THE CONTINUITY OF OJAI

The passing of Lawrence Morton on May 9 closes the long opening chapter in the history of the 40-year-old Ojai Festival.

For many years, Morton was the festival’s artistic director who planned each season’s programs in consultation with the music director/principal conductor of that festival. After the Boulez year of 1984, he continued to offer counsel to festival management “until recently,” according to executive director Jeanette O’Connor, now in her ninth year with Ojai Festivals Ltd.

“This has been a very difficult year for all of us,” said O’Connor. “Just two months before Lawrence’s death, we also lost Connie Wash, one of the original founders of the Ojai Festival.”

Continuity has been one of the hallmarks of Ojai’s first four decades. The return, this coming weekend, of Lukas Foss, who led the Ojai Festivals of 1961-63 and 1979-80, is just one example.

On the phone from Long Island last week, Foss described the 1987 format: “We call it ‘Music, Old and New,’ and we mean by that both the old in the new and the old working on the new.”

The first of the five 1987 programs, Friday night in Festival Bowl, is the best example, the composer/conductor/pianist says.

That program offers excerpts from Charles Wuorinen’s “The Magic Art,” an instrumental masque (1978), includes the West Coast premiere performance of Oliver Knussen’s “Music for a Puppet Court,” and ends with Foss’ year-old “Renaissance” Concerto, in which flutist Carol Wincenc will be soloist.

About the “Renaissance” Concerto, Foss says: “It was written for Carol, who gave the first performance, in Buffalo, in May, 1986. After Ojai, it can be played by others, and the first performance of it not to be given by Carol will be at Aspen, in July, when James Galway plays it.

At the other end of the festival, on the closing program, next Sunday at 5:30, Foss’ Percussion Concerto (1974) will end the five-concert series, played by soloist Jan Williams.

Temperamentally, Foss says, the Percussion Concerto “is just the opposite of the ‘Renaissance’ Concerto.

“It’s a crazy piece, also big--half an hour long--written for Jan Williams, who has played it many times since the premiere in Carnegie Hall. In it, my style includes the use of both minimal and chance techniques.

“The double surprise of this is that, though no two performances of the piece will ever be exactly the same, all performances will be amazingly similar. As a composer, I don’t like the idea of relinquishing all control.”

The Saturday afternoon festival program spotlights flutist Wincenc, assisted by pianists Antoinette Perry, Foss and David del Tredici. Saturday night, Tredici’s “Haddock’s Eyes,” in its West Coast premiere, will be sung by soprano Susan Narucki; Copland’s “Old American Songs,” Set I, will be sung by baritone Leroy Villanueva. Foss will also conduct works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Handel and Rand Steiger.

Next Sunday morning, John Alexander leads his Pacific Singers in a mixed program. And on the Festival finale program, Foss conducts the U.S. premiere of a work by Joan La Barbara, and the West Coast premiere of John Harbison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Flight Into Egypt,” as well as the Percussion Concerto.

For information: (800) 554-OJAI.

A BORGE “CARMEN”: Victor Borge is the conductor, and Wendy White, Stephen Plummer, Nickolas Karousatos, Stephanie Conte and Lola Montes and Her Spanish Dancers are the featured performers in a touring company of Bizet’s “Carmen” to be given in three locations this week.

As he has said on a number of occasions, the mischievous musical funnyman is serious about conducting. About this staged and abridged version of “Carmen,” Borge has promised that “we will present the cream of the opera,” and “I will be respectful to my colleagues and to my own integrity as far as the music is concerned.” Still, that leaves a little room for play.

Performances (all at 8 p.m.) are scheduled Thursday in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Friday at the Arlington Center in Santa Barbara and Saturday in Marsee Auditorium at El Camino College.