15 June 2009
By Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent
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Shock, shake of the new: The weekend's 63rd annual Ojai Music Festival offering made for a fresh fest
As the last clanging of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union" rang out Sunday night at Ojai's Libby Bowl -- the climax of a five-hour marathon finale to this year's 63rd annual Ojai Music Festival -- a certain dualistic impression settled over the dedicated festgoer. This year's four-day festival, organized by heroic contemporary chamber ensemble eighth blackbird, was somehow perfectly fresh and in keeping with the fest's celebrated history. Brazen youth and respectful tradition got along, and famously.
World premieres, especially of the large-scale and ambitious sort, haven't played much of a role in the Festival's history, which made the Friday night premiere of "SLIDE" an extra-notable achievement. This 75-minute opus is also a multilimbed, hard-to-describe achievement of composer-guitarist Steven Mackey's flexible writing. The piece moved nimbly through Modernist maneuvers and post-art-rock moments reminiscent of King Crimson and Gentle Giant -- here we got grooves, intellectually, with distinctive singer and co-creator Rinde Eckert's narrative about a troubled psychologist and a would-be chamber musician.
Filling out the ever-changing piece, members of eighth blackbird navigated Mr. Mackey's score without blinking, while also playing roles in the intentionally ambiguous storyline of the work. As Mr. Mackey has explained, his new work follows the inspirational lead of 20th century loosely narrative chamber music classics, such as Igor Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat" and Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." Fittingly, the latter piece, re-choreographed and directed by Mark DeChiazza with glorious soprano Lucy Shelton in the "sprechstimme" lead role, assumed the pivotal Saturday night main event spot.
Ojai's outdoor setting has always been an inspiration, and also an inherent and accepted distraction from the normally controlled setting of a classical performance. This year, the natural aspect reared its head in various ways, most notably when a siren went off -- as if on cue -- just after Ms. Shelton's final high note on Stravinsky's "Syektantskaya (Sectarian Song)," an oddly mind-blowing epiphany.
During Thursday night's performance of George Crumb's "Music for a Summer Evening," a loiterer lurking outside the festival compound could be heard imitating the primal vocal sound in the music, and crows provided well-timed and well-suited caws during the Charles Ives Piano Sonata. On Sunday night, the provocative European recorder quartet QNG (Quartet New Generation) -- which also presented a memorable late-night concert Saturday at Ojai Theater -- performed Victor Ekimovskij's "Kites Flying" perched in different corners of the seating area. Here, the musicians issued bird-like sounds around the space (late birdsong-loving Olivier Messiaen, an Ojai Festival guest composer several years ago, would have been impressed).
One look at the expanse of music on the Festival program, and it's apparent the overall design was intent on achieving diversity, but it also contained logical connections.
Steve Reich, a featured composer at last year's Festival, was again a highlight during this year's, with his sensuous and smart music playing beautifully in this place. His magnificent 1976 piece "Music for 18 Musicians" -- one of the certifiable minimalist masterpieces -- was performed Sunday morning on the same stage it was played on 31 years ago. Jumping ahead to the recent era, Mr. Reich's "Double Sextet," which won a 2009 Pulitzer in music and was commissioned by eighth blackbird, is a solid piece, but clearly in the long shadow of "18 Musicians."
Saturday morning, pianist Jeremy Denk split his recital program between the compelling first piano Sonata of great American composer Charles Ives (whose music is far too rarely presented in Ojai, where it fits beautifully) and Bach's classic Goldberg Variations. There are more links here than might be expected, including a blend of the sublime and the raucous, and variations on themes and moods.
Unfortunately though, Mr. Denk also preceded his Ives performance with a long and half-apologetic verbal program note, as if the rubes in the house might otherwise be alarmed. Apparently, he didn't get the memo that the Festival is a contemporary music-friendly zone. But, once focused on the keyboard, he went on to deliver the goods in a powerfully persuasive way.
Sunday's climactic event, a marathon stretching to five hours that included a smorgasbord of musical treats, amounted to a miniature festival-within-a-festival. Patterned after the long-standing and influential Bang on a Can marathon in New York City, this three-part presentation surveyed a huge range of musical ideas large and small.
Stephen Hartke, who teaches at the University of Southern California and who is clearly one of the finest composers in the west, was well-represented on Sunday. His 2007 piece "Meanwhile: Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays," a delicious blend of faux Indonesian sounds and passages of virtuosity, wit and sonic sensuality, was commissioned by eighth blackbird, and it plays up the group's strengths, including its habit of committing music to memory and choreographing movements around stage. In a local note, Hartke's snaky charmer from 1985, "Oh Them Rats is Mean in My Kitchen," was written for a married couple, accomplished violinists Michelle Makarski and Ronald Copes, then living in Santa Barbara. Here, the art-music-meets-blues-riffs piece was played by Matt Albert and Andrew McCann, but the musical theme appears to mimic marital interactions, alternating between spats and accord, misunderstandings and harmonious resolve.
Unorthodox solo performances also fell naturally into the varied marathon mix. In contrast to the elaborate sweep of his Friday night premiere, Mr. Mackey's "Heavy Light" was an evolving and mostly improvised electric guitar solo that included the use of the e-bow effect, digital looping and variations on the theme of exploring in the guitar-centric key of E.
Also on Sunday, violinist-vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, whose art-folk band Tin Hat performed a short set on Friday, showed her impressive classical chops on Lisa Bielawa's "Kafka Songs." Ms. Kihlstedt, who performed in solo mode last year at Contemporary Arts Forum, is a particularly gifted musician who blurs lines and expectations as she goes.
For Sunday's penultimate piece, the world premiere of Nathan Davis' "Sounder" might have been musically forgettable -- a breezy bit of post-minimalism -- but its significance was all about the toys in the trees. Throughout the weekend, the presence of toy pianos and other bric-a-brac literally positioned up in the trees around Libby Bowl aroused curiosity. Finally, the pieces came alive, triggered by instruments played onstage. It was all part of the Festival's showcasing of the inventor-sculptor-musical-maverick known as Trimpin, a music man Germany-born and Seattle-based.
Trimpin, in fact, was the star lurking in the periphery this year. He was in Ojai a few years ago, presenting his computerized grand piano versions of music by the late, great Conlon Nancarrow. But this year, the focus was both sharper and broader, with Trimpin's sonic invention "Sheng High" set up in the park outside Libby Bowl and with the special screening in the Ojai Theater of director Peter Esmonde's striking new documentary, "Trimpin, The Sound of Invention."
As it happens, Ojai was ablaze with the sound of invention last weekend. Count festival No. 63 as a rousing, refreshingly different kind of success story. Next up: 2010's festival music director is British composer George Benjamin, who will be joined by Ensemble Modern, one of the world's greatest -- and oldest -- champions of the "new."
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