OJAI, Calif. — For four days in early June, the Ojai Music Festival becomes the center of the contemporary and new music universe. Founded in 1947, this year’s festival ran June 11-14, drawing sold-out audiences. Even a heat wave didn’t deter people from trekking to this scenic little town northwest of Los Angeles.
The festival’s 80th anniversary celebrated those we lost, such as Walt Disney Concert Hall architect Frank Gehry in December 2025, as well as milestones: this was Ara Guzelimian’s final appearance as Ojai’s artistic director. But what a way to go out! Finnish conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen was music director (a different one is selected annually), adding even more luster to the event. No wonder so many music luminaries were present at Libbey Bowl, the festival’s principal venue.
First and foremost, since one of the festival’s themes was continuity, next year’s newly appointed artistic director, Teddy Abrams, 39, could be seen conferring with former festival director Thomas W. Morris. (Abrams’ music director for 2027 is virtuoso mandolin player, singer, and composer Chris Thile.)
Present also were three former music directors — Vijay Iyer (2017), John Adams (1993, 2021), and Peter Sellars (2016) — and at least a half-dozen composers, including Andrew Norman and Sean Shepherd. Former and recently appointed orchestra and new music executives flew in, perhaps to honor Guzelimian, but perhaps also looking for ideas. What works? Where’s the line between engaging audiences and pushing them away?
Since Ojai programming is partly about trying to serve different temperaments and tastes, the music was inevitably a mixed bag, though this year everything somehow felt raised to a higher level. Salonen opened the June 12 concert with Steven Stucky’s Colburn Variations (2002), paying tribute to the late composer as well as to the school where Salonen directs the conducting program. Fittingly, Salonen led the Colburn Orchestra smoothly through the intricacies of Stucky’s chordal writing and lyrical string solos to the score’s bracing unison finale. The youthful orchestra performed with aplomb.
Next was Salonen’s own kinēma (2021), a patchwork, five-movement, quasi-clarinet concerto, which benefited greatly from the mellow allure and high-pitched precision of featured soloist Anthony McGill. The clarinetist brought color and rhythmic variety to many short phrases, with the third movement, “Pérotin dream,” conveying more of the give-and-take of a concerto.
Mert Yalniz, a Salonen conducting fellow, ably directed the orchestra in Lutosławski’s Grave: Metamorphoses for Cello and Strings. Soloist Jay Campbell (a member of the JACK Quartet) gave a searching rendition — solemn, angry, despairing — of the tightly conceived ten-minute score.
Less successful was Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. With Salonen conducting the Colburn Orchestra, the contrapuntal and densely textured first half, though well delineated, never transfigured persuasively into the radiant serenity of the second. Of course, it’s important to remember that this elite student orchestra still consists of students making their way. The generational continuity that Guzelimian spoke of before Sunday’s late-afternoon festival finale will depend on these musicians.
On Saturday morning (June 13) pianist Conor Hanick presented a first-rate traversal of Salonen’s Six Preludes, a set that summoned Ligeti’s insight, “Even things seemingly unrelated and devoid of tradition have their secret connections to the past.” Salonen freely admits his debt to teachers Franco Donatoni, whose music also appeared at the festival, and Niccolò Castiglioni, whose Dulce refrigerium: Six Spiritual Songs for Piano (1984) received a restrained, lyrical account by Hanick on the Sunday (June 14) morning concert.
Also on the Saturday morning concert was Kaija Saariaho’s Sept Papillons (2000), in which Campbell’s challenge was to project a limited, delicate palette of sounds, suggesting the flight of butterflies. Even amplified, much of the sound flirted with inaudibility.
The morning concluded with John Adams’ three-movement Road Movies (1995), including a rousing finale (“40% Swing”) by violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist John Novacek.
Mid-afternoon brought L.A. Dance Project’s choreographed version of four of Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas: the earliest (Sequenza I) from 1958 and the latest (Sequenza XIV) from 2002 (Berio died in 2003). The musicians — Campbell, cello; Rose Lombardo, flute; Hanzhi Wang, accordion; and Nathan Schram, viola — gave it their all, but this music can sound dated now, the painful squeaks and slashing squawks that became the stereotype of “new music.” Nevertheless, the musicians’ intense concentration, athleticism, and, in the case of the flutist, breath control, won me over so completely that I drifted away from the dancers. These sonic experiments communicated a rough-hewn integrity, or to borrow a phrase from composer György Kurtág, “an ugly beauty.”
On Saturday night (June 13), there were several fascinating works, including Gabriella Smith’s Anthozoa (2018), a pulsating, multi-chromatic piece, which locates sonic correspondences to the undersea world through prepared piano, with Mark Robson standing at the instrument, at times slapping the soundboard, Rebecca Reale’s violin, Jason Lippmann’s cello, and Wesley Sumpter’s percussion.
Magnus Lindberg’s Related Rocks (1997) also proved compelling. It’s composed for a small ensemble, with Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray handling piano and electronics and Kana Funayama and Sumpter on percussion. The performers sustained the score’s careful integration of texture and sheer energy throughout. By contrast, in an inspired bit of programming, the LA Phil New Music Group, conducted by Aleksandra Melaniuk, effectively conveyed tones of delicacy, even fragility, in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ró (2013).
Especially impressive at this year’s festival was the Attacca Quartet — Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, violins; Nathan Schram, viola; Andrew Yee, cello. On Sunday morning they performed their “playlist,” including fiercely propulsive and nuanced performances of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” from their 2001 album Amnesiac and the world premiere of Adams’ Iron Jig, written for the quartet. Reimagining the Baroque gigue using shifting compound meters, Adams’ approximately nine-minute work is a more humorously cumbersome ride in a fast machine, but his vintage playfulness — several false endings elicited laughs from the audience — kept it on its feet.
Mid-afternoon Sunday at the Greenberg Center, Jonathan Hepfer’s mostly percussion concert began with Alvin Lucier’s eccentrically charming Nothing Is Real, in which Hepfer reroutes piano fragments of the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” through a teapot (Google it), and ended with Morton Feldman’s witty undercutting of percussive gigantism absurdly titled The King of Denmark, in which bass drum, timpani, gongs, hi-hat, bongos, and other percussion instruments are all gently rubbed or feather-lightly touched.
Late Sunday, the festival closed with a touching rendition of an expanded version of Salonen’s Fog (2019), originally composed so Gehry could hear music in the unfinished space years before Disney Hall opened in 2003. It employs Bach’s Prelude from the Partita No. 3, and there’s also a nod to Stravinsky, another of Salonen’s composer heroes.
There was a rarely performed, unconvincing version of Stravinsky’s complete ballet, Pulcinella, with Salonen conducting the Colburn Orchestra. The piece restored the original score with a soprano, tenor, and baritone. The music works much better shaped as a suite, though as Pierre-Laurent Aimard (music director 2007) once observed, “If not here at Ojai, then where?”
The festival knockout was Josefowicz’s scorching performance of Ligeti’s unpredictable, ear-bending five-movement Violin Concerto (1992). It was the violinist’s first time performing the concerto, and she composed her own cadenza for the final movement, adding even more difficulty to an already treacherous work. The definitive version received its premiere in 1993 conducted by Pierre Boulez (music director a record seven times, between 1967 and 2003).
Salonen let Josefowicz play, and her cadenza is certainly the longest I’ve ever heard. The orchestra abruptly cut her off as per the score, then wild applause began. If the festival website offers a stream of this performance, see it, not only for the violinist’s raw animalistic intensity, but for Salonen’s blown away “Wow” to his soloist at the end.
Josefowicz returned for an encore: Ligeti’s lovely Ballade and Dance for two violins (1950), performed with the Colburn Orchestra’s concertmaster, Ray Ushikubo. Here professional and student emerged as full-fledged colleagues, a gift for the future and a memory, among many others, that Guzelimian will no doubt proudly take with him.
