Sense and Nonsense at Ojai Festival

OJAI —  The two unofficial patron saints of Ojai--Krishnamurti, the Indian sage, and Beatrice Wood, the potter and mama of Dada--lived long lives and gave the Ojai Valley much of its character as a place hospitable to the spiritualist and Bohemian.

Oddly, the Ojai Festival, from which the valley derives international renown, has never shown much musical interest in either figure. Someday, a survey of mystical minimalism so in fashion among Eastern European composers might serve the spiritual impulse. But on Sunday, although she was nowhere mentioned in the program (other than in an advertisement for her studio), Wood’s spirit was finally acknowledged on the final day of the 54th weekend festival.

Wood, an American, spent her youth in Paris among Duchamp, Picabia and other French painters and writers sympathetic to Dada. And on Sunday morning, a young American string quartet, FLUX--which takes its name from the neo-Dadaist movement Fluxus--made its local debut in the Libbey Bowl. Then, in the late afternoon, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by this year’s music director, Simon Rattle, closed the festival with a concert performance of Poulenc’s “Les Mamelles de Tiresias,” the closest thing to a Dada opera in the standard repertory.

The young British composers around whom the first two days of the festival had revolved were little in evidence on Sunday. But their spirits also hovered. Mark-Anthony Turnage, who appropriates American jazz, was refracted through the FLUX Quartet, which also has a taste for jazz and appropriation. “These Premises Are Alarmed,” by Thomas Ades, whose assimilative style has the flavor of French surrealism and who is frequently hailed as the successor to Benjamin Britten, opened the afternoon orchestra concert. That program also featured the “Four Sea Interludes” and Passacaglia from Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”

It should have been impossible to conjure Grimes, the morose North Sea fisherman bedeviled by grimly religious villagers, in new age Ojai on a gorgeous, sunny afternoon. Impossible, too, should have been that opera’s pairing with Poulencian froth. But the four-minute Ades curtain-raiser helped make sense of nonsense and nonsense of sense.

What this remarkable 29-year-old composer does in “Premises” is take Britten’s sound world--luminous, rapturous, shrieking, overpowering--and go crazy with it. Ades made a farce by fragmenting the sonic language of “Grimes.” Ironies piled on ironies. “Grimes” was Southern California-inspired, because a homesick Britten discovered its source--an early 19th century poem by a Suffolk pastor, George Crabbe--visiting in San Diego. Another irony is that the sensuous, unpredictable, flamboyantly ecstatic Ades now heads the Aldeburgh Festival--on the North Sea, in Grimes territory--which Britten founded.

Poulenc’s 1944 “Mamelles” is contemporary with “Grimes” and seemingly its opposite. It is based on Apollinaire’s play about a woman who liberates herself by dispensing with her breasts (they fly from her blouse as balloons) to enjoy the life of a man and become a dashing soldier, leaving her husband to make babies on his own (40,000 in one day!) and tend them.

Poulenc’s music is charming, refined, elegant. It is the natural music of Parisian cafes used for an unnatural drama. It shows that the strange is commonplace. “Grimes,” too, we realize is ultimately strange--if hardly Dada--drama made believable by Britten.

The performances were superb--the Ades, brilliant; the “Grimes” excerpts full of grit and intensity and beautifully dug-in textures (Evan N. Wilson played the robust viola solo). The Poulenc featured mostly the same soloists heard opening the festival on Friday in Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortileges”--Heidi Grant Murphy (a sensational Terese), John Aler (a hilarious husband), Francois Le Roux (amusing in the prologue and as the silly Gendarme), along with Thomas Young, Julian Rodescu and Marietta Simpson. Rattle’s comic sensibility may tend toward music-hall British, but he also shares the appropriately goofy streak in the British comic tradition of “The Goon Show” and “Monty Python.”

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The FLUX Quartet--violinists Tom Chiu and Cornelius Dufallo, violist Kenji Bunch and cellist Darrett Adkins--is trying to position itself as the Kronos Quartet for its generation. The players (recent Juilliard grads) are very strong, however fuzzy the group’s ambitiously eclectic musical identity remains. But FLUX did also give a different perspective on the British-French theme of the weekend than one got from the more establishment Philharmonic and Rattle.

If Turnage appropriates jazz, FLUX reminded us of crossing over in the other direction, with Ornette Coleman’s chaotic but interesting “Poets and Writers.” It chose a British composer, Philip Cashian, whose String Quartet No. 1, harsh and ugly music that suits the sensation-making attitudes of young British visual artists, makes even Turnage sound genteel. Renaud Gagneux’s String Quartet No. 1, the group’s French contribution, transforms 12-tone technique into techno rants.

But the most intriguing piece was the world premiere of Chiu’s “Collage Series” No. 1, a FLUX compendium from grating walls of sound to chirpy minimalism to ethereal transcendental sonorities all presented as a continuum. This is the work of a quintessentially American and aggressively 21st century ensemble that is both refreshingly and annoyingly ignorant of boundaries. And it was also one more example of how Ernest Fleischmann--under whose artistic direction the festival is currently flourishing and who was on hand despite very recent heart surgery--has a rare talent for discovering new talent. It was also a good lead-in to next year’s festival, when Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to conduct music of the Americas.