and it proved gripping. Spano softens some edges (Miguel Harth Bedoya conducted in Santa Fe), but he brings to it a rich symphonic sweep.

There were aspects of the festival this year that didn’t make sense. On Friday, eighth blackbird preceded “Ainadamar” with a performance of Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together” that turned this powerful political meditation on the 1971 riot at the Attica prison in rural New York into a tawdry psychodrama.

At the other extreme, the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus offered a characterless Saturday morning a cappella concert unrelated to the festival. There didn’t seem much point in Spano’s moderate-energy, careful performance of John Adams’ Chamber Symphony on Sunday, when most in L.A. know the hellbent-for-leather performances of it that Esa-Pekka Salonen gives with the local band.

But eighth blackbird completely redeemed itself not only in Golijov’s music but also in Luciano Berio’s “Folk Songs,” which Upshaw performed as prelude to “Ayre.” Berio’s 1964 arrangement of songs from around the world for soprano and chamber ensemble pioneered musical postmodernism. The songs are relatively straight, their accompaniments not. The ensemble played with remarkable cogency. Upshaw sang them with an engagingly innocent enthusiasm that may have been a bit too innocent compared with the biting edge that the late Cathy Berberian, for whom Berio was writing, brought to them.

On Sunday, Spano remembered Berberian by conducting Berio’s “Requies,” his otherworldly tribute to the soprano (and the first of the composer’s three wives). Here hazy music proved just as mysteriously beautiful as the Ojai mist that hung over the mountains most of the weekend but was just beginning to break.

Berio’s arrangement of Bach’s unfinished last fugue from “Art of Fugue” segueing into the ending of Bach’s B-minor Mass, done in grand style by large chorus and orchestra, ended the festival -- apparently to lift our spirits.

Yet the feel-good message of peace on Earth sounded too superficial taken out of context of the whole Mass. And I wonder whether Ojai audiences might not be spiritually tough enough to go home with a bracing understanding of Bach/Berio unfinished business rather than simple answers.