Avner Itai first heard the sound of an oboe at age 17. In the Kibbutz Kfar Giladi of the 1950s, neither the oboe nor classical chamber music was heard. Rather, nature was the music of the day: the mooing of the cows in the barn where Itai worked ("in third grade I milked one cow a day and three years later, I was already milking 20 cows"), the swish of the sickle Itai used to cut grain, the click of the pruning shears in the vineyard facing Mount Hermon and the cries of the birds of prey circling over the Naftali hills.

When Itai finally heard the sound of the oboe, in an Israel Philharmonic concert at his kibbutz, he pointed to the instrument and told his parents: "I want one of those." Where they got the money from is still a mystery to him, but they bought him an oboe that Philharmonic oboist Eliahu Turner obtained in the strangest way: The instrument had been buried by Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps and Jewish Brigade soldiers found it and then brought it to Israel. An odd instrument, the oboe was made of transparent Bakelite and emitted a terrible sound. But for a youngster who only dreamed of making music and had yet to know how to read notes, the oboe was a treasure indeed.

After more than half a century, Avner Itai became the lead Israel Chamber Orchestra oboist, one of the greatest conductors in Israel and a professor for choir conducting. At the Abu Gosh Festival on Friday at 8:30 P.M., Itai will join Ora Seitner and guitarist Oded Schub in performing folk songs and works from Catalonia and France. He will play an oboe d'amore that he bought this year. On Friday at 7:30 P.M., Itai will conduct instrumentalists from the Philharmonic and his choir, Collegium Tel Aviv, in Bach's "Mass in B Minor."

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The two polls which mirror Avner Itai's career - his late start in music and his conducting the Bach "Mass" with a small choir that lacks a budget and which rehearses voluntarily once a week - reflect all that happened to him over the years. He has uncompromisingly struggled for culture; his struggles were characterized by a willingness to embark on large, seemingly hopeless missions that he had to see through - no matter what.

The struggles began with the accordion that he played when he was 13 years old. Even though he had to teach himself to play, he accompanied evenings of community singing that he organized for his friends. Then he joined the Israel Defense Forces Orchestra: "The conductor, Shalom Riklis, said to me: 'Listen, you don't know how to play and you don't know how to read music, but we're missing a second oboist. If you can fit in, fine - if not, to the artillery.' The other soldier-musicians, children of the Tel Aviv musical nobility, sons of members of the Philharmonic, related with scorn mixed with pity to the country boy who had shown up among them," he laughs.

And finally, the most difficult mission of all, getting accepted to Paris' La Schola Cantorum music school: "At the kibbutz school, I didn't learn a thing and I even had an exemption from English classes. Therefore, when I came to Europe for the first time, at the age of 23 and without any knowledge of grammar even in my mother tongue, English and French sounded to me like a string of incomprehensible noises," says Itai. "But I was very motivated and the examination in the French language at the Alliance Francaise was the first I ever passed in my life, and with an excellent mark."

"Now, after having enjoyed yourself for three years, you have to justify your existence," the kibbutz secretary told Itai upon his return as a graduate in choral conducting from the Parisian academy.

"That's when I started teaching every possible musical instrument to children, establishing a wind ensemble and a string instruments club and founding a choir," he relates.

Looking back, it seems he "justified his existence," meaning he fulfilled his individual passion for music by giving back to the collective in accordance with the socialist outlook. Itai became a musical pioneer and leader, with all the disappointments suffered by pioneers in the face of the cynical reality of a society discarding its cultural and social assets.

Forty years have passed from the time Avner Itai returned from Paris as a young fellow of 26, imbued with revolutionary zeal, until his return in 2001, for a five-year retreat from musical life in Israel.

Why did you go there this time?

"I had accumulated two and a half years of sabbatical leave from the university," he says. Itai established the choral conducting department at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, founded two student choirs and taught generations of students.

"After the age of 69, sabbatical rights expire and I knew that this was the last moment to use them. So then we - the whole family - decided to go; and the great longings for Paris, in addition to the knowledge that there was an Israeli school there for our children, led to the choice of the city. I brought in conductor Michael Shani to overlap with me at the Academy and I left."

No doubt people ask you how it was.

"And I answer: 'It was right.' I needed the distance."

Did you conduct there?

"Very little. I offered to start choral activity in the Jewish community: to start a conducting course for adults and introduce choral education in the schools, all the things I know. I saw how much they needed this but they didn't feel the lack and refused politely. So then I established a small vocal ensemble, David's Harp, which didn't have a single Jew and sang mostly in Hebrew anyway."

And now will you return to your earlier activities?

"After 40 years of exhausting battle for the choir movement in Israel, I no longer want to be involved. It also has to do with age, my inner music. I feel a need to conserve my energies: My wife Naomi and I have a young family, a son who is a student, a son in the army and a daughter who is 14 years old. Apart from that, the committees and the public managements and the bodies that make the decisions need young people who will be free of my shadow."

However, it is not a shadow that Itai cast during those years, but rather a great light. He started out as the young musical director of the United Kibbutz Choir: "We went through all the beginnings together - the first madrigal, the first Bach motet, Mozart's Requiem. I learned from them and with them for 36 years," he says.

In the mid-1970s, he started a real revolution when he founded the Cameran Singers. The choir grew rapidly: "We achieved something that had never been seen in Israel: a chamber choir that had a subscription season, six series of six or seven concerts each, all around the country, in the Center and in the periphery."

Choir members held workshops and spread art throughout the country, but after 13 years, Itai was informed he had been fired from the choir he had established. Two years later this historic entity was dismantled: "The institutions did not understand that performing 40 to 50 concerts a year, with the tremendous work of rehearsals three times a week, is a professional matter. They enjoy it, so there is no need to pay them, they said at one of the discussions. Therefore the Cameran collapsed."

Itai was determined and uncompromising and did not try to curry favor with colleagues and officials, festival directors and sponsors. It was convenient for many people to push him out of the picture, and after the failure of his attempt to revive the veteran Rinat Choir, which Gary Bertini founded in the mid-1950s and which in 1992 was about to be dismantled, he gave up musical directing and contented himself with teaching at the academy.

Avner Itai's upcoming concert proves that his break from musical directing did not last long. By 1997, he had already assembled a new group. It is called Collegium Tel Aviv and it has veteran and young members singers of both sexes: "There is no limit to the singers' devotion," he says. "A rehearsal once a week for a choir that wants to sing at a high level is a joke, but no one complains."

The choir performed for about four years before he went aboard - at the Musica Sacra festival that began in Nazareth, among other places. In his absence, it survived with other conductors, "and for a year now, we have been staying together without a budget," he says. "Performing the 'Mass' is long-distance running. It's altogether audacious of me to perform it with a semi-professional group, but I am seeing how the musical design is gradually emerging, how agreement on the shape is crystallizing, and the bonus: the whole, endless variety of forms and styles that Bach wove into this work, from Renaissance writing to Baroque virtuosity. I would be glad to work again with a professional choir to engage in musical interpretation and not repetition. Work like this brings out devotion in people, and this is a great gift. Very beautiful things have happened in rehearsals."

If so, was the decision to perform the "Mass" a gamble?

"Adventure is a better definition, and in any case this isn't a performance that is intended to remain forever."

Alongside the work with the Collegium and playing the oboe, Itai is continuing something has never ceased to engage him since his kibbutz days, community work with amateur singers. "We've set up a singing club on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, and once a week people come there to sing," he says. "A more or less permanent group of about 30 people has formed, most of them can't read notes and learn the parts by ear. Sometimes I bring instrumentalists, and the musical tasks are simple and beautiful. This is God's little acre."