MUSIC REVIEW : Ojai Turns to Mozart, Moderns : Mozart and composer-conductors Peter Maxwell Davies and John Harbison dominate 45th festival.

OJAI —  Yes. The lusty birds in Libbey Park still embellish the prosaic, man-made music with rude obbligatos of their own. The noble, ancient sycamore--or what remains of it after all these decaying decades--still flanks the tiny stage in this verdant, emphatically un-Hollywoodish bowl.

The ruggedly attentive audience is still divided into two classes. The devout who fill the expensive seats (top ticket: $27) still bear the indignity of hard wooden benches with stoic honor. An equally staunch mass of aficionados insists, however, that one can fully savor the glories of a concert in this unlikely mecca only if sprawled in rustic splendor on the grass (general admission: $12).

Some things never change. Never? Well, hardly ever.

It wouldn’t be entirely realistic to pretend that the 45th Ojai Festival offered business as usual. Rebounding from the brink of fiscal disaster, the management has engaged a new resident director: Christopher Hunt, a transplanted Briton who had brought adventurous luster to the Pepsico Summerfare in Purchase, New York.

A new amplification system now projects the music to distant places with enhanced fidelity. From a seat near the back of the amphitheater, it also introduces a disorienting contradiction: While the players labor busily on the stage, the sounds they produce emanate stubbornly from loudspeakers at the rear.

Ojai always dealt in musical sophistication. The festival has provided an appreciative long-weekend haven for the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez and Lukas Foss. Occasionally, habitues might complain if dissonances demanded what they regarded as undue ear-stretching, but no one came here to hum along with Tchaikovsky under the stars. And no one minded the apparent anachronism that found dedicated volunteers selling tickets at the entrance from a cigar box on a card table.

The cigar box is gone now. Ojai has built a handsome, elaborate box-office structure that also houses souvenir and refreshment stands. The lawns have been manicured and enlarged. The place is beginning to look like a mini-Tanglewood.

Still, a degree of happy innocence lingers. One senses it when Hunt takes to the microphone before a concert. With dry British wit, he exhorts the patrons to applaud and depart only in the right places, to refrain from smoking (invariable applause) and to “turn off all beepers, alarms and babies.”

The programs were dominated this year by three composers, two of whom doubled--with varying degrees of success--as conductors. Acknowledging the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death, Ojai surveyed numerous rarities from the composer’s final year. Reaffirming its commitment to the 20th Century, Ojai turned to an enlightened pair of creative conservatives: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the universally celebrated pride of Hoy in the Orkneys, and John Harbison, the Pulitzer-prize winning former composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The opening concert, Friday night, found Harbison stodgily leading the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, an obviously eager ensemble that enlists Maxwell Davies as associate conductor. Though spirits were high, finesse was in rather short supply.

Harbison introduced his own modest and faithful arrangement of an F-minor Fantasia that Mozart had cranked out for a mechanical organ, a.k.a. musical clock. Less trivial Mozartean pursuits involved two vehicles for illustrious graduates of the Peter Sellars School of Mozart Opera.

Sanford Sylvan, Pepsico’s cynical Figaro and Alfonso, sang the flowing concert-aria “Per questa bella mano” with almost enough art to disguise the fact that Mozart intended the piece for a Sarastro bass, not a Papageno baritone. Owen Lee provided the deft, over-amplified double-bass counterforce.

Janice Felty, Pepsico’s feverish Dorabella, tried valiantly to ride her lyric mezzo-soprano over the dramatic-coloratura hurdles of “Non piu di fiori” from “La Clemenza di Tito.” Lewis Morrison provided the virtuosic basset-horn counterforce.

Harbison’s contributions included the Concerto for Oboe and Clarinet--a complex, neatly beguiling little wind squabble written in 1985--and a properly elegiac yet just-as-properly jovial “Exequiem” for Calvin Simmons, who had been music director here in 1978. Morrison and Richard Simpson, both principals with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, executed the complex solo duties in the concerto with complementary elan.

The concert ended charmingly if anticlimactically with seven formula dances by Mozart--assorted country pieces, pretty minuets and cute jokes that turned out to be a bit much of a not terribly good thing. The Mozartean redundancies continued Saturday afternoon when Maxwell Davies, a somewhat primitive but more seasoned maestro than Harbison, conducted a dozen more incidental dances and minuets.

This program was easily redeemed, however, by the U.S. premiere of Maxwell Davies’ “Strathclyde” Concerto No. 4, an extraordinarily poignant essay in the gradual clarification of chaos. Morrison did his canny best to fullfil the composer’s wish that the clarinet might somehow impersonate a bagpipe.

Maxwell Davies’ “Ojai Festival Overture,” a piece d’occasion receiving its world premiere, exulted in jolly, almost simplistic bustle.

The action moved indoors at 9:30 for an intimate late-evening--possibly too late--program of chamber music at the Ojai Presbyterian Church. A crowd of 300 braved stifling heat to be enthralled by the quaintly blurred, otherworldly sounds of the glass armonica in two Mozart adagios performed by the redoubtable Dennis James.

This sprawling adventure began with an utterly prosaic “Kleine Deutsche Kantate” by Mozart, poetically sung by David Gordon and competently accompanied at the fortepiano by the ubiquitous Harbison. Also on the agenda was Maxwell Davies’ amusingly rowdy, folksy-primitive dance suite from “The Two Fiddlers,” with Rose Mary Harbison serving as jaunty soloist.

Her husband’s “Words From ‘Paterson’ ” revealed a sensitive setting of William Carlos Williams’ text, but the recitatives seemed to ramble in elusive quest of lyrical expansion. Accompanied by a stellar chamber ensemble, Sanford Sylvan did what he could with the ungrateful vocal line. Luckily, he can do a lot.