Heavenly Music in the California Hills

For a new music fan, Southern California’s Ojai Festival is about as close to nirvana as it gets. For 62 years now, this little artsy town in the hills near Santa Barbara has been bringing contemporary music to the outdoor Libbey Bowl, an acoustic shell in a sylvan park setting as idyllic as the music can be challenging. Stravinsky, Copland, Boulez, MTT (many times) … a good number of the 20th century’s most acclaimed musical creators and interpreters have directed the four-day extravaganza. And since, in recent years, the musical director changes annually, the programming can vary wildly.

This year’s chief, St. Louis Symphony music director David Robertson (in tandem with artistic director Thomas Morris, the former Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra honcho), chose what for Ojai was a fairly mainstream focus — a celebration of the greatest living composer, Steve Reich, and a star turn by one of contemporary music’s brightest stars, Dawn Upshaw. The festival also featured several U.S. premieres, an Elliott Carter tribute, the West Coast debut of an exciting postclassical ensemble, Signal, and a rising piano prodigy, Eric Huebner. Four days of some of the most compelling music of our time, played by some of its finest interpreters. Like I said, paradise. Admittedly, the acoustics are far from heavenly. With no walls, the sound is dry, amplification is necessary, and the resulting sound can sometimes evoke car speakers more than, say, Disney Hall. Crickets and birds often contribute, unasked, to the performances. And yet, within a few minutes of Thursday night’s opening concert featuring Reich’s Eight Lines, performed by Signal, the committed, high-caliber playing erased all acoustical concerns.

Small Ensembles Loom Large

Years ago, Reich predicted that orchestras would need to change, to become more flexible in order to perform more than the extremely narrow band of repertoire we keep hearing over and over. He said they’d need to be able to break into smaller ensembles specializing in, say, early music, percussion music, and other contemporary sounds, then come together for larger works. With Brad Lubman’s Signal, composed of some of New York’s most accomplished new music players, that day seems closer. In only its second official performance, the group nailed Eight Lines and Reich’s new-ish Daniel Variations, whose subject is L.A. native Daniel Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter. Whether by design — Reich, as usual, stood next to the mixing board — or not, the sound in Daniel came off as harsh, but the passionate performances carried the day. The four solo singers, whose sound resembled early music vocalists far more than typical operatic or art song interpreters, were especially striking, their precise diction making almost every word clear. The dry acoustic actually helped listeners perceive Reich’s interlocking melodic lines. Two members of Signal (which includes the acclaimed So Percussion ensemble) tossed off Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas. And So Percussion played Reich’s once-controversial Four Organs; as at the L.A. Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival a few years ago, what once drew boos and catcalls (Boston, 1973) drew cheers today — as it did in its first Ojai performance 35 years earlier. Friday evening’s concert gave us our first glimpse of Robertson in action, and he delivered a crisp performance with the Ojai Orchestra (an aggregation of leading SoCal classical players) of George Antheil’s dizzy, oh-so-’20s Jazz Symphony (which is neither). It staggers drunkenly from sequence to sequence as entertainingly as an inebriated W.C. Fields. It was followed by another assemblage: the U.S. premiere of Un Gran Masturbador (no apparent connection to the Dali painting) by the young French composer François Narboni, who was in attendance. A stitched-together compendium of 1970s-era musical fragments (guitar riffs, chants, and other vocal snippets) played back and then picked up and transformed by the orchestra, the piece’s dedication namechecks almost 50 pop and jazz musicians of the period. The effect was somewhere between Carl Stone, DJ Spooky, and John Zorn. It’s certainly representative of today’s fragmented, sample-soaked musical culture and therefore a worthwhile addition to the program. But, lacking the solid musical structure of similar combinations like Reich’s Different Trains or City Life, it overstayed its welcome.

Chaplin’s Genius on Display

The evening’s centerpiece was a viewing of a beautifully restored print of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic film, Modern Times, featuring the orchestra’s lively performance of the original “score,” which Chaplin (not a trained musician, but very musical) fashioned with considerable help from the great film composer David Raksin. Since the movie, though made in the sound picture era, contains no audible dialogue and only infrequent subtitles, the music works in tandem with the onscreen imagery to set the mood — weepy during the scenes depicting the travails of the Depression; madcap during Chaplin’s justly celebrated, comic, nervous breakdown in which he winds up caught in the giant gears of the factory’s machinery; boozy (even a “how dry I am” quote) when he’s accidentally under the influence of beer and “nose powder.” I confess I was too transfixed by Chaplin’s magnificently subversive genius to pay close attention to the orchestra’s performance in this essentially functional music, but it was certainly a lot of fun. This IS Southern California, and a nod to film score culture seems appropriate. Can you imagine anything more divine than waking up on a sunny Saturday morning, strolling through a leafy park, and sitting a few yards away while Dawn Upshaw sings Debussy? Me neither. Her wide-ranging Saturday morning recital, with new music piano stalwart Gilbert Kalish (who took a few solo turns), also featured music of Ives, Fauré, Berg, Copland, and more. Upshaw’s ever-richer voice changes to suit whatever style is appropriate — playful in Ravel and William Bolcom bonbons, ecstatic in Messiaen, ravishing in Hugo Wolf, otherworldly in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s White Moon. Unfortunately (for this philistine, anyway), that morning beauty was battered away by an afternoon centennial tribute to Elliott Carter. The brilliant young pianist Eric Huebner (joined, in Carter’s 1948 cello sonata, by Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick) was as persuasive as could be, maintaining a powerful sense of forward motion and drama in all three showcases. This dark-hued music might have worked better in a nocturnal setting rather than in the sun-soaked Ojai Art Center. But I’m certainly of the minority opinion — they had to schedule a second afternoon performance when the first sold out. Call me a West Coast weenie, but after an hour of pummeling from dissonant multiple fortissimos, no matter how well played, I couldn’t bear to see the festival’s screening of A Labyrinth of Time, the Carter film biography, which probably would have explained the whole thing.

From the European Scene

Saturday evening’s concert offered a glimpse into what hot young European composers are up to courtesy of Robertson, who succeeded Boulez as director of Paris's Ensemble Intercontemporain in the early 1990s. With no fanfare, a perturbed-looking soprano in a long black gown appeared on stage, spotlit, singing a meandering melodic line swathed in electronic burblings and susurrations supplied by Miller Puckette. After this strikingly dramatic opening, Philip Manoury’s En echo maintained a languid, dreamlike state, with occasional electronic spritzes squirting through the texture like undersea volcanic eruptions. Soprano Juliana Snapper held the stage alone for the next 45 minutes, but the music itself never varied much. A translation of the lyrics might have helped.

Photo by Axel Koester

Another, even more perturbed-looking, black-clad blonde, actress Barbara Sukowa, took center stage for the evening’s second piece, the West Coast premiere of Michael Jarrell’s Cassandre. Her hour-long dramatic retelling of the Trojan War from the loser’s perspective (based on Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel) was gripping throughout. The music itself, played by the Ojai Orchestra, mostly hovered in the background, supplying atmosphere and punctuation, but taken as a whole, the performance was an audience-pleasing success. It was followed, a short saunter away at the Art Center, by an 11 p.m. performance of onetime Ojai music director Olivier Messiaen’s 20th-century landmark, Quartet for the End of Time. Played by an all-star quartet (pianist Gloria Cheng, clarinetist Todd Levy, cellist Andre Shulman, violinist Frank Almond) in a hushed atmosphere of candlelight and floor cushions, it made a moving capper to an exhausting but exhilarating day of modern music.

Photo by Axel Koester

The festival reached a climax the following morning with the return of Reich, his long-time colleagues the Nexus percussion ensemble, and the next generation So Percussion. Reich and Nexus' Russell Hartenberger kicked it off with the always entertaining Clapping Music, then Huebner fired off two of Georgy Ligeti’s irresistible "Études," and Robertson led the asembled percussionists through Edgard Varèse’s pioneering essay in “organized sound,” Ionisation — surprisingly, the first time it’d been played here.

Drumming Up a Storm

Then came the highlight, and one of the peak experiences of my musical life, a live performance of Reich’s Drumming. Starting with a single drummer tapping a single note, Reich’s hour-plus 1971 masterpiece eventually builds to a vast, mind-blowing (as they said then) tapestry of interlocking rhythms. But as with much percussion music, and much of Reich’s work, experiencing it live is a tremendously richer experience. Not only are the overtones and other acoustic properties so important to the piece much more audible, but listeners are also able to see almost every note as it’s played, more clearly revealing the gradually shifting rhythms and other intricate processes that make Reich’s earlier works so fascinating. At Ojai, the percussionists, including Reich, moved to and from a row of drums, to a row of marimbas, to a row of glockenspiels, eventually joined by wordless vocals and piccolo. As the Nexus percussionists gave way to (and eventually rejoined) the So Percussion ensemble, you could see the torch (and the mallets) being passed from the first generation of minimalist performers to the next. Ever so gradually, they created a vast whirlwind of evolving sound that produced, in this listener, an emotional response right up there with Reich and colleagues’ Music for 18 Musicians in San Francisco a decade ago, and a very few other performances. I wondered how the Ojai audience, so steeped in modernism, would react, and the answer came at the sudden ending (signaled by the vocalist), when ecstatic whoops and cheers forced three curtain calls. Even the famously intense Reich grinned wide and long, perhaps in wonder at the power his early work had to move so many listeners, so many years later. It was a performance for the ages. After that climax, the evening performance made a happy denouement. Upshaw and the orchestra’s lovely take on Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (augmented by the excellent mezzo Kate Lindsey) and the closing hallelujahs of Reich’s soaring, ecstatic, classic Tehillim ended the festival on a high — and yes, heavenly — note. The Ojai Festival reports that only about 10 percent of its audience comes from the Bay Area. Judging by this year’s triumph, it should be more.