Chutzpah Under the Sycamores: Ojai Music Festival

"How was Ojai?" you will ask, and the answer — as in every one of the past 61 years — remains the same: "Same old, same old — and wonderful." The report usually starts with weather: drizzle some years; this year, uninterrupted sublime, the meteorological equivalent of Dawn Upshaw gift-wrapping a Schubert song. (There was that too.)

Steve Reich was the dominant figure. A fair number of the pages in the lavish, 120-page program book trumpeted the news that he was America's greatest composer, and there was evidence to sustain, perhaps to clobber. Opening night, Thursday (June 5), was all-Reich, old and new; closing day, Sunday, had Reich in the morning and again at night. Sometime in between, at a so-called symposium event, a capacity audience in an airless church sat through a half-hour of recorded Reich midway through what was billed as a "conversation." A lot of Steve, to be sure.

Conductor Brad Lubman organized the opening program, with Signal, his brand-new performing ensemble, which had been christened only days before at New York's Bang on a Can Festival. Young musicians working their way through the inventive intricacies of Reich's Eight Lines and the sheer chutzpah of that historic audience goad Four Organs — it served as a kind of guarantee that the music would find its performers for another generation, at least. As for the final work on that opening program, Reich's recent Daniel Variations —which was composed for and has now been recorded by our own L.A. Master Chorale — the performance under Lubman was less successful, turned into hash by microphoning that left the text incomprehensible and the orchestral detail muddy.

Better in all respects was the Sunday morning program, nicely organized by this year's music director, David Robertson, around Drumming, Reich's early, primal masterpiece. First came Clapping Music, that nice little portable number, done by its originators, Reich and Russell Hartenberger. Then this year's sensational newcomer, L.A.-born pianist Eric Huebner, made an hors d'oeuvre out of a couple of killer Ligeti piano etudes. Every percussionist within reach — including Reich's veteran Nexus group, the upcoming So Percussion, Huebner and festival artistic director Tom Morris — then piled on to the stage to re-create the granddad of all bang-away masterpieces, Edgard Varèse's 1931 Ionisation, after which it was only natural for Reich's 1971 Drumming to fall into place, all 75 minutes' worth.

What a great piece! And how it grows in the open air, as a visual and auditory phenomenon, the players moving in and out of position, building suspense even as they stand silently, raising expectation for their next lunge, as the music develops in complexity, reaches its zenith, subsides, creates a form all its own. From this music alone I might argue the case for some kind of Reichian supremacy — but does it matter? Drumming was, at least, the high point of this one festival. Later that day came Tehillim,a towering edifice of the Steve Reich that is; nothing can compare with the Steve Reich that was.

David Robertson, Santa Monica born, currently turning his Saint Louis Symphony into a consequential, forward-looking orchestra, was the excellent choice for Ojai's music director this year; he is young, bright and full of ideas. That is not the same, however, as declaring that his ideas, the first time out, were exactly right for the territory. Of the four precious evenings on Ojai's calendar, the two Steve Reich events were right for Ojai; two, it seemed to me, somewhat misjudged the territory.

One thing that the Libbey Bowl — that sylvan depression in Ojai's town park, where concerts happen, friends gather, birds cluster to approve and sycamores overhang menacingly — is not is a place to show movies. Whatever motivated Robertson to turn over half a festival evening to a rerun of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, it couldn't have been the anticipated pleasure of reliving the 1936 curio, weeping along as David Raksin's gooey tune slithers past several times too often, losing one's heart once again to Chaplin's travails or to Paulette Goddard's gamine or to Chester Conklin's delirious cameo. For the folks on the lawn up back, the film must have been nearly unseeable; for those in the first couple of rows down front, bent collarbones were also the order of the evening. I can see film as a festival adjunct, nearby at the Ojai Art Center or in the movie theater just across the street — but not subsuming half an evening's program on the main premises in festival time.