31 August 2009
Ojai Festival
A Raging Contemporary Success
By Richard S Ginell
Look over the long list of Ojai Festival music directors going back to 1947, and you will see the names of conductor after conductor. Not until 2002 do you find a festival where a conductor was not in charge or co-charge of the event—and that was the Emerson Quartet.
In 2009, there was another break with the pattern. A contemporary chamber music ensemble from Chicago called Eighth Blackbird was chosen to program the festival. Next year, the ensemble-in-residence will be Germany's Ensemble Modern with British composer George Benjamin conducting, a sign that perhaps the days of symphony orchestras visiting this lovable festival are ending in this era of austerity.
For the six youthful musicians of Eighth Blackbird—known to Ojaians from their terrific performance of Golijov's Ayre in 2006—this was a chance to run amok through the highways and byways of 20th and 21st Century music without a care for idiom. Rock-and-roll was heard at the festival for the first time in anyone's memory, though always in a so-called classical context. Over the entire four days, there were only two pieces written before 1900. Eighth Blackbird is not what you would call a box-office act; still, the benches in the park were well packed all weekend.
If anything, Ojai is a brief for the case against austerity. As many financially insecure opera companies and orchestras retreat to the cozy comfort of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini, Ojai—in just as precarious a spot—went even further out on a limb than it usually does and still drew crowds. There are even brave plans afoot to replace the crumbling, iconic Libbey Bowl shell with a new one, based on the present design but with backstage facilities and a somewhat different ground plan for the seating areas and walkways. This small town has already raised two-thirds of the $3 million it needs to proceed with the project. Granted, Ojai has often been an exception to the norm, but one wonders if this festival has a model that others might profit from.
Certainly the most talked-about event of the four-day festival, judging from heard and overheard conversations, was the June 12 world premiere of Steven Mackey's Slide, a multi-media theater piece with a fascinating premise. The idea for it came from the idiom-bending, multi-media pioneer and singer-actor Rinde Eckert, who plays a psychologist revisiting (through the use of in-and out-of-focus slides) an experiment in human nature that he conducted 40 years earlier.
In Slide Mackey displays an encyclopedic repertoire of rock-and-roll techniques on the electric guitar, but he also figures out how to merge rock music with rigorous contemporary chamber music in a totally unself-conscious way. The work is also a showcase for Eckert's high tenor, falsetto, and crazy dancing. It's no shock that Mackey plays on both ball fields with equal ease; he is a professor of composition at Princeton but also performs in a rock band with Eckert called Big Farm, delivering straight doses of prog-rock for its fans.
A dour, downcast opening set by the Slavic-jazz improv group Tin Hat dovetailed effectively into the mournful piano opening of Slide, whose premise was clearly laid out in narrative fashion at the beginning of the 70-minute piece. One's hopes went up.
But the problem with Slide is that it takes the psychologist's method and turns it backwards. Whereas the slides are presented to the study's subjects first out-of-focus and then in-focus, Mackey's work begins in-focus and then drifts out of focus into irrelevance as the narrative is abandoned and the piece lurches from episode to episode. It might have been a powerful piece. Earlier that day in their joint appearance at the annual Ojai symposium, neither Mackey nor Eckert was keen on the idea of narrative. Perhaps with some tweaking and tightening, Slide will eventually cohere.
The musicians of Eighth Blackbird had no problem fitting into Mackey's classical-hard rock vision, nor were they shy about being asked to move physically around the stage as part of the action.
The following evening Blackbird also got involved in the staging of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which they were able to do because each member played his part from memory, if you can imagine that. No matter how hard the opinion-makers try to drag Pierrot into the mainstream, it remains a creepy, devilishly difficult, outré reflection of a decaying society, even nearly a century after its composition. That's how this riveting performance played out—in a decadent cabaret setting with a mute Pierrot (Blackbird percussionist Matthew Duvall) and a dancer (Elyssa Dole) interacting with the amazing Lucy Shelton, whose concept of sprechstimme leaned toward the speech-dominated ideal that Schoenberg asked for in his own recording of the piece.
Eighth Blackbird also has many professional friends who flocked to the Ojai Valley. Three percussionists joined Duvall and pianists Jeremy Denk (more on him later) and EB's Lisa Kaplan in a cannily sequenced opening program June 11 that began with table-top humor (Thierry De Mey's Table Music), then worked through the sonorous, ominous crests and rolls of John Luther Adams's Dark Waves and the delicate droplets of Takemitsu's Rain Tree. All of this served as an extended prelude to an intense performance of George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening, whose wistful coda evokes the same atmosphere as the ending of Mahler's Song of the Earth.
Several other players and singers were recruited for a Sunday morning rendering of Steve Reich's ecstatic Music for 18 Musicians, a sequel to last year's performance of Drumming. As before, Reich's music cast its percolating spell, but I thought the performance could have been even better; the loud in-your-face sound mix obscured some of the textures and interfered with the "groove".
The festival's only outright misfire (played just before Pierrot) was David Gordon's Quasi Sinfonia, whose microtonal treatment of the hymn "King of Peace" sounded like a bad village band.
Denk is a classical music resource who ought to be better known. He is a most entertaining and perceptive speaker—and he's a first-rate wit (check out www.jeremydenk.net for a hilarious fantasy interview with Beethoven expert Governor Sarah Palin on the subject of the Hammerklavier Sonata!).
Denk is also a marvelous pianist—and a daring one who thought it would be a neat idea to follow Ives's cantankerous First Piano Sonata with Bach's Goldberg Variations. He played both of these big pieces from memory the morning of June 13, head bobbing up and down, everything alive and beautifully articulated. If you brought a score of the Ives, you might have noticed an omitted run or two, or an extra chord here and there. But he spectacularly captured the spirit of the danged thing, allowing himself to go nuts at the bombastic banging out of "Bringing in the Sheaves" and thickets of super-ragtime. He then rattled through the Goldbergs at a pace that made it fly by, taking only a handful of repeats as the mood struck him.
The festival's final, most audacious stroke was the traditional Sunday afternoon send-off, now expanded into a four-and-a-half-hour marathon of modern music that ran overtime into the night. Trimpin, the jolly composer-inventor-madman who builds fantastic sound installations out of scraps from junk stores, spent a lot of time decorating Libbey Park's hardy old sycamore with electronically-triggered percussion instruments Rube Goldberg-style, all for a slight, funny, eight-minute piece by Nathan Davis called Sounder.
Reich's Double Sextet, played here by 12 instruments (instead of six plus six more on tape), is a good, typical example of recent Reich: piano and vibraphone-driven with plush sustained chords on top. Why this piece deserved a Pulitzer prize and his other, more groundbreaking pieces did not is a Pulitzer panel secret.
Also on this long program—which, timid impresarios should note, was sold out in the benches—Shelton sang some Stravinsky songs in passable Russian. A recorder quartet called QNG played very cool bebop on "Tall P" by Pete Rose (not baseball's bad boy). Pianist Amy Briggs moved easily from rippling arpeggios based on a cell phone ringtone to some retro-stride jazz in some Etudes by David Rakowski. Lisa Bielawa's Kafka Songs for violin and voice (pace Gyorgy Kurtag, who wrote Kafka Fragments for the same combination 23 years ago) was a virtuoso vehicle for the vocalist-violinist Carla Kihlstedt. Louis Andriessen's Workers Union, normally an intolerable bangfest, was made palatable and even fun by the master stroke of having all the performers in the festival join Eighth Blackbird one by one to make an escalating communal racket.
That ended not only the festival but also any thoughts that Ojai ought to cut down on the contemporary sauce.
Copyright © 2009 American Record Guide
