To Make Music 'Adventurous'

Lukas Foss, the renowned conductor and composer who has taken hold of the baton of the Music Festival of the Hamptons this year as artistic and general director, is promising a series that will take a fresh approach to classical music and offer a healthy amount of modern music.

"Toscanini said 'tradition is the last bad performance,' " Mr. Foss said last week, as he discussed the spirit with which this year's festival, his first, had been planned. The classical offerings, he said, will be done not with "clich‚d reverence" but in "adventurous" ways - "as if the ink were hardly dry."

The contemporary music, interspersed among the more familiar, will be given "the awe and respect given the classics," he said.

Real And Surreal

With Mr. Foss at the helm for the next three years, "there's no question" that the festival is moving more in the direction of contemporary music, said Eleanor Sage Leonard, its president and founder. She called Mr. Foss a "champion of the 20th century."

An example of Mr. Foss's programming is "Bach: Real and Surreal," which will be the concert preceding the event's benefit dinner party on Saturday, July 19. The concert and dinner will take place at the festival's Snake Hollow Road, Bridgehampton, location.

Besides traditional Bach, the program will include Claude Bolling's "Bach to Swing," in the jazz idiom, and Mr. Foss's own "Non-Improvisation: A Bach Nightmare."

"It's kind of frightening," Mr. Foss said of the latter piece, ". . . big clouds of sound using Bach's notes."

Commentary

Mr. Foss will provide commentary about the Bach works while conducting from the piano, in a way, he said, that will not be "classroomy," but, he said, should make "the music exciting." The commentary will be confined to the classics, however. "New works should speak for themselves," he said.

More traditional contemporary music will be highlighted on July 25 in a program called "The American Connection." In it, Mr. Foss and Richard Stoltzman, a clarinetist, will showcase the works of some of America's best-known composers - George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, for example - and share personal memories about some of the composers. Music by Paul Hindemith, with whom Mr. Foss studied at Yale, also is on the program.

The music of Schubert and Brahms as well as of Bach will be the focus of three concerts by the festival's resident chamber ensemble. It is new this year and includes outstanding young musicians, including some from such schools as Juilliard.

The festival will provide "an opportunity for promising young musicians to live and play with accomplished musicians," Mr. Foss said.

A celebration of Brahms will take place on July 26, the 100th anniversary of the composer's death. Mr. Foss will perform with the ensemble on July 23 in "Franz Schubert: With and Without Words," a program that will present two versions of each piece - one with the vocal score and one without it. Emily Golden, a mezzo-soprano, will be the soloist.

Final "Event"

"Every concert should be an event," Ms. Leonard said she was told by Mr. Foss, and she has tried to make it so.

The last evening of the festival will be an event, no doubt, with a performance of Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat." The Faust legend will be narrated by Gene Saks, a well-known theater director. Larry Rivers, an artist and jazz saxophonist, will take the role of the soldier, and Peter Stone, who just won two Tony Awards for his book of the musical "Titanic," will be the devil.

Three contemporary pieces will complete the program: Leonard Bernstein's "Masque," "Divertimento," by Ellen Zwilich, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Mr. Foss's own "Curriculum Vitae."

Piano Recitals

This year's program again includes the Benno Moisewitch Piano Recital Series. Named after Ms. Leonard's great-uncle Benno Moisewitch, a Russian-English pianist, the series includes classical concerts by Cristina Marton and Aglaia Batzner on July 20 and Michael Boriskin on July 24, performances on July 22 by Zadel Skolovsky and Jeffrey Biegel, who will play a contemporary piece by the festival's co-director, Jeffrey Johnson, and "An Afternoon With Byron Janis" on July 20.

Mr. Janis's afternoon performance, at the festival tent in Bridgehampton, will be preceded by afternoon tea. The program will include Chopin nocturnes, mazurkas, and waltzes, as well as a preview of selections from his original score for a musical based on "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

"What we're hoping to accomplish is a little Tanglewood by the sea," said Eleanor Sage Leonard, the festival's founder and president. To this end, one of the goals this year is to reach out to children and senior citizens, she said.

Reaching Out

Two programs, a piano recital by Zadel Skolovsky on July 22 and "Ensemble for the Seicento," a July 26 program of Italian Baroque music on period instruments, will be free for seniors.

Youngsters up to the age of 18 have been invited to attend the festival's first concert, a performance of the Boys Choir of Harlem on July 18, without charge. Ms. Leonard has arranged for buses to bring children from day-care centers from Manor ville to East Hampton to the show. A children's concert featuring "Peter and the Wolf" by Prokofiev and Mozart's "A Little Night Music" will take place on the festival's last day, July 27.

"If I can get the corporate support I need," she said, "I want to create a young concert series as Bernstein had done years ago."

Birthday, Too

In addition, Mauricio Molina, a recorder player, will give lessons during the festival in the instrument to families or groups of up to six people in three series of courses.

The shows will be held at festival tents at the East Hampton Airport, the Bridgehampton Community House and Snake Hollow Road, Bridgehampton, Parrish Memorial Hall in Southampton, and the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. A "meet the artists" reception will be held following each one, and picnic-style meals will be available at some. Dinner packages with nearby restaurants may be available as well.

Mr. Foss's 75th birthday will be celebrated after the final concert at a closing dinner.