Summer offers myriad pleasures, but perhaps none as diverting as the music festival. The ubiquity and variety of these events only further their appeal, and the best-known of them—Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne in Europe, and Marlboro, Tanglewood, and Aspen in America—are venerable institutions with their own cachet and rituals. But even less familiar festivals have charms, arguably all the more so because of their novelty. The Ojai Festival in California is hardly young (this year marked its fifty-fourth anniversary) and far from unknown to music lovers in the Golden State. Yet there is a hidden quality to Ojai (pronounced OH-high), a sense that it is a well-kept secret best kept well. Partly it’s a question of geography. The city of Ojai, which fancies itself something of an arts-and-crafts center, lies in a valley about ninety miles northwest of Los Angeles and fifteen miles from the Pacific coast. This is the place that Frank Capra chose for Shangri-La when he filmed Lost Horizon more than sixty years ago. And something of that idyllic environment persists to this day. Though some ancillary events have broadened the festival in recent years, it remains at heart a relaxed out-of-doors affair running just three days. Since 1952, it has occurred in a small public park, within which stands a tiny wooden band shell—the so-called Libbey Bowl—mounted on a flagstone base. The shell is surrounded by a verdant canopy of sycamores and flanked by benches and a great lawn. Yet at this unassuming spot, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Pierre Boulez, to name but a few, have conducted orchestras in a range of challenging works. That tradition of programing unconventional repertory persists to this day and has become the Ojai Festival’s defining feature. This year, Sir Simon Rattle, soon to be the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was the music director, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.1 And in what some would call an enhancement, two Englishmen whose music Rattle has championed, the wunderkind Thomas Adès and the would-be bad-boy Mark-Anthony Turnage, were the composers-in-residence. The tilt toward Cool Britannia was not complete, however, for the biggest (and arguably the most memorable) works on the programs were concert performances of operas by Ravel and Poulenc.
Though the festival offers its share of solo and chamber recitals, the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening orchestral programs are what draw music lovers to Ojai. The first of these concerts this year featured major works by Turnage and Adès, as well as Ravel’s winsome L’enfant et les sortilèges. Turnage’s Kai, here receiving its American premiere, is a decade-old piece dedicated to Kai Scheffler, a cellist who died young. Though some of the work’s thematic material was recycled from Turnage’s now-abandoned opera about the jazz bassist Charles Mingus, the tribute to Scheffler, by turns mournful and crackling, is quite heartfelt. Turnage likes to meld jazz riffs and modern-classical motives, and he does so with characteristic conviction in Kai. But the center of the piece is the vibrant, aching cello line, which in this performance was penetratingly played by Ben Hong, the assistant principal cellist of the philharmonic. For his part, Rattle, who conducted the premiere of this work, held his own, but he was clearly spoiling for Adès’s Asyla, having its West Coast debut. Much has been made of Asyla, a symphony in all but name. Many are calling it the best work thus far by Adès, a prodigiously gifted composer who has yet to turn thirty. Indeed, the work may prove just the groundbreaking effort fawning critics insist it is. Certainly its strange harmonies, converging in unexpected ways, are instantly captivating. In the second movement, for example, a preternaturally calm sound-world is evoked, at least partly, through cow bells. And in the third movement, which Adès has named “Ecstasio,” disparate instrumental elements unify and build into repeated figures that suggest nothing so much as a mechanical device grown huge and insatiable. Yet Adès leavens that impression by investing this music with humor, too. Three years ago, Rattle gave the premiere of this work in Birmingham, and his affection for it is obvious—and infectious. The philharmonic has long played well for Rattle, a favorite guest conductor in Los Angeles, and the orchestra sounded particularly pliant in this case.
Flexibility was at the heart of the L’enfant performance as well, which Rattle and the orchestra had played gorgeously just a week before in Los Angeles. If anything, Rattle’s control over the musicians was even greater in Ojai, with an unusual transparency in the strings especially welcome. The bucolic environment may have had something to do with the success: this is lush, atmospheric music, and hearing it in the perfumed night only increased its sensuous appeal. Yet full credit must be given to the eight soloists, for they were flawless. Ravel based his one-act charmer, completed in 1925, on a text supplied by Colette, and the result is beguiling on every count. The fantastic scenario concerns a willful child and his antagonistic encounters with, first, a host of animated household goods (an armchair, a grandfather clock, a teapot, etc.) and, later, a group of garden animals. Success in such endeavors naturally depends on abandoning reticence. And so it was at the Libbey Bowl, where generally upright singers like the tenor John Aler (a blustering teapot and a manic old man shouting numbers) and the baritone François Le Roux (a distraught clock and a highly sexed tomcat) let decorum slip away in favor of fun. The Israeli mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham (replacing an indisposed Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) lent a sympathetic tint to the brat, but it was another mezzo, Marietta Simpson, as the child’s put-upon maman, who really impressed, with her ample warm tone.
Saturday evening’s concert focused on loss. The program opened with Deluge, a single-movement piano concerto written by the young composer Naomi Sekiya. She had won something called the “Music for Tomorrow” award, and with victory came a performance of her piece at the festival. Deluge is a memorial for Sekiya’s father, and so anguish surfaced throughout the work, a mostly agreeable amalgam of early Stravinsky and film-noir scores. Rattle, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group, led a committed performance, and Vicki Ray, as the piano soloist, variously imparted both sensitivity and brute force. The featured work was Turnage’s distended Blood on the Floor (1996), which was receiving its American premiere. This piece, which takes its title from a Francis Bacon painting, is an elegy on a far bigger scale. A nine-movement suite for chamber orchestra and jazz trio (saxophone, guitar, and drums), Turnage’s knockabout score honors his brother, Andy, who died of a drug overdose. Turnage told me that he wrote the piece in “bits,” and there’s no question it has an episodic quality and is perhaps better appreciated parceled out. Frequently engaging in its raucous, jazz-inflected way, and occasionally even during its quieter moments, the work became ponderous and repetitive as it wore on. (This performance lasted about eighty minutes.) Yet there was no denying the enthusiasm with which Rattle and the players essayed the music; they were true believers, even when such devotion wasn’t warranted.
Unlike traditional concert series, the tighter summer festivals have a way of surprising us.
The first half of Sunday’s concert rather too symbolically paired Adès (These Premises Are Alarmed, 1996) with Benjamin Britten (orchestral interludes from the opera Peter Grimes, 1945). But the contrasts were worth savoring, as was the unmistakable sense that with Adès producing music of such glossy wit, England’s place on the musical scene remains secure. Rattle and the philharmonic clearly delighted in the freewheeling piquancy of the young composer’s brief, cheeky work, but they saved their earnestness for Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia. Their richly colored performance was precise and gripping, the winds especially pellucid. But it is worth mentioning that the philharmonic had played this music at a subscription concert in March, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, the music director-designate of the Cleveland Orchestra, and that performance was even more convincing.
Poulenc’s rarely performed short opera Les mamelles de Tirésias concluded the entire festival. Like the Ravel two evenings before, it was gamely and lovingly dispatched, and by the same performers. Based on Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 play of the same name (the first work to be called “surrealist”), Poulenc’s opera is a gay romp with a serious point: war decimates populations; avid procreation rebuilds them. These days, the political aspects of the piece don’t carry much weight, but the effervescent score still does. Under Rattle’s direction, the music soared, much as the heroine Thérèse’s breasts do (balloons, really) when they are sent aloft. As with the Ravel, the intricacies of the plot don’t matter nearly so much as the spirit of the work, and in this performance, the singers embraced the silliness fully. Le Roux, with his superb diction and pleasing timbre, brought an apt music-hall spirit to the Theater Director’s introduction, which sets up the tale. The bass Julien Rodescu and the tenor Thomas Young, as Messrs Presto and Lacouf, were a happy study in contrasts, physically as well as vocally. And Aler, in excellent voice throughout the festival, seemed to be having the time of his life as Thérèse’s bemused husband. But the soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, as Thérèse, stood out most, and not just because of her starring role. Murphy can be a cloying singer, but here she sang with Dawn Upshaw-like freshness and appeared utterly comfortable in this sometimes baffling piece.
Unlike traditional concert series, the tighter summer festivals have a way of surprising us. Their entire complexion can change from year to year. Ojai certainly welcomes change. In 1999, for instance, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the L.A. Philharmonic, oversaw a festival rich in scores from his native Finland. And next year, Salonen will return to Ojai, bringing with him programs devoted to music of the Americas. Whatever the specific musical results, something interesting and potentially enlightening is bound to occur. It always has, anyway. That’s the wonder of Ojai—well, that and the picturesque mountains and the warm breezes and the shady groves.
