Irrepressible Finns Take a Playful Spin

OJAI — Saturday morning at the Ojai Festival is traditionally the time for an innocuous family concert, which offers for many out-of-town festival-goers a few free hours in an otherwise musically packed day to savor these splendid surroundings. This year’s exceptional festival provided no such liberty, not when, at the unmusical hour of 10 a.m., extravagantly accomplished, versatile, interesting and refreshingly irreverent musicians turned into bunnies.

One of the bunnies was Esa-Pekka Salonen. The others were brilliant musician friends from his school days. They acted very silly. They played like gods.

Every so often a city becomes the focal point for a collective of young musicians who then go out and change the world. In the early ‘50s, there was the New York School around John Cage; there was also the group of budding composers in Olivier Messiaen’s class in Paris (including Pierre Boulez) who were to produce the European avant-garde. A little later a band of five school boys in Manchester (among them Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwhistle) set the course for the future of British music.

Less known are Salonen’s six feisty Helsinki pals who studied together in the ‘70s. Deeply rebellious of their conservative Finnish conservatory schooling, they formed, in 1981, Toimii, a fervently anti-establishment ensemble with strong Dadaist leanings. But what has separated this from any number of other such puerile collectives that sprang up in the ‘60s and ‘70s is that the members have not only remained together but maintained their spirit of independence (they perform seldom, make few recordings and eschew rules and organization) while becoming themselves the establishment--Salonen and composer Magnus Lindberg, who is the Toimii pianist, are world figures. What separates them even more is that they are phenomenal musicians who operate on a level of competence that is practically incomprehensible.

So after the daring and dazzlingly virtuosic American debut of Toimii on Wednesday, the festival has gone on to reveal the individual character of the players. And the virtuosity has been downright dizzying.

Finns, and especially these Finns, like to spin a lot of notes, and spin them perilously fast. Lindberg’s music is especially acrobatic, and one of the festival revelations has been just how theatrical it can be when performed by the fearless Toimii virtuosos. His Clarinet Quintet from 1992 was inspired by Buster Keaton, and the score is one of modern music’s great chase scenes. The Toimii clarinetist, Kari Krikku, joined by four excellent local string players (Phillip Levy, Christine Frank, Kirsten Monke and Paul Cohen), seemed to be everywhere at once. But it was Krikku’s trills, ringing in ways that sounded more electronic than acoustic and looked impossible to accomplish on the page of the score, that astounded most of all (trills, too, are a stylistic feature of this generation). Poker-faced as ever, Krikku, at the family concert, whipped out a banjo and played and sang a credible bluegrass.

Lindberg’s Cello Concerto, which had just been given its world premiere by Salonen and the Toimii cellist Anssi Karttunen in Paris three weeks ago, was on the Friday night program in Libbey Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and it was more virtuosic still. I don’t know that a concerto has ever required a cellist to leap about with such agility as Lindberg’s new piece does, and I have never heard a cellist play with a touch as light as Karttunen’s. He seems to skim on the strings with bow and fingers as if this were music as sleight of hand, meant to amaze.

The elegant Toimii guitarist Timo Korhonen also plays with a transcendental ease--he tossed off transcriptions of Chopin Mazurkas on Thursday night as if they were nothing at all. The percussionist, Riku Niemi, is not only a superb player but a comedian. It was he who cobbled together the Spike Jones-ish arrangements of operatic music for the family concert and who also proved something of a closet countertenor.

And then there is Salonen. As music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Salonen’s antic side remains understandably understated. (However, there is no saying whose idea Saturday morning’s bunny suits were.) Still, last week he closed the orchestra’s season with a performance of Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” that sounded unusually sly. Seeing him cavort with his Toimii colleagues Saturday morning explained why. And it was there in his music too.

On Friday night, with the Philharmonic, he conducted the premiere of a new song cycle, “Five Images After Sappho.” Taken from fragments by the ancient Greek poet, these brief songs for soprano and chamber orchestra follow the coming of age of a young girl.

This is a new direction for Salonen, whose own musical coming of age we have been witnessing in Los Angeles. Immediately engaging, gorgeously lyrical, influenced by Ravel, Richard Strauss and John Adams, the songs tellingly reveal Salonen’s dramatic side. Laura Claycomb, who replaced an ill Dawn Upshaw, sang them with beguiling directness. There may be a slight sketchiness to this music, but it is the sketchiness of opera, and presumably that is precisely what these songs are: sketches for the opera Salonen is commissioned to compose next year. But they are songs so appealing I suspect we will be hearing them again and often.

Where Salonen came from was further revealed in his brief orchestral work “Giro,” a recent revision of a highly complex score he wrote 15 years ago, now turned into a still-challenging but newly apprehensible showpiece, and the short, witty “Yta II” played with a calm but transcendent virtuosity by Gloria Cheng on Saturday night.

Other Finnish contributions to the festival Saturday included Kaija Saariaho’s wondrously sonorous “Amers” for cello and ensemble (Karttunen again was the unbelievable soloist) and an afternoon performance by pianist Olli Mustonen of a mixture of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues that were a study in mind-boggling finger control and interpretive contrariness (the Bach could take it; the Shostakovich, not).

There was a touch of California contrast in Lou Harrison’s early Concerto for Flute and Percussion and John Adams’ Chamber Concerto, both wacky works in their own right, and they fit right in. But then, anything fit in. On Saturday morning the theme music from the television show “Dallas” entered the “William Tell” Overture--opera and soap, Salonen explained, being two sides of the same coin.