Ojai Festival opens with new shell
Sixty-five years young and showing off its nifty new shell for Libbey Bowl, this year’s Ojai Music Festival began Thursday night with a spring in its step, but also a tear in its eye.
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Ojai Music Festival wraps up its 65th season
A delicious puzzle to contemplate. Is this year’s Ojai Music Festival music director Dawn Upshaw the luckiest person in the world because she has so many multitalented collaborative friends, or are the friends the luckiest because they have Upshaw to urge them on in rewarding directions?
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Music review: Dawn Upshaw, Peter Sellars and George Crumb in the 2011 Ojai Festival
Concerts at this year’s Ojai Music Festival, the 65th, tended to be preceded with something rare in this magical musical kingdom.
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Australian Chamber Orchestra entertains crowds at Ojai Music Festival
The Australian Chamber Orchestra displayed its considerable wares at Saturday’s Ojai Music Festival events, culminating in a stringent evening concert that demonstrated a serene compatibility with the festival’s honored tradition of featuring at least one rarely heard work.
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Ojai Music Festival at the Libbey Bowl
With George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny on Friday night, the Ojai Music Festival once again exceeded expectations, taking the concert form a step further in the direction of a total dynamic experience.
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No sign of retirement here : In its 65th annual edition, the Ojai Music Festival came on strong, artful and fresh, thanks to a few stars of varying substance
By the old-school definition, the age of 65 marks the dawn of the “golden years,” the finale of the active work force years. Yet for the ever-impressive and world-renowned Ojai Music Festival, this year’s 65th birthday celebration over the weekend felt much less attuned to the feeling of endings or closure than a renewing, rebirthing occasion.
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CONCERT REVIEW: Swinging and mostly moving, to the finish : For the two Sunday concerts in last weekend’s 65th annual Ojai Music Festival, jazz composer-bandleader Maria Schneider was the star of the day
On Sunday morning in the Libbey Bowl, some Ojai Music Festival purists might have raised an eyeball and an earlobe upon hearing the fare — jazz, by any other name. Then again, any diehard Ojai Festival fan knows better than to don a purist hat too snugly. Flexibility is built into the festival agenda, along with deep, abiding “serious music” lore, in progress.
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At Ojai, New Music Was Once Its Strength
To celebrate the Ojai Music Festival’s 65th anniversary last weekend, a new and slightly larger band shell was inaugurated. It marks the outdoor amphitheater’s first major renovation since a permanent structure was erected in 1957.
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The More Things Stay the Same
For better or worse, the most interesting thing at this year’s Ojai Music Festival was the feeling that the festival was embarking on a new phase in its history. The most obvious reason for this was the completion of the brand spanking new Libbey Bowl, the outdoor amphitheater in Ojai’s Libbey Park that has been the long-time home of the festival.
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New Bowl for (Mostly) New Music
The Ojai Music Festival is a place where the likes of Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez are cheered lustily, where living composers, no matter how arcane, are lionized. It’s a place where a piece such as Magnus Lindberg’s outrageous “Kraft” is considered not only perfectly suitable fare, but worthy of grand finale status.
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Ojai Music Festival 2011: “Summertime, and the Listenin’ Was Easy”
A month ago at Ojai, morning fog came on little cat feet, birds chirped, the sun shone at noon, oaks drooped at four, swamis led evening meditations, and the hills were alive for four days with the sounds of unusual music. It was June and the faithful, with many new faces, had congregated in the town’s enchanted valley for the annual Ojai Music Festival, this the 65th in the long-enduring series.
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Ojai North, Zellerbach Hall/Playhouse Berkeley, California
Founded and sequestered in a paradisiacal hamlet in southern California, the Ojai Festival closely guarded its musical glories for 65 years.
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Afghanistan Veteran, Afghan Sounds
Though the experienced arts administrator Thomas W. Morris is the official artistic director of the Ojai Music Festival, much of the artistic planning for this innovative annual four-day event is turned over each June to a rotating music director, who organizes the programs. This summer that artist was the soprano Dawn Upshaw, and not surprisingly she devised diverse and adventurous offerings.
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