There has been a music festival in the jewel-like town of Ojai (California) for 80 years and I spent last week enjoying its latest incarnation. In some ways it resembles other small towns with music festivals – Aspen, Tanglewood – but Ojai is unique in that it is entirely devoted to new concert music and is so well-regarded that many of the distinguished composers come in person to hear their works performed. The ink was hardly dry on some contemporary pieces that were played. Bach got a brief look-in on the final concert but otherwise Stravinsky’s was the oldest work on offer.
Many of this year’s offerings were works by John Adams, the Festival’s former Music Director, and Essa-Pekka Salonen, who was in charge this year. John Adams, as anyone with even a glancing interest in serious music knows, is a Pulitzer-Prizewinner who has composed operas such as The Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China as well as multiple orchestral and chamber works, several of which were in the Ojai program.
Essa-Pekka Salonen is the distinguished Finnish conductor, former Music Director of both the LA Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, but, he says, a composer at heart who took up conducting primarily to ensure that someone would conduct his own compositions…