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Special Report from Thomas W. Morris (December 13, 2018)

I am writing this from Gothenburg, a beautiful quiet city in southern Sweden, home of the Gothenburg Symphony, the National Orchestra of Sweden. The widely recorded orchestra has a distinguished conductor heritage with Barbara Hannigan along with Christoph Eschenbach serving as Principal Guest Conductors and Gustavo Dudamel as Honorary Conductor. Former Ojai Music Director Kent Nagano served as Principal Guest Conductor for the last five years.

The occasion here was the world premiere of the new fully staged production of Stravinsky’s 1951 opera, The Rake’s Progress, a co-production of the Gothenburg Symphony, Brussel’s Klara Festival, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Ojai and Aldeburgh Music Festivals. This same production will open the 2019 Festival on Thursday, June 6 in Libbey Bowl.

The Rakes Progress is an astonishing morality tale of good and evil, with text by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and composed in Stravinsky’s most delicious neoclassic style. The 45-piece orchestra has all the rhythmic clarity found in the classic operas of Mozart, down to the ever present sparkle of a harpsichord continuo. There are arias, ensemble pieces, recitatives, and choruses, all framed in some of Stravinsky’s most bracing, stylish and rhythmically pointed music. The work is full of deep and stark drama, but also enormous humor – a perfect meld of the sublime and the ridiculous.

The production is and performances were out of this world. The mastermind was Barbara Hannigan who conceived the project and conducted, in fact it was her operatic conducting debut. Two years ago, Barbara founded Equilibrium (EQ), her mentoring initiative for young professional artists in the early stage of their careers. She reviewed over 300 applications for the project and personally auditioned over 100 singers and conductors a year ago. 22 were selected to participate during this first year, who come from all over the world.. Through the course of the year, Barbara conducts about three weeks of workshops outside Paris with the group, with the goal of teaching performance practices, refining interpretive issues in particular works, coping with the peculiar challenges of an artist’s life on the road, and functioning at the highest level of professionalism in the face of often challenging circumstances. Joining her in teaching are a yoga instructor from Amsterdam and the incredible Jackie Reardon, world famous tennis player and tennis coach who now spends her career as a life coach and motivational teacher, and author of several books and online teaching courses called Mindset and Friendly Eyes.

The artists also work with Barbara in her own various projects, including The Rake’s Progress. EQ singers form three separate casts for Rake’s (the opera requires six singers). This rotating cast will be working with Barbara in this new production to be performed three times in Gothenburg (I heard the first two performances), two performances at Brussels Klara Festival in March, two performances with the Munich Philharmonic in early May, five concert performances in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Paris, Dortmund and Dresden in late May, and then one performance in Ojai June 6 and a final one in Aldeburgh June 20.The Brussels cast will be the same that comes to Ojai and Aldeburgh.

Barbara engaged the noted young director Linus Fellbom to create, design, light, and direct the production, originally conceived as a “semi-staged” production – vastly simpler than traditional fully-staged productions and usually necessary because of the need to adapt a production to many difference places, different kinds of halls (concerts halls in Gothenburg, Munich, and Aldeburgh), a traditional opera house in Brussels), and different environments such as the unique outdoor setting of Ojai’s Libbey Bowl. “Semi-staged” productions also have the advantage of requiring far less preparation times to set up, a significant factor with so many performances in different places, as well as usually far less in terms of budgets. What Linus has incredibly created is a “fully-staged” production under “semi-staged” limitations. It is a marvel of compactness, power and simplicity – one that will be fascinating in so many different settings.

While not wanting to give away the surprises, I will say the production is based on the concept of an opera production which lands mysteriously in the various settings in gigantic wooden box, plopping itself down the center of the stage, behind which is the orchestra and on the sides of which is the chorus. As the opera unfolds, the box assumes life of its own, framing not only the singing and acting but astonishingly becoming the center of the drama itself. The work’s powerful climax contains a most stunning coups de theater that will take your breath away.

I saw two performances in Gothenburg, and both were thrilling. The production was over the top in its power and meaning, and the singing and acting by the unique Gothenburg cast from EQ simply the best I have ever heard in this opera, both individually and also as an ensemble. A note that singing the title role of Anne Truelove was Aphrodite Patoulidou, a young Greek soprano, who will also sing the role in Ojai: remember this name and the fact that you can say you discovered her in Ojai, much the same as discovering the young Julia Bullock in Ojai in 2011. The sheer energy, ensemble and vocal art of all of these young performers was totally captivating. The audience rose to its feet at the end in loud cheers each night. Reviews have been ecstatic. And above it all, Barbara Hannigan’s mastery of the score, her incisive conducting and her electrifying presence gave coherent shape, energy and power to the whole score.

Ojai is in for a treat. The Rake’s Progress has not been widely performed in southern California, only two touring performances in the 1960s and a performance about five years ago by Opera Pacifica. (Neither the LA Opera or LA Philharmonic have performed the work.) Ojai amazingly has heard performances of three excerpts from the work – the so-called Bedlam Scene in 1962 conducted by the Lukas Foss, and Anne Truelove’s famous aria scene in 1956 conducted by Robert Craft, and again in 1968, conducted by Lawrence Foster. I am so proud we can open the 2019 Festival with this fully-staged production – which not only expands our range of production capabilities but ties neatly to the fact that Stravinsky himself was Ojai Music Director in 1956, just five years after composing Rake’s.

As the devilish Nick Shadow says at the end of the first scene – “the progress of a Rake begins” –  indeed, a journey that will last the whole season for Barbara Hannigan, and of which we will be the beneficiary in June, an event not to be missed.

OUTGOING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR TOM MORRIS TALKS UP THE OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL 

After years at the helm of the Ojai Music Festival, Artistic Director Thomas W.  Morris is ready for his next chapter. He says that the festival will be in good hands and that new creative directions are on his personal horizon. Morris ends his stay having fostered a legacy of eclecticism and invention, and he’s grateful for all that he’s learned at the helm   of one   of the world’s most iconic musical gatherings. On   a sunny winter day, he took time to sit down with the Ojai Quarterly to reflect on his time introducing our ears to sounds strange and wonderful.  conversation has been edited for length.

By JESSE PHELPS. Reprinted by permission by Ojai Quarterly / SPRING 2019

OQ: When did you come on board, and what did that process look like?
TOM MORRIS: My first Festival as Artistic Director was 2004. I was approached about three years before that. You know, the way we work, you have to plan three-plus years ahead. From my standpoint, the timing was impeccable because when I got the first call … I was going to retire from the Cleveland Orchestra. It was 17 years there and I decided at age 60, it was time to move on … And the other two things that were intriguing to me about this – I mean, I ran the Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra for 35 years as the chief executive – but my real interest was in the artistic side. I was involved in all that in the orchestra world, I wasn’t responsible for it. And so, in essence, switching a career from the executive side to the artistic side was intriguing to me. It fit what I love. It actually focused it. Obviously, the reputation of the Festival goes without saying. But the fact that it was small-scale but high-impact also appealed to me.

OQ: Had you been to Ojai previously?
TM: I had. I started with the Boston Symphony in May, in the summer of 1969, and lo and behold, who should arrive as the Symphony Conductor but (current San Francisco Symphony M usic Director and seven-time Ojai Music Festival Music Director) Michael Tilson Thomas, a young hotshot conductor. And Michael, as I got to know him, was always talking about this Festival, the Ojai Music Festival, which I’d not heard of, and Ojai really gave Michael his break. But I never went to the festival, for various reasons, until 1996. And I fell in love with it.

OQ: You feel like there’s a different kind of integrity here, in service to the art?
TM: If you look at my career – where I went from the Boston Symphony, which is a huge conglomerate – Boston Symphony Orchestra Incorporated, which I was the CEO of, ran the Boston Symphony, it ran Tanglewood, it ran the Boston Pops – it’s massive. I went from there to the Cleveland Orchestra, which I think is the best anywhere, but it was a much smaller and more focused organization and it had a far greater belief system around the culture of art. And then to Ojai. So my whole career, I like to think of it as sort of an increasingly deep focus, less about size than meaning.

OQ: The impact of what you’re doing hasn’t lessened any.
TM: It’s gotten bigger in fact… Everyone thinks growth means bigger stuff. But it can also be smaller stuff or better stuff, or it can be different stuff.

OQ: What have you learned?
TM: It’s basically about a far broadened set of musical possibilities. And when I came here, I immediately sort of said, well, we’re not going to be orchestral. There are times in Ojai’s history when there was a lot of orchestra. I just didn’t want to do that. First of all, the facility is too small for a big 100-piece orchestra and also there’s a pretty great orchestra just down the road at Disney Hall. The music, to me, has grown from this magical setting and has this incredible audience. It s a magic alchemy, if you will. So I would describe my 16 years here as sort of the education of Tom Morris and the immersion of Tom Morris in these other worlds of music. Society’s changing, but the world of music is completely changing now. Because genres are disappearing and everything is melded together and in fact a lot of the creative excitement is actually between the genres.

OQ: Ojai really does offer this opportunity for that collision. I was fortunate to come and interview (2017 Musical Director) Vijay Iyer, and through that talk was inspired to go to the Sunday show where he was playing with (percussion master) Zakir Hussain and…(Indian Carnatic vocalist) Aruna Sairam…
Right! And that was like something transcendent. TIhat’s the only way to describe what I witnessed there.
TM: Of course! And you can’t describe what kind of music that was.
No.
TM: It was a collision of four artists who had not worked together before, who wanted to work together. And we created the opportunity for them to work. And I remember Vijay had said to me, you know, I’ve never worked with Zakir Hussain and I’ve never worked with Aruna Sairam and I want to do that. So we put it together. They all came with ideas and to watch the creation of music in front of your eyes- and the give and take and how it was morphing- you were watching creativity in real time.

OQ: High, high, high level creativity.
TM: Beyond high level. And to me, to be involved in that kind of artistry, that’s not something you simply can do in a symphony orchestra. So, my learning here has been one of vastly expanded horizons and expanding and changing personal tastes and a whole new world of artistic friends. And what’s interesting, I find, if you look at my work here, it’s very organic and cumulative.

OQ: It wasn’t a planned arc.
TM: What was really happening was as we started to try different things. It expanded the range of possibilities, which expanded the range of possibilities, and if you look at the sequence of Music Directors, you can see that each one was in such a completely different direction, which is one of the beauties here.

OQ: I imagine you wouldn’t be stepping away if you didn’t have full confidence in your successor.
TM: I have complete confidence in (incoming Artistic Director) Chad (Smith). I couldn’t have a better successor. In my view, Chad is creative, he’s got a broad range of interests. He’s been in the orchestral world, but all you have to do is look at what he’s been doing (as the COO) at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the range of artistic offerings there, which puts most other orchestral offerings to shame, in my view.

OQ: Do you think he’ll be as eclectic?
TM: What I hope is that he treats it as a learning laboratory for him, as I was able to do. What I’ve learned is that music exists in space, in a space, and how that space feels is where you pull the energy from. And this is one of the most spectacularly beautiful settings in the world.111ere’s nothing normal about the concert facilities. I mean, it’s outside, it’s amplified, and it has this audience which just is so into it. Every artist who comes says it’s the greatest audience we’ve ever played for because they trust, they respond, whether they like it or they don’t. In Ojai, it’s about the idea of Ojai. The Festival is about adventure, it’s about challenge, it’s about surprise.

OQ: There’s always the possibility of that magic we talked about.
TM: Correct. And it’ll always happen v somewhere. And think about that from an audience perspective.

OQ: Right. Just the act of attendance is in some way experimental. But with that experiment comes sort of an infinite range of possibility of experience.
TM: I’ve been widely quoted on this. I look at concerts as experiences, as events. It happens at a certain time. And I think we can learn something from sports events. Why do people go to live sports events?

OQ: You don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
TM: Correct. And every concert that I’m interested in putting on, and everything we do here, the outcome is uncertain. That edge is why people who want to go to art exhibits or shows, that’s what excites them.

OQ: So why are you leaving us, and what’s next? 
TM: I don’t think you should overstay your welcome. A good friend of mine once said, “Never run the risk of being forgotten but not gone.” I seem to have this habit, Boston was 17 years, Cleveland was 17 years, and this is 16. It actually adds up to 50, which I find curious. I’ve changed it a lot here and it’s time for somebody else to take it to the next stage. So that’s the first reason, which is very personal. And the second is, the organization in 2021 and ’22 is celebrating its 75th anniversary. There was some talk that I would see it through the anniversary, but the 75th anniversary ought to be a time to propel forward.

OQ: So what are you going to do?
TM: I don’t know yet. When you change what you’re doing, I look at it as two decisions. It’s a decision to leave and it’s a decision to go someplace. And that’s happened consistently in my career … I’ve found that one you’ve jettisoned what you’re doing, the possibilities explode. And I’ve been very active recently with Interlochen (the famous youth arts education institute in Miichigan) as a board member, and I’m very interested in how artists are trained. So my guess is somehow that’ll be a factor in what I’m doing going forward. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there might be another festival in the offing. I’m a complete failure at retirement. I keep going back to this learning thing. The greatest thing about doing what I do is I get to work with the most creative people. It’s a very sparky, creative existence. And that’s something I just don’t want to leave. I’d rather have an effect through doing than reflecting.

OQ: You’re all about the experience.
TM: This place is just such a freeform laboratory. It’s a humbling experience having the artistic responsibility for a venerable organization. It’s gone from being sort of fundamentally contemporary classical, and almost European music, to much wider, which to me reflects what’s going on in society and in the world today.1he range of artists who come is just completely broader and different and the possibilities have expanded, radically.

OQ: Thank you for helping to shepherd that. 
TM: It’s not been a burden. It’s a personal quest for me too. It’s affected me and taught me. You know, one of the great things about not-for-profit organizations like this one is , that they give you the opportunity to lead and to create and I’ll forever be grateful to the Ojai Music Festival for the belief and support and enthusiasm. And the complete lack of fear.

OQ: We’ll always be grateful to you for being willing to fearlessly undergo that journey in front of us and with us.
TM: It’s very personal to me, and I think that’s what it has to be. I will say that I’m the luckiest person. I’ve had the luckiest career of anyone I can imagine. I’m actually paid to do what I love. What’s better than that? And this year’s going to be about as perfect a capstone as I can imagine. There are going to be moments of awe and moments of laughter and moments of fright. And the level of artists coming, you just can’t get better artists than are here this year anywhere.

The Ojai Music Festival returns for one last go-round with Thomas Morris as Artistic Director this June 6-9. This year’s Music Director is multi-faceted Canadian conductor and soprano, Barbara Hannigan. Tickets and more information about the events can be found at ojaifestival.org.

Founded by soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan, Equilibrium focuses on young musicians who are finished with their training and in the first substantial phase of their professional career, with special attention to singers. Suited for musicians who already have professional solo experience on stage, Equilibrium aims to help young artists further their professional development, elevating their total musicianship and discipline, offering projects with leading orchestras and ensembles. Seven of her EQ artists will be performing at the 73rd Ojai Music Festival, June 6 to 9, 2019 with Barbara Hannigan.

The Ojai Music Festival welcomes Ojai Valley residents to get involved in the upcoming Ojai Music Festival slated for June 6 to 9, 2019 with Grammy-winning soprano Barbara Hannigan as music director. The Festival is seeking guest housing for musicians, production crew, and interns that include guest cottages, private rooms, and homes. The Festival also includes volunteer opportunities in various positions in the following areas: ushering, venue set up, special events, and merchandise sales. Volunteers receive special perks for their generous donation of time and talent.

The 73^rd Ojai Music Festival, June 6-9, 2019, celebrates and explores the creative breadth of Music Director Barbara Hannigan, as conductor, singer, and mentor. Joining Hannigan will be the US debut of her mentoring initiative for young professional artists, Equilibrium (EQ), and the US debut of the orchestral collective from Amsterdam, LUDWIG, with whom Hannigan made her Grammy Award-winning conducting debut CD “Crazy Girl Crazy” in 2017. Returning to Ojai will be 2015 Music Director Steven Schick, who will both perform and conduct, and the JACK Quartet performing works by John Zorn, Tyshawn Sorey, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Program highlight include the staged production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress with Hannigan conducting and members of EQ as the cast; Hannigan as singer in Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, John Zorn’s Jumalattaret, and Girl Crazy Suite, a special arrangement by Bill Elliott of songs from the Gershwin musical; Hannigan conducting Vivier’s Lonely Child, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Stravinsky’s complete ballet Pulcinella. In addition, the Festival will give a concert in memoriam for 2005 Music Director Oliver Knussen. 

For more information on housing hosts or volunteering for the Ojai Music Festival, please call 805 646-2094 or email info@ojaifestival.org, or download application here. 

The Ojai Music Festival celebrates works by Debussy, Messiaen, and Schoenberg in Part One of our Friday evening concert on June 7. Prepare yourself for a journey through shadowy forests, across oceans, soaring through the wind, basking in the light of the moon, breathing in the air of another planet. 

Poetic imagery, painting, and nature served to stimulate Debussy’s imagination, as did his encounter with non-Western music. In Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon descends on the temple that was), one hears in its suspended stillness elements of the music of Bali.

Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan (A boat on the ocean), the third of his five-movement Miroirs, is a study of motion, captured in surging arpeggiated currents.

Un reflet dans le vent (A reflection in the wind) is the last of Messiaen’s eight Préludes, all of which bear the hallmarks of his distinctive harmonic and rhythmic language. Their descriptive titles suggest influences from Debussy and crisp textures from Ravel. 

Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet is relatively short, its textures and formal layout clear and transparent. The impassioned first movement is an abbreviated sonata form; the second, a fidgety scherzo. The third movement delivers an unprecedented shock: the commanding voice of soprano Barbara Hannigan.

Prepare yourself for a dream beyond time as Barbara Hannigan leads Vivier’s powerfully enigmatic Lonely Child to end a thrilling, picturesque evening featuring Debussy’s Syrinx and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Friday June 7th at 7:30PM

The myth of Syrinx is the story of a chaste nymph transformed into river reeds to escape Pan’s pursuit. Pan, in turn, creates from these reeds the pipes with which he laments his loss. Debussy’s piece for solo flute, scarcely three minutes long, serves as the prelude to another work of transformation: Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). 

Considered at that time to be offensive to the modesty of chamber music, the steamy program Verklärte Nacht (drawn from Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name) is a work of one single movement filled with chromatic harmonies and dense textures. Schoenberg’s music closely follows a woman’s tortured confession to her lover that she is carrying the child of another man. In the radiant conclusion, the man assures his partner that the stranger’s child will be his own, transfigured by their love.

Vivier has described Lonely Child as “a long song of solitude” composed “without using chords, harmony, or counterpoint,” a homophonic texture that becomes one single, “intervalized” melody: “Thus, there are no longer any chords, and the entire orchestra is then transformed into a timbre. The roughness and the intensity of this timbre depend on the base interval. Musically speaking, there was only one thing I needed to control, which automatically, somehow, would create the rest of the music, that is great beams of color!”

The Ojai Music Festival kicks off Friday morning, June 7 with the music of composer John Zorn, the prolific saxophonist whose creative force has spawned album after album across several decades of work, samples of which can be heard in the links below.

Friday’s chamber works by John Zorn with Stephen Gosling and the JACK Quartet include Hexentarot, Ghosts, and The Aristos for piano trio, The Unseen, and The Alchemist for string quartet. 

About the composer – John Zorn is an American composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and music improvisation. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions, which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. Zorn was described by Down Beat magazine as “one of our most important composers.”

Saturday Morning, June 8th Preview

This Two-part concert opens with a tribute to the late Oliver Knussen (2005 Ojai Music Director), a composer of infinite wit, imagination, and refinement, qualities readily in evidence in this wide-ranging selection of chamber works. In the dramatic scene, Twice Through the Heart, Mark-Anthony Turnage (who studied with Knussen), filters his fascination with contemporary social issues through jazz and classical idioms. Rachmaninoff’s idiom is lushly Romantic. Here, though, LUDWIG presents his orchestral tone poem, The Isle of the Dead, in an arrangement for chamber ensemble. 

This is a concert Olly Knussen would have loved. He was a champion of new music, including that of his student and close friend Mark-Anthony Turnage, but he also loved the delectable harmonies and rich orchestral textures of such late Romantics as Sergei Rachmaninoff. 

The works on this tribute are all relatively short but chronological. Masks, the rare early piece that survived Knussen’s critical scrutiny, is heard here with its ad libitum glass chimes. It has joined Debussy’s Syrinx and Varèse’s Density 21.5 as one of the classics of the solo flute literature. Knussen described the next three works that make up a triptych as “diary-like expressions” that were at the same time explorations of new harmonic spaces.

Autumnal, written in memory of Benjamin Britten, has two movements – Nocturne and Serenade – named after two of Britten’s own song cycles.

In Sonja’s Lullaby, written for Knussen’s infant daughter (now an accomplished singer specializing in new music), the lowest registers of the piano anchor a gentle rocking motion and widely spaced sonorities and filigree in the voices above.

Cantata for oboe and string quartet, the longest movement of the set, is more episodic, a quality that reminded Knussen of 18th-century solo cantatas in their alternation of recitatives and self-contained numbers. There are moments of high drama before an introspective coda recalls the work’s opening.

Eccentric Melody, written for Elliott Carter’s 90th birthday, is a compact, powerful work that explores the cello’s full expressive range.

Ophelia’s Last Dance is fashioned from one of the many fragments in Knussen’s compositional workshop (this one dating from 1974). The melody continued to haunt him and in 2009-10 he brought it together with several other “‘homeless’ dance fragments” to produce a piece “related more by personal history and by mood than anything more concrete.” Study for “Metamorphosis” – another early work – was revised just before Knussen’s death and dedicated to the memory of the composer Alan Stout.

The 73rd Ojai Music Festival, June 6 to 9, is on the horizon. Get a head start by reading the 2019 Festival program notes by musicologist and program book annotator Christopher Hailey. Download the PDF via the link.

Download PDF here
Download Rake’s Progress libretto 

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This year’s closing concert highlights that music, to thrive, must always be about the joyous urgency of now. With a series of contrasting pieces, festival director Barbara Hannigan celebrates the “synthesis of dark and light: chiaroscuro,” as she puts it.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, composed in 1768, demonstrates the process in which old and new huddle together at the threshold of change. The orchestration and structure are conventional and yet the content reflects the unprecedented emotional turbulence of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period: dynamic extremes, dramatic melodic leaps, and unexpected accents and silences. Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a ballet interspersed with songs featuring stock characters, echoes Baroque composer Pergolesi and creates new perspectives for the present.

George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, inspired by jazz, Tin Pan alley, and Broadway theater, premiered in 1930 and featured an all-star cast that included Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers, and a pit orchestra teeming with luminaries. Featuring Barbara Hannigan as both conductor and soprano, Bill Elliott’s Girl Crazy Suite enfolds the show’s hits in a series of droll arrangements that extend from gauzy impressionism to brassy Broadway swagger, bringing the dramatic finale of this year’s festival to a fitting close.

The Ojai Music Festival allows the world beyond Ojai’s Libbey Bowl to experience the music and ideas expressed at the Festival through state-of-the art live streaming access during the four-day event. In addition to the concerts, you can also watch our live stream interviews with hosts Steven Smith of National Sawdust and Thomas Kotcheff of Classical KUSC.
Please join us for the 2019 Ojai Music Festival live broadcast!

Thursday, June 6 2019

Friday, June 7 2019

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Saturday, June 8 2019

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Sunday, June 9 2019

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