Explore a tidbit of detail on each concert! These tasting notes are deeper than piece listings and a fraction of program notes, all written by Thomas May.
Opening Concert
Libbey Bowl
THU 06.11.26
We establish the tone for the whole festival by resetting your sense of time – starting with a surprise inspired by the ever-present birds around Libbey Bowl. Music by Esa-Pekka Salonen is on the menu, including a brand-new duo for violin and cello alongside his mercurial Homunculus — a natural match for the innovative Attacca Quartet. Then, Conor Hanick traces two sides of John Adams, from the early turning point China Gates to a piano piece heard here in its world premiere. This first Ojai evening culminates in a 20th-century landmark: Quartet for the End of Time envisions a suspension of time altogether, where birdsong becomes an emblem of transcendence: the desire “for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.”
Ojai Dawns
Zalk Theater
FRI 06.12.26
Written at the height of the Vietnam War, Black Angels channels what composer George Crumb called the “dark currents” of the time into a charged, ritualized, amplified sound world that helped redefine what a string quartet could be. Taken up by groups like the Kronos Quartet and carried forward this morning by the Attacca Quartet, that legacy continues in David Lang’s daisy, written for Attacca as a response to Black Angels that imagines two futures at once — one overwhelmed, one held open.
Morning Concert
Libbey Bowl
FRI 06.12.26
Unfamiliar combinations set the morning in motion at Libbey Bowl: a distant cello shadowing another in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tribute to composer friend Oliver Knussen; a bright, high-register trio that twists the idea of a music box; an amplified harpsichord set against a battery of percussion, each producing sounds that refuse to blend but instead create fascinating sonic “knots.”
Ojai Afternoon: LA Dance Project
Greenberg Center
FRI 06.12.26, SAT 06.13.26
Sequenza is Luciano Berio’s long-running series of solo works, each written for a different instrument and performer. In this interpretation, these solos push players to the edge of what their instruments — and bodies — can sustain, from flute and viola to cello and accordion, and are at the same time set in dialogue with the artistry of choreographers and dancers from LA Dance Project.
Evening Concert
Libbey Bowl
FRI 06.12.26
A few notes, a fragment of melody, a remembered story — music has myriad ways of transfiguring what’s given: the letters naming LA’s Colburn School; material from a film score recast as a clarinet concerto, its movements unfolding in a new kind of cinematic motion; or a passionately charged encounter between lovers, drawn from a fin-de-siècle poem and transformed by Arnold Schoenberg into a radiant early masterpiece.
Morning Concert
Libbey Bowl
SAT 06.13.26
The flute sustains a solo voice in Debussy’s Syrinx, while Kaija Saariaho compresses a solo cello’s gestures into brief, self-contained fragments that flicker in and out, like the erratic flight of butterflies. Piano miniatures spanning more than a decade of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s career are heard for the first time as a complete set, and John Adams takes us on an unforgettable trip for piano and violin, from a relaxed drive down a familiar road to a giddy, propulsive ride that never lets up.
Evening Concert
Libbey Bowl
SAT 06.13.26
Images from the natural world abound in the variety of contemporary music this evening at Libbey Bowl, from the teeming, marine life of Anthozoa to the shifting, seismic formations of Related Rocks and the near-still, fragile equilibrium of Ró. Meanwhile, Esa-Pekka Salonen and John Adams respond to the legacy of Arnold Schoenberg and early Modernism from sharply different angles: unpredictable, manic, at times even unhinged.
Morning Concert
Libbey Bowl
SUN 06.14.26
The Attacca Quartet leads this program, moving from their own vividly eclectic playlist — including reimagined tracks from Radiohead — to the world premiere of John Adams’s Iron Jig, a newly forged dance in which the quartet locks into a single, tightly wound mechanism — rhythms colliding, patterns shifting, and motion driving forward until the music seems almost to spin itself apart. Also performing are clarinetist Anthony McGill and pianist Conor Hanick in music by Olivier Messiaen, Jessie Montgomery, and Niccolò Castiglioni, where time stretches toward stillness and sound is held in delicate suspension.
Ojai Afternoon: Percussion
Greenberg Center
SUN 06.14.26
For a percussionist like Jonathan Hepfer, sound can come from almost anything — and even begin to speak. Nothing is Real reroutes fragments of a classic Beatles song through a teapot, and speech and percussion merge into a kind of surrogate voice in Toucher. Bone Alphabet pushes the performer to extreme feats of stamina, while Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark reduces sound to the faintest touches, each one appearing and vanishing almost without trace.
Finale Concert
Libbey Bowl
SUN 06.14.26
The concert begins with a memory that segues into a tribute to architect Frank Gehry and his enduring vision at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Leila Josefowicz takes on György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, threading her way through a constantly reconfiguring labyrinth of shifting tunings. The rest of the program turns to Stravinsky — a touchstone for Esa-Pekka Salonen — and to one of his most sparkling scores, Pulcinella, a work that marked his move toward a neoclassical style. Presented complete with a trio of singers, it closes out the 2026 Festival with stylized wit and theatrical flair.