MUSIC REVIEW : Boulez Orgy Ends Happily

The Ojai Festival, a musical mirage hidden in a sleepy inland valley somewhere between Ventura and Santa Barbara, began back in 1947. The little concerts took place in private homes. The gala events invaded a school auditorium.

All that has changed, to a degree. Now, the little concerts take place in a church, and the big ones occupy a mini-bowl in the town park.

The annual festival lasts only one long, overstuffed, stubbornly sophisticated weekend. But it has made Ojai something of a mecca for the enlightened many who think compelling concerts need not always be hum-along convocations.

The ambience here is agreeably intimate, blessedly informal. The programming tends toward the progressive, if not the experimental. The list of participants over the decades has been decidedly uneven but often imposing.

Igor Stravinsky made his first appearance here in 1955 (in tandem with Robert Craft, of course). He was followed by such diverse compositional colleagues as Aaron Copland, Ingolf Dahl, Lukas Foss, Olivier Messiaen, John Harbison and Peter Maxwell Davies.

Pierre Boulez--chronically cool, ever urbane and often witty--has been an intermittent guiding spirit for a quarter of a century. In his uncompromisingly analytical approach both to composing and to conducting, he demands much of his players and much of his audiences. Luckily, this unassuming, eminently cerebral Frenchman usually gets what he demands.

His visit this year turned out to be his fifth. It yielded a series of extraordinarily stimulating, amazingly polished programs.

In the bad old days, Ojai audiences frequently had to accept good intentions in place of good achievements. Once past Peter Sellars’ disastrously miscalculated “L’Histoire du Soldat” on opening night, we didn’t have to take anything on faith this time.

The biggest problem facing anyone who braves all five concerts in an Ojai weekend involves aesthetic indigestion. The final chords of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” had barely evaporated in the warm night air on Saturday, for instance, when the devout moved from the alfresco amphitheater to the nearby Presbyterian Church to hear five difficult pieces of modern chamber music.

The focus here was on virtuosic means to intellectual ends. Gloria Cheng untied the tight linear knots of Boulez’s “Douze Notations pour le piano” (1945) with uncommon clarity of purpose, obvious intensity of concentration and a fine sense of muted drama. Later, collaborating with the poised and agile Philharmonic flutist Anne Diener Giles, she found decorative logic in the innocent bird song of Messiaen’s “Le Merle Noir” (1951). Finally, in an official memorial to Messiaen, she brought dashing bravura to the subtle convolutions of “Quatre Etudes de rhythme” (1950).

The second hero of this concert was John Bruce Yeh, a young clarinetist equipped with a dazzling technique, an inquisitive mind and impeccable stylistic instincts. He blithely defined both the tension and the surprisingly florid order in Stravinsky’s Three Pieces (1919). Then he played a delirious extended duet with his electronic shadow in Boulez’s “Dialogue de l’ombre double” (1985).

His resourceful partner in matters of tape technology for this complex challenge was Howard Sandroff, officially charged with the duties of “computer-controlled spatialization.” The creative program credit no doubt reflects a profoundly significant sign of our times.

For a traditional Sunday breakfast, Ojai served a duo recital by Cho-Liang Lin and Andre-Michel Schub. The menu, much applauded by the eager gourmands in attendance, included sonatas and duets of Debussy and Stravinsky, including the reputed premiere of an obscure tango transcribed by the latter for Samuel Dushkin. One somewhat reluctant gourmand (this one) arrived only in time for the hearty dessert--Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata--played with much finesse by the pianist and with some unaccustomed stridency by the violinist.

Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic devoted the grand finale of the Ojai orgy to three disparate giants of the century: Bartok, Schoenberg and Debussy. The players didn’t have an inch to spare on the tiny stage, and the balmy clime obviously took its humid toll (the men sensibly doffed their white jackets). The dauntless maestro exerted taut refinement and precision even under imperfect conditions, however, and the microphones treated the music kindly. Once again, our orchestra sounded like an inspired world-class ensemble.

Boulez reduced the violence of Bartok’s Four Pieces, Opus 12, to mere urgency, but that may have been a wise decision in context. He certainly savored the odd romantic echoes in Schoenberg’s second Chamber Symphony (1939), and he depicted both the delicate ripples and the mighty waves of Debussy’s “La Mer” with objective savoir-faire.