It’s the Very Latest in Ojai From Impassioned Pianist Formenti

The Ojai Music Festival this year is concerned with “last and latest thoughts.” For the main concerts tonight, Saturday night and early Sunday evening, the Emerson String Quartet will play late Beethoven and Shostakovich. A symposium, begun Thursday and continuing today, examines the nature of late work in general and that of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Strauss in particular. Marino Formenti, the phenomenal Italian pianist, tackles recent music in a recital for kids Saturday morning and one for adults in the afternoon.

But to begin it all, Formenti performed a four-hour marathon Wednesday night in a gallery of the Ojai Art Center, with the audience seated on folding chairs placed in a semicircle around the piano. It consisted of late work by Beethoven, Schubert, Morton Feldman and three Czech composers who died in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin. Probably this extraordinary pianist didn’t intend to turn the theme of the festival into an oxymoron, but that is what he did, in a riveting, unique event.

For Formenti, “last and latest” might as well be one and the same. Everything he plays seems like latest thoughts, namely his own. Formenti surely must have prepared long and hard for this incredibly demanding and brilliantly executed program, but it all sounded as though he were making it up on the spot.

Formenti has become a familiar, if ever astonishing, figure in Southern California over the past few years. The Vienna-based pianist, who is a member of the new-music group Klangforum Wien, has offered venturesome one-man festivals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has given recitals in Orange County and Cerritos. He is a volatile, passionate modernist who can bring a sense of theater to even the most complex, knotty modern music.

He holds audiences in thrall with his ferocious percussive intensity at one extreme and his otherworldly lyricism at the other.

On Wednesday, Formenti took on two 19th century masterpieces--Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Opus 126, and Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, D. 960.

Beethoven’s last work for piano consists of six miniatures, each an exercise in condensation. With time running out for Beethoven, he made each phrase an essential expression and left us to fill in the gaps. Syphilitic Schubert wrote his transcendental B-Flat Sonata the last year of his short life, but it is music in no hurry. Rather, the sonata is an uncompromising study in the unfolding of the long, lyric line.

Formenti played both works in what appeared to be a state of wonder. His Beethoven raged with fury one moment and seemed lighter than air the next. In the Schubert, the pianist lingered on the haunting dark ringing of the low trills in the first movement and then lifted the black mood with a lyricism that bordered on the ecstatic.

For the Terezin works--excerpts from Pavel Haas’ Suite, Opus 13, Viktor Ullmann’s Sonata No. 6 and Gideon Klein’s Sonata, Opus 49--Formenti had little opportunity to exploit his lyric gifts. This is mainly busy, Expressionist music. But what Formenti did is bring dramatic fervor to this often gray music. There was nothing maudlin or exploitative here, as there can be in performances of these composers, just exciting playing, and, in the case of Haas, a feeling that here was one composer who might have been able to carry on where Janacek left off.

The marathon’s concluding performance, Feldman’s “For Bunita Marcus,” was an event all by itself. Written in 1985, two years before the composer’s death and not his last work for piano, it nevertheless has the feel of music that has transcended the physical realm altogether. For the 76-minute performance, which went on past midnight, many of the chairs were replaced by cushions and futons around the piano. Lights were kept dim. The music is very soft (rarely rising above the dynamic of piano) and exceptionally minimal even for Feldman. Much of it is single notes loosely strung together. About every 10 minutes comes a chord.

Formenti’s performance was mesmeric, shamanistic, unforgettable. He was, I’m fairly certain, quieter and more still than any other pianist who has tackled this work (there are two recordings of it, and only a handful of other pianists have played it). But what was most striking about the performance was its beauty of tone. Every note was like a shimmering star in a clear, beautiful night sky. That sense of lyrical wonder that Formenti made momentary in Beethoven and Schubert came to seem permanent here. Time stopped, last and latest merged into one.

The long evening began before Formenti performed when members of the California EAR Unit offered the premieres of works by young local composers.

Both works were winners in an Ojai Festival competition sponsored by the Gould Family Foundation.

In “Transits to Paradise,” a trio for cello, clarinet and piano, Kay Kyurim Rhie contrasted bright rhythms with longer floating lines as she imagined music to accompany a bus ride through Los Angeles smog. Patricio da Silva’s ensemble work, “Periodically Aperiodical, Aperiodically Periodical,” proved stimulating chaos, small bundles of notes bouncing about unpredictably but pleasingly, like molecules in space.

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The Ojai Music Festival continues through Sunday, $15-$55, Libbey Bowl, Ojai Avenue at Signal Street, Ojai, (805) 646-2053.