Taking a New Look at Igor Stravinsky : Music: His right-hand man Robert Craft is conducting some of the legendary composer’s works in Santa Barbara.

Wherever Igor Stravinsky went during most of his 20-plus years in Los Angeles, he was flanked by Robert Craft, musician, journalist, cultural translator and dutiful aide de camp for the great composer. Craft conducted many of the composer’s later premieres, published books about him and attended to logistics in the life of the legend. In short, he was a right-hand man.

Craft, who met Stravinsky while at Juilliard in 1948, developed a unique relationship with the composer, whose life took him from Russia to Europe and, after World War II, westward to Los Angeles. Here, the composer--with Craft in tow--lived until 1969, when, feeling unappreciated in his adopted city, he moved to New York. He died there in 1971.

It only makes sense that Craft’s first official return to Southern California (apart from a brief appearance in Ojai in 1987) is as the principal guest conductor and Regents’ lecturer for “Stravinsky,” UC Santa Barbara’s fourth annual New Music Festival, which opens today. Why did Craft stay away from Southern California so long?

“I’m a little fearful of it,” he explained in an interview from his home in Florida. “The reason is that I do have very strong feelings of nostalgia about it. After all, I spent 23 years there with Stravinsky. It was the most marvelous time of my life, stimulating every moment, aggravating every other moment.”

On the five-day festival program, which is designed to highlight all the composer’s stylistic periods, Craft conducts concerts on Saturday and Sunday nights and lectures twice. Additional events include three Stravinsky concerts and four lectures, plus special concerts of works by faculty and students in tribute to the composer.

Why Stravinsky? And why now? From a 1990s vantage point, says festival director and UCSB professor William Kraft, “it’s obvious he’s the most influential composer of the century.”

Robert Craft’s involvement with the life and work of Stravinsky has in some ways intensified since the composer’s death: He has become the keeper of the flame. Right now, for instance, he is in the middle of a 15-title project conducting Stravinsky’s music for the Music-Masters label. In part, Craft sees the project as a response to the mammoth Stravinsky-conducting-Stravinsky series released by Sony a few years ago.

“When I started out with the MusicMasters series, I was trying to reverse some of the impressions given by Stravinsky’s worst performances on Sony. The last scene of ‘The Rake’s Progress’ is marvelous music, which atones for much in the score that isn’t. His recording kills it. It drags horribly.”

In fact, a good part of Craft’s m.o. regarding Stravinsky’s legacy is setting the record straight. For example, a “new version” of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, originally written in 1920s and revised in 1947, will highlight Sunday’s concert at UCSB. As Craft said, it’s not really new at all, but a corrected version of the revised score, which has never been published. Stravinsky added “many, many changes--rewritings, re-instrumentations, re-voicings and chords, marked in red ink.”

In the published score, “all the colors are different. For instance, in 1947, he did not have alto flute or alto clarinet. They were rare instruments.” According to Craft, the commonly heard version is “full of mistakes--wrong notes, terrible phrasing.”

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During Stravinsky’s sojourn in Los Angeles, he traded the neoclassical sound of works like the Symphonies of Wind Instruments for the schemes of 12-tone music. Is it true that Craft pushed the composer toward serialism, even in the face of Stravinsky’s stated antipathy toward the music that his contemporary--and fellow Los Angeles transplant--Arnold Schoenberg had pioneered?

“I have to confess that I was a fervent proselytizer,” Craft said. “You can lead a horse to water, but he’ll have nothing to do with it if he’s not interested, so I don’t feel bad about it. Some books blame me for this, but he certainly knew what he was doing. He could see more clearly than I could what there was in that world for him.”

One of the more winning examples of Stravinsky’s 12-tone music is the ballet “Agon,” a centerpiece of “American Stravinsky,” the fourth CD in Craft’s MusicMaster series. Craft has vivid recollections of conducting the premiere of the ballet at UCLA’s Royce Hall in 1957. Stravinsky’s friend Aldous Huxley spoke and a telegram from President Eisenhower were among the extra-musical garlands lavished on the evening.

“It was a time of the most incredible excitement,” said Craft. “Stravinsky was 75, and we were tremendously happy that he had lived to be 75, because the previous autumn, he’d had a terrible stroke. The latter half of ‘Agon’ was composed after he’d spent six weeks in a hospital in Munich. This is a young’s man music. He came back, in a renaissance.”

In Los Angeles, Stravinsky lived in two different houses on Wetherly Drive in Beverly Hills. Craft, who said he won’t be visiting his old haunts on this trip to Southern California, describes the street as “a place where so much happened and so much music was composed, listened to, played on the piano, you can’t just look at a place like that and turn away.

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“Stravinsky managed to do that. He went back to Russia, to what is now St. Petersburg, and passed the house where he lived. He looked at it and turned away. At the house next door was a plaque for a rather bad conductor, totally forgotten now. But there was no plaque on Stravinsky’s door. I think that bothered him.

“Then we went around the corner to the conservatory and he could barely look at that, for another reason--he hated it so much. It represented the academic world that he said he ‘sent to hell’ when he wrote ‘Le Sacre du Printemps.’ ”

Craft, who in addition to the Stravinksy CDs is also recording the music of Schoenberg, believes that “as the world gets more and more anxious, people turn to Schoenberg and to Stravinsky.” Complex times, he thinks, require complex art. Which means that the Stravinsky expert is always in demand.

Recently, for instance, scholars comparing scores discovered 2,000 major mistakes in the published “Firebird.” Sighing, half laughing, Craft said, “I got two letters last week from bassoon players, one in Switzerland and one in Los Angeles, asking whether it’s an E-flat”--he sings the part--”the second time around. I’ve heard it both ways. It keeps us busy, but I have enough to do.”

* Robert Craft conducts Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat” (staged), “Pastorale,” “Eight Instrumental Miniatures” and Concertino (version for chamber ensemble), May 6, 8 p.m.; and May 7, 7 p.m., “Histoire du Soldat” (staged), “Symphonies of Wind Instruments,” “Parasha’s Aria” from “Mavra,” and other works. At Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, UCSB. $7 (students) to $10. For a complete schedule of events at the New Music Festival, call (805) 893-3230.