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Relive the 2012 Festival with Video and Photos
Relive the 66th Ojai Music Festival with Music Director Leif Ove Andsnes and friends from the comfort of your home!
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WATCH recordings of the concerts >>
LISTEN to pieces recorded at the Festival >>
READ reviews of the 2012 Festival >>
John Adams
Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Over the past 25 years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings.
Leif Ove Andsnes, 2012 Music Director
The New York Times has called Leif Ove Andsnes “a pianist of magisterial elegance, power and insight.” With his commanding technique and searching interpretations, the celebrated Norwegian pianist has won worldwide acclaim, prompting the Wall Street Journal to call him “one of the most gifted musicians of his generation.” He gives recitals and plays concertos each season in the world’s leading concert halls and with the foremost orchestras.
Eivind Buene
Eivind Buene studied pedagogics and composition at the Norwegian State Academy of Music from 1992 to 1998, and in 1999 and 2000 he was composer in residence with the Oslo Sinfonietta. Since 2000 he has been a freelance composer living and working in Oslo, writing for a wide array of ensembles and orchestras. He has recieved commissions from among others Ensemble Intercontemporain, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Fondation Royaumont and most of the Norwegian Orchestras and ensembles.
Antoine Tamestit, Viola
Antoine Tamestit was born in Paris and studied with Jean Sulem, Jesse Levine and Tabea Zimmermann. He was the recipient of several coveted prizes which lauched him at the highest level – First Prize at the Maurice Vieux Competition (Paris, 2000) and the William Primrose Competition (Chicago, 2001), First Prize at the Young Concert Artists (YCA) International Auditions which led to his New York, Boston and Washington recital debuts in 2003. In September 2004, he took First Prize at the 53rd ARD Munich International Music Competition.
Lucy Shelton, soprano
Winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards—as chamber musician and solo recitalist—soprano Lucy Shelton continues to enjoy an international career bringing her dramatic vocalism and brilliant interpretive skills to repertoire of all periods. An esteemed exponent of 20th- and 21st-century repertory, she has premiered over 100 works.
Christianne Stotijn, Mezzo Soprano
Mezzo soprano Christianne Stotijn was born in Delft, the Netherlands and received her first solo diploma for violin in 2000. She then Pursued intensive vocal studies with Udo Reinemann at the Amsterdam Conservatory graduating cum laude. S he furthered her studies with Jard van Nes, Noelle Barker and Dame Janet Baker.
Steven Schick, percussion/director
Percussionist, conductor and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works for percussion. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and a Consulting Artist in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music.
Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1977 under the leadership of Terje Tonnesen, who still works as the orchestra’s Music Director. For many years he worked in parallel with Iona Brown, who was Music and Artistic Director until 2001. Isabelle van Keulen will share the position as Music Director together with Tonnesen and with Leif Ove Andsnes as Principal Guest Director from the start of the 2009/10 season.
Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano
Marc-André Hamelin’s unique blend of musicianship and virtuosity brings forth interpretations remarkable for their freedom, originality, and prodigious mastery of the piano’s resources. Long known for his bold exploration of unfamiliar pianistic terrain, Mr. Hamelin has increasingly turned his attention to the established masterworks of the piano literature, in performances and recordings of the piano sonatas of Haydn, major works by Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and others.
Martin Fröst, clarinet
Martin Fröst is internationally recognized as one of the most exciting wind players around today. Forthcoming concerts include debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic with Osmo Vänskä (performing Kalevi Aho’s Concerto which was commissioned for him by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi, NHK Symphony Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner, and both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Radio Chamber Orchestra (at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw).
Hafliði Hallgrímsson
One of the most important figures in the current flowering of Icelandic music is Hafliði Hallgrímsson, born in 1941 in the small town of Akureyri on the north coast of Iceland. He began playing the cello at the age of ten and studied in Reykjavik and Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome. On returning from Rome, he continued his studies in London with Derek Simpson at the Royal Academy of Music and was awarded the coveted Madame Suggia Prize in 1966.
Bent Sørensen
“It reminds me of something I’ve never heard.” Such was the spontaneous reaction of the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim upon hearing a work by Bent Sørensen. And it is not easy to imagine a more strangely to-the-point description of the ambiguous, almost paradoxical expressive idiom of this unique composer, who is without doubt the leading Danish composer of his generation. Sørensen’s music is not recycled, in no way does it rely on the yellowing pages of history for its musical nourishment his musical language is undeniably of the present day, both aesthetically and technically.
Jamie Van Eyck, mezzo-soprano
With polished, elegant vocalism and committed dramatic portrayals on-stage, American mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck appeals to audiences and critics alike as a compelling young artist in opera and concert. This season, she makes her New York City recital debut with pianist Jocelyn Dueck in a performance sponsored by The Casement Fund.
Douglas Williams, bass-baritone
“The gifted young bass-baritone Douglas Williams” (Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times) combines a “formidable stage presence” (Seattle Times) with “a bass voice of splendid solidity” (Bernard Jacobson, Music Web International), making him one of the most appealing singing actors of the younger generation. He has collaborated with leading conductors including Helmut Rilling, Sir Neville Marriner, John Nelson, and Christoph Rousset in such prestigious venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Stuttgart’s Mozart-Saal, and the Frankfurt Alte Oper.
Learn more about 2013 Music Director Mark Morris
MARK MORRIS was born on August 29, 1956, in Seattle, Washington, where he studied with Verla Flowers and Perry Brunson. In the early years of his career, he performed with the Koleda Balkan Dance Ensemble, and later the dance companies of Lar Lubovitch, Hannah Kahn, Laura Dean, and Eliot Feld. He formed the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980, and has since created more than 130 works for the company. From 1988-1991, he was Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the national opera house of Belgium. Among the works created during his time there were three evening-length dances: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato; Dido and Aeneas; and The Hard Nut. In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Morris is also a ballet choreographer and has created eight works for the San Francisco Ballet since 1994 and received commissions from many others. His work is also in the repertory of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, New Zealand Ballet, Houston Ballet, English National Ballet, and The Royal Ballet. Morris, named music director of the 2013 Ojai Music Festival, is noted for his musicality and has been described as “undeviating in his devotion to music.” He has conducted performances for the Mark Morris Dance Group since 2006. He has worked extensively in opera, directing and choreographing productions for the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, English National Opera, and The Royal Opera, Covent Garden.
In 1991, he was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. He has received eleven honorary doctorates to date. In 2006, Morris received the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Mayor’s Award for Arts & Culture and a WQXR Gramophone Special Recognition Award “for being an American ambassador for classical music at home and abroad.” He is the subject of a biography, Mark Morris, by Joan Acocella (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and Marlowe & Company published a volume of photographs and critical essays entitled Mark Morris’ L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration. Morris is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In recent years, he has received the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement (2007), the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society (2010), and the Benjamin Franklin Laureate Prize for Creativity (2012).
Visit the Mark Morris Dance Group
Visit our multimedia page and watch recent videos of Mark Morris
For information on series tickets to the 2013 Festival, call our box office at 805.646.2053 or purchase online here >>
Carl Ruggles
Writing only 84 minutes of music in the entirety of his career, Carl Ruggles’ eight published works nonetheless attest to his complete dedication to atonality and ultra-modernism. Ruggle’s prickly personality was paired with a meticulously deliberate compositional process – Michael Tilson Thomas recalled visiting the composer and hearing him play “every sonority, every chord . . . once, twice, 10, 20, 50, perhaps hundreds of times, as loud as he could, because as he said to me, ‘I thought that if I could still stand the sound . . . after a hundred times or so, it would sound pretty good a couple of hundred years from now!”
Wu Man, pipa
Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso and as a leading ambassador of Chinese music, US-based, Chinese-born musician Wu Man has carved out a career creating and fostering projects that give this ancient instrument a new role in today’s music world, not only introducing the instrument to new audiences, but commissioning and premiering over a hundred new works to grow the core repertoire. A Grammy Award-nominated artist, her adventurous musical spirit has also led to her becoming a respected expert on the history and preservation of Chinese musical traditions, reflected in her recorded and live performances and multi-cultural collaborations.
Jeremy Denk on the 2014 Ojai Music Festival
“On the advice of my lawyer, I’m not going to tell you what I’ve planned for 2014,” joked Ojai Music Festival 2014 Music Director Jeremy Denk at the Sunrise Breakfast. The joke was half-serious. Denk, in conversation with Performance Today’s Fred Child, revealed a few things over the course of a discussion that ranged from Denk’s 2001 residency on Performance Today – an hour every morning for a week of interviewing and performing – to why Denk double-majored in chemistry and music performance at Oberlin.
Child and Denk spoke in front of a crowd of donors at the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa after OMF artistic director Tom Morris chatted a little about the status of sales for this year and for next – about 700 tickets had been sold for 2013 by the fourth day of this year’s festival – and Denk, who performed at the Festival with eighth blackbird in 2009, said that he was nervous the first time he was here and didn’t get to fully appreciate the atmosphere. But on Thursday night, as he listened to Marc-André Hamelin play the Concord Sonata, he started settling into the beauty of nature and thinking about the ways nature “and all its colors” could play out in the programming for 2014.
When an audience member asked Denk if Ojai 2014 would be seeing any “Denkian words” on stage during his festival, he said, “That’s a probability,” and he also hinted that he might be inviting violinist Stefan Jackiw. “I feel confident in saying someone from Brooklyn, or someone who has lived in Brooklyn, will be in the festival,” he added, in response to an audience question about the new music scene centered in Brooklyn
Denk said he feels a little bit like “a fuddy-duddy” in comparison to some of the younger musicians experimenting with music in New York. But, he added, “I feel like Ojai has a sort of party atmosphere that should not be lost in the music-making.” The audience clapped and laughed
An audience member asked, “Are you thinking about doing some composing?” and Denk responded, “Please! No.” He’s working on another major piece for The New Yorker, he said, and he added, “There’s that practicing the piano thing to do, which does take some hours every day.”
-Suzi Steffen
2013 Ojai Music Festival Press Release
The Ojai Music Festival announces further details of the 67th Ojai Music Festival, with choreographer Mark Morris as Music Director.
Five Things Friday – Reinbert de Leeuw
Conductor, composer, pianist, author . . . Dutch musician Reinbert de Leeuw wears many hats. Throughout his career, de Leeuw has been an ardent champion of new music, co-founding the Schoenberg Ensemble in 1974 (he’s been conductor and music director since its inception). If you aren’t familiar with Reinbert de Leeuw, here’s five things to help you get acquainted:
- Mr. de Leeuw is an accomplished pianist – he will be performing his own Im wunderschönen Monat Mai on Friday Night with Barbara Sukowa. His interpretations of Erik Satie, in particular, have brought him widespread acclaim. Here’s a video of him playing Satie’s Le Fils des Étoiles No. 2.
- In addition to his work with the Schoenberg Ensemble, Mr. de Leeuw has also served as music director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music (1994-1998) and artistic advisor for contemporary music at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2000-2004). He has also been involved in several opera productions, including works by Stravinsky, Andriessen, Ligeti, Vivier, and Rob Zuiddam.
- In 2011, Mr. de Leeuw accomplished a cherished dream – to lead a complete performance of Schoenberg’s massive Gurre-Lieder. For his performance, de Leeuw brought together 356 musicians, including students of the Royal Conservatoir and Codarts Rotterdam. Here’s a brief video taken from one of the rehearsals.
- If that isn’t enough, Mr. de Leeuw is the author of two books (one on Charles Ives and a collection of essays), and helped to create an internationally acclaimed eight-part documentary on twentieth-century composers.
- And one more…In 2010, Mr. de Leeuw was a part of the “Cage Against The Machine” campaign, which was a worldwide push to get John Cage’s 4’33” as the Christmas No. 1. Here is his performance for Dutch television (begins at 6:30). If anyone speaks Dutch, we’d love to know what he says!
We’re excited that Reinbert de Leeuw will be joining us in June. From what we’ve seen so far, he’s an incredibly talented musician and thinker – we can’t wait to meet him! He’ll be in Ojai June 7-10 – click here for tickets and further information.
Looking Back on Ojai Festival 2012 Preview Events
At our Preview Events last weekend, hosted by Artistic Director Tom Morris and ArtsJournal.com founder Doug McLennan, we asked attendees to tell us what they thought and what the most interesting thing they heard was – here are a few of the comments we received. Thank you to all of our friends who attended our events in Ojai, Santa Monica, and Pasadena; it was so wonderful to meet you all!
Needless to say, with less than two months to go, excitement for the Festival in June continues to mount. We hope to see you there – purchase your tickets today.
Five Things Friday – The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra (or, as we’ve shortened it here in the office, the NCO) has worked with 2012 Music Director Leif Ove Andsnes for several years, both on recording projects and at the Risør Festival in Norway. But the group is well-known and established in their own right, so for this week’s Five Things Friday, we’ve decided to see what we could learn about the NCO:
- The group was started in 1977, bursting onto the international music scene with its acclaimed recording of Grieg’s complete works for string orchestra in 1979. The NCO has benefited from having two long-term leaders: Terje Tønnesen (1977-1981, 2010-present) and Iona Brown (1981-2001). Leif Ove Andsnes was the orchestra’s first guest leader, holding the position from 2002-2010.
- Terje Tønnesen is active across several different genres, enjoying working in jazz, rock, and theatrical performance in addition to his work with the NCO. Here’s an incredible video of Tønnesen performing in Dance Macabre (1995), choreographed by Kjersti Alveberg.
- The NCO is known for their dedication to developing new performance concepts and modes of presentation. Take, for example, their performance of Grieg’s In ‘Holberg’s Time’, in 2010 (wait for about 50 seconds in).
- The NCO appeared as part of the BBC Proms in 2010, receiving almost universal praise for their (and Andnes’) performances of Grieg and Mozart’s piano concertos. But they gave another performance as well, at the much less traditional 100 Club, usually home to Jazz and rock groups. You can see a video of their sold-out performance here.
- And speaking of unusual venues, the NCO also had a series of performances throughout the city, including in a train station. Definitely one of the times we wish we spoke Norwegian.
There are less than two months to go until the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Leif Ove Andsnes, and the rest of the 2012 artists arrive in Ojai. If you have not yet bought tickets, you can do so online at https://ojaifestival.secure.force.com/ticket.
Chatting with Marc-André Hamelin
A few weeks ago we collected questions to ask Marc-André Hamelin. He’s just gotten back to us, answering questions about working with Leif Ove Andsnes, favorite pianists, and desert islands. Here’s what he said:
When you and Leif Ove Andsnes perform works for four hands, how do you decide who plays which part?
It’s only happened for two pieces so far, so there’s no great tradition yet! If one of us expresses a preference, the other respects it; that’s all there really is to it. Incidentally, we’ve only played 2-piano pieces so far — nothing on just one piano.
How do you decide the balance between solo, chamber, and orchestral appearances? Do you have a preference? What are the attractions of each?
It all depends on what concert offers come my way. I tend to take all I can, whether solo, chamber or orchestral, provided my schedule doesn’t get overcrowded; beyond a certain number of concerts, the quality of what I do is bound to start to suffer.
You have played pretty much everything…is there anything left, or will you turn to composition full-time?
I find this question extremely amusing! If one could play literally everything ever written for the piano, it would take at least twenty lifetimes! It’s not generally appreciated just how much there really is. True, a lot of it is forgettable or out of fashion, but there’s still many good things out there waiting to be heard.
As far as composition, it’s a necessary thing for me, and I enjoy it tremendously, but my concert activity will always be my main priority.
Desert island music question! What are the five recordings you’d want if you were actually stranded on an island? (box sets don’t count).
The more CDs and LPs you have (and yes, I still collect LPs) the more it would be impossible to make a choice! Also, I’d be afraid that if I took a small number of records to a desert island, I’d get sick of them, and that would be unfortunate…
Do you have any favorite pianists among the legendary figures of the past (or present)? Any favorite recordings or concert experiences?
When I was little, my father played a lot of the Golden Age pianists’ recordings — those were his favorites by far, so naturally I got to know and love them very much. I liked a lot of them — hard to pick one. Ignaz Friedman and Josef Hofmann, perhaps. As far as now, people like Freire, Lupu, Uchida, Ax, Andsnes and Zimerman…well, the world would be much poorer without them.
Two of the concerts that particularly affected me (in a positive way!) were Shura Cherkassky’s two Montréal appearances back in the late 70s, when I was an impressionable youth.
If you weren’t playing piano, you’d be….
A master of ‘air chess’! No, seriously…I have a certain aptitude for languages (even though I only speak two) so maybe a linguist?
Thanks to everyone who sent in their questions, and a big thank you to Marc-André – we can’t wait to see you in June! If you’re interested in seeing Marc-André Hamelin perform at the 65th Ojai Music Festival, click here for a program schedule.