20 June 2009
Oh, The Highs of Ojai
By John Allison
What's in a name? In the case of the Ojai Music Festival, everything. First, there is the place (pronounced 'Oh-hi'), a small town that occupies a special position in the 'Left Coast' mythology of America's West Coast out of any proportion to its size. The sycamores and orange groves of the fertile Ojai valley may be only a 90-minute drive north of Los Angeles, but they are a world apart, and the town's laidback atmosphere has long attracted devotees of its early residents Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley, and - since the festival was founding in 1947 - of adventurous music-making.
Central to the Festival's identity is an approach to music rare in its idealism. The programmes embrace music in its widest sense, and despite a bias towards contemporary work, the new-music ghettos that usually dominate this scene feel utterly remote here. There is nothing dutiful about the approach of either the performers or the audience, but a truly festive spirit in the way they come together for this annual long weekend. Few other audiences are as open-minded or curious as those who gather on the benches or lawns of Libby Bowl in Ojai's park.
And although the Festival renews itself by appointing a different music director every year, its physical make-up has changed very little. At last weekend's 63rd season it was possible to sit on those hard benches and imagine history being made: this is the festival that once featured Stravinsky, that convinced Copland to make his conducting debut and that gave Boulez his first US concert dates. Ojai is also the place that helped to launch the careers of the conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Kent Nagano.
Some of that may suggest the establishment at play, but this year was very different. Midway through a 10-year stint at the helm, Tom Morris, one of America's leading musical administrators, took a leap of faith by inviting eighth blackbird to act as a collective music director. This sextet - which derives its name from a Wallace Stevens poem - then set about involving other musically omnivorous colleagues in barnstorming programmes. Guests included composing-improvising ensemble Tin Hat, the modern recorder quartet QNG and the sound sculptor Trimpin.
Stage animals as well as outstanding chamber players, eighth blackbird perform with a freedom almost unheard of in their technically demanding repertoire. In Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, directed by Mark DeChiazza with the soprano Lucy Shelton, the musicians were integrated into the production and played their parts from memory - an uncommon delicacy.
A similar physicality marked out their premiere of Slide, by Princeton's composer and electric guitarist Steven Mackey, and the actor-singer Rinde Eckert. All performers here speak, sing and play instruments in a drama about a psychologist haunted by his experiment into perception and reality. But, unlike the psychologist's slides, which eventually pop unto focus, this new work remained unfocused. Mackey's art-rock song is monochrome, and his big reputation in American music is puzzling: he is like the high school guitarist who never grew up.
One of eighth blackbird's most recent commissions is Steve Reich's Double Sextet, which has just won the veteran composer his first Pulitzer Price. Its outer movements, with their bouncy, interlocking textures, contain all the usual Reich trappings, but the central movement is hauntingly lyrical. A big presence at Ojai this year, Reich was also represented by Music for 18 Musicians, which sounded unusually euphoric here: hearing it in a sunny park beats a darkened concert hall anytime.
Another modern classic, George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening, dominated the Festival's opening concert. Cicadas and nocturnal birdsong provided background to a four-work programme inspired by the natural world.
Bach is not banned. One of the high points was Jeremy Denk's 'beauty and the beast' recital, in which a playful performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations was preceded by Ives's rarely heard Piano Sonata No. 1, its odd-numbered movements serious and knotty, the even ones revivalist-ragtime scherzos.
Any Ojai 2009 highlights inventory must also include the West Coast premiere of David Michael Gordon's Quasi Sinfonia, which turns the symphonic process upside down and finds new and beguiling sounds, and almost everything played by the virtuosic recorders of QNG; their performance of Victor Ekimovskij's ethereal Kites Flying lightened up the five-hour Marathon Finale. Ojai certainly has an appetite: at the end, after the place had rocked with Louis Andriessen's Workers Union, the talk was already of next year's festival, which will be under the directorship of the British composer George Benjamin.
Copyright © 2009 The Sunday Telegraph
