AX IN CHARGE AT OJAI FEST.

Byline: Rita Moran Scripps-McClatchy Western Service

Emanuel Ax is more accustomed to a seat at the piano than at the planning table.

But the music director for the 1997 Ojai Festival knows his music, and he knows what he likes. Much of it will be heard during the piano-heavy festival, running June 6-8.

Ax revealed a genial personality and keyboard expertise at a festival preview earlier this month in Pasadena. He was accompanied by Los Angeles Philharmonic managing director Ernest Fleischmann, who will retire from that post this year and become artistic adviser to Ojai Festivals for the 1998 season.

Ax was good-natured, witty and firm in his opinions, some of which diverged from the formidable Fleischmann's. They differed on the value of musical competitions, which Fleischmann thought should be replaced by invitational sessions in which managers and promoters simply evaluate rather than score the talent. Ax responded that he would never have received such an invitation in 1974 when, at 25, he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. A year later he took the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists and, four years after that, the Avery Fisher Prize. Recording and concert contracts followed.

The festival program will ``make a bow in the direction of Schubert,'' particularly appropriate in the year of the composer's 200th birthday. His works have received all too little attention, and that's a slight Ax is pleased to remedy.

Schubert's Trio in E-Flat will be on the festival's opening program, with Ax at the piano joined by friends Cho-Liang Lin on violin and David Finckel on cello. ``It's one of the absolutely greatest works of the 19th century,'' Ax said. He's worked on it before with Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma, and those associations give it a special spot in his heart.

``The more you work together, the more shorthand language you develop,'' Ax said. ``But there are different kinds of working together. We work together across the table - we have dinner a lot.'' Playing music together is as much a personal enterprise as a musical one, he added. ``Yo-Yo Ma and I have played together musically very well, but I don't think we would if we did not get along very well personally. We talk about everything from soup to nuts.''

Ax is also happy that he shares a program with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki. Scheduled for the Saturday night concert are Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, ``one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century,'' and a piece new for the couple, Messiaen's ``Visions de l'Amen,'' which Ax finds ``wonderful, ecstatic music.''

Ax is impressed by this year's festival conductor, Daniel Harding, who stepped in at the last minute to lead a complex program by England's Birmingham Symphony last year at age 20. ``I think he's going to be one of the most wonderful conductors ever,'' Ax said.

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Photo

Photo: Emanuel Ax

Ojai Festival music director