Nonesuch Releases Jeremy Denk’s Recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations September 24
Nonesuch releases pianist Jeremy Denk’s recording of J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations on September 24, 2013, available for pre-order now in the Nonesuch Store. A companion DVD accompanies the album and contains video “liner notes,” with Denk demonstrating passages on the piano as he explains certain details of the iconic piece. (Watch an excerpt below.) The beloved Bach work has long been a staple of Denk’s repertoire and his performances have received critical praise. The New York Times has remarked on his “profound affinity with Bach,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer called Denk’s performance of this piece “mesmerizing,” noting that his “Bach is expressive, but not fussy or overthought. Technically unbothered by the work’s more explosive spots and remarkably fluid in its scurrying passage work, he was able to make connections between and among bits of material that sometimes occur many seconds apart.”
Denk plays in 15 US cities this fall, including a performance of the Goldberg Variations in Boston, Chicago, and DC and four nights in Davies Hall, one at Carnegie Hall, and one at the Krannert Center (in Champaign-Urbana) with the San Francisco Symphony playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503. See below for the currently scheduled US dates; for details and tickets, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
Writing for NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog last year, Denk said, “The best reason to hate the Goldberg Variations—aside from the obvious reason that everyone asks you all the time which of the two [Glenn Gould] recordings you prefer—is that everybody loves them.” He continued, “Yes, I’m suspicious of the Goldbergs’ popularity. Classical Music is not really supposed to be that popular. I worried for years that I would be seduced into playing them, and would become like all the others—besotted, cultish—and that is exactly what happened. I have been assimilated into the Goldberg Borg.”
Denk’s previous releases include a recording of music by Charles Ives, released on his own Think Denk Media label, and a Nonesuch album of works by Beethoven and Ligeti. He also is an avid chamber musician and a respected writer, both on his blog and in such publications asThe New Yorker. Denk is expanding a recent article in that publication into a book that will be published by Random House.
From the Vault: Jeremy Denk’s Notes from the 2009 Festival on Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Jeremy Denk made his first appearance in Ojai at the 2009 Festival with Music Director eighth blackbird. The pianist was very thoughtful and helpful in sending over notes for his Saturday Morning Concert, which included Bach’s iconic work, Goldberg Variations (about to be released on Nonesuch Records). As we move forward Jeremy’s return to Ojai – this time as the 2014 Music Director – read about how he first explained this piece, which has become an significant part of his repertoire.
“I think the connection between the Goldbergs and the Ives First Sonata is … opposites attract? Beauty and the Beast? This program is a bit like a couple that you would never imagine would get together but, when you hook them up, they suddenly have a lot to say to each other. I love the idea–a kind of painterly contrast–of the luminous, serene Goldbergs against the dark, raucous Ives Sonata. An 18th-century German Lutheran and a 19th-century Connecticut farming family may not be all that far apart, in some sense: they’re both spartan and spiritual. One of my favorite parts of the Goldberg Variations is the concluding Quodlibet, where Bach takes two common tunes and superimposes them over the Goldberg harmonic ground: a masterstroke of composition, but also a wonderful joke combining high and low, the profound and profane. And what could be more Ivesian than that?
For me, the Goldberg Variations is a tripartite cosmos: a third of the variations are full of humorous keyboard virtuosity, another third are extraordinary canonic demonstrations, and another third are “character pieces,” which draw on the musical world around Bach, almost reproducing that world, like a mural. The Ives Sonata has interesting parallels to this: it has a big arching structure of three serious movements, flanking two down-and-dirty scherzos. The effect is that Ives journeys back and forth from the dark, wintry, severe character of his rural Connecticut family–with their plaintive hymns and ballads–to the totally different, citified world of ragtime, painting in wild contrasts a picture of Ives’s sprawling, uniquely American musical world.” – Jeremy Denk
Continue Your Festival Experience With OjaiU During the Summer
This past May, over 240 Festival enthusiasts participated in our first OjaiU Online University. Through videos from guests instructors (including Mark Morris, Jeremy Denk, John Rockwell, and John Luther Adams) and “listen and do” activities, OjaiU students got a deeper understanding of Festival programming and the thinking that lies behind it.
If you missed the classes in May – it’s not too late! OjaiU classes are still available so that you can extend Festival experience through the summer.
Composer Andrew Norman to join USC faculty
We are so excited that Andrew Norman will be returning to the west coast as a member of USC’s Thornton School of Music faculty and as Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Composer in Residence.
The 2014 Festival (June 12-15) led by Music Director Jeremy Denk will include works by Norman.
Read the full LA Times article by Mark Swed here >>
“In recent years, Norman has worked with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as its composer in residence. He studied at USC and Yale University before embarking on his professional composing career.
Norman was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in music for his piece ‘The Companion Guide to Rome.'”
Timo Andres’ “Home Stretch” out on Nonesuch July 30th
Timo Andres’s Home Stretch out on Nonesuch July 30
Timo Andres, piano
Metropolis Ensemble
Andrew Cyr, conductor
ANDRES: Home Stretch
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, “Coronation” (Completed by Andres)
ANDRES: Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno
NPR Music: “First Listen” streams Home Stretch in its entirety this week.
Click here for the stream.
On Timo Andres’s upcoming Nonesuch album, Home Stretch (July 30, 2013), he performs with Andrew Cyr and the Metropolis Ensemble, pairing the title work with two reinventions of works by musical heroes Mozart and Brian Eno: Mozart’s “Coronation” concerto andParaphrase on Themes of Brian Eno. Album pre-orders are available now at nonesuch.com and include an exclusive print of the first page of the Home Stretchscore, autographed by the composer. To celebrate the release, Andres, artist and book designer Peter Mendelsund and the New Yorker’s Leo Carey will host a conversation about artistic influence. The event will be held at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on July 30 at 7:00 PM, and is free. Andres will perform music from the record, including his own work and pieces by Brian Eno and Mozart.
Tuesday, July 30
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012
Free
Home Stretch was written for pianist David Kaplan and was conceived as a companion piece to Mozart’s Piano Concerto, No. 12, K. 414. Andres wanted the piece to reflect his friend Kaplan’s personality. Andres notes, “I knew I wanted Home Stretch to have something to do with fast cars, which David is obsessively interested in. The piece is in three large sections that gradually accelerate: beginning in almost total stasis, working up to an off-kilter dance with stabbing accents and ushering in a sturm-und-drang cadenza that riles itself up into a perpetual-motion race to the finish. However, there are always little ‘smudges’ of music from each section in the others, sometimes fitting into their new context, sometimes balefully interrupting.”
Also on the album is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, “Coronation,” completed by Andres. A virtuosic improviser, Mozart left much of the solo part unwritten as he expected to play the piece himself. In particular, the left hand is mostly absent from the original manuscript. Pianists generally play from a completed score that adds simple accompaniment patterns and harmonies for the left hand, but Andres’s treatment of the concerto takes a wholly different approach. He inserts his own voice into the left hand and ends the work with newly written cadenzas. He explains, “I approached the piece not from a scholarly or editorial perspective, but more as a sprawling playground for pianistic invention and virtuosity, taking cues from the composer-pianist tradition Mozart helped to crystallize.” The New Yorker’s Alex Ross wrote on his blog that the result is “mesmerizing.”
The recording ends with Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno. Already an influential force in popular music history, Brian Eno is increasingly gaining recognition from classical composers. As Andres writes, Eno is a composer with “two quite distinct sides: as an innovator who works in ambient and collage music, and as a quirky and crafty pop songwriter. It’s all interesting, but the really amazing things happen when these musical personalities overlap and wear away each other’s surfaces.” In Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno, Andres focuses on Eno’s albums Before and After Science and Another Green World. He builds what he terms, “a nineteenth century style ‘orchestral paraphrase’ on the subject of Eno’s music.”
Home Stretch was recorded at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood and was produced by David Frost. It is Andres’s second album with the Nonesuch label; his first, Shy and Mighty, was praised by the New York Times for its “inventiveness and originality,” and by the Guardian for the way it “glides across stylistic boundaries in a totally unselfconscious way.”
Timo Andres is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His debut album, Shy and Mighty, which features 10 interrelated pieces for two pianos, performed by Andres and pianist David Kaplan, was released by Nonesuch Records in May 2010 to critical acclaim. Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that Shy and Mighty “achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene… more mighty than shy, [Andres] sounds like himself.” In the current season, Andres plays a solo recital of his own works alongside those by Chopin, Thomas Adès and Schumann for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers; a solo recital for San Francisco Performances, and a duo program with Gabriel Kahane for the Library of Congress. Commissions include a new piano quintet written for Jonathan Biss and the Elias String Quartet, presented by Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and San Francisco Performances; a solo piano work for Kirill Gerstein commissioned by the Gilmore Foundation, and a new string quartet for the Library of Congress, to be premiered by The Attacca Quartet.
Leo Carey is a Senior Editor at the New Yorker magazine, where he has worked for 15 years. He was born in Oxford, England and studied English Literature at Oxford University. As an editor at the New Yorker, he has worked on a wide range of non-fiction. His own writings have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. In his spare time he plays the piano and cello.
Peter Mendelsund is the Associate Art Director of Alfred A. Knopf Books, the Art Director of Pantheon Books and Art Director of Vertical Press (and a recovering classical pianist). His designs have been described by the Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.” His writing on literature, design and other matters can be found on his blog: jacketmechanical.
New York-based Metropolis Ensemble is a Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra dedicated to classical music in its most contemporary forms.
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is one of downtown New York’s most vital cultural institutions, presenting an eclectic mix of events — from readings and concerts to comedy nights and storytelling competitions -– featuring many of today’s most exciting artists. The bookstore is staffed almost entirely by volunteers and 100 percent of its profits go to Housing Works, Inc., which provides housing, healthcare, job training, and advocacy for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. As an independent cultural center, it offers patrons a unique opportunity to join the fight against AIDS and homelessness simply by buying or donating books; eating at the cafe; coming to concerts, readings, and special events; or volunteering on their staff.
Remembering A Festival Family Member: Betty Izant
The Ojai Music Festival is deeply saddened by the passing of one of its longest-serving staff members and volunteers, Betty Izant on July 4, 2013. Betty was a part of the Festival for more than 40 years, joining the office in 1969 as secretary. This soon became a full time position and led to her life-long involvement with the organization as secretary, manager, board member, box office manager, and historian.
Betty was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She lived in Corning, New York before moving to Los Angeles, graduating from Hollywood High School. She attended UCLA and Frank Wiggins Trade School, where she majored in dress making and design. She worked as a dress designer for Mable Morrow and as Executive Secretary for the Huntington Hartford Foundation, a residence for writers, artists and composers until 1965.
Upon the Foundation’s closure, Betty moved to Ojai, where she served as assistant to the director of Happy Valley School (now Besant Hill) for two years. She spent time as a freelance secretary before joining the Ojai Music Festival in 1969. She officially “retired” in 1984, but stayed on as a volunteer to assist with ticket sales until 2011.
Betty’s lifelong commitment to the Festival was an essential part of making the organization what it is today. From overseeing numerous transitions in the 1970s and 1980s to her keen memory for patrons (and their seats!), which made ticketbuying a uniquely personal experience that continues to this day, Betty’s devotion to the Festival and its mission imbued each task she undertook . Her indomitable spirit and steadfast dedication will be greatly missed by all of us here at the Festival, and by the Ojai community at large.
Photo taken by the Ventura County Star.
Brooklyn Rider, string quartet
Hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings), the game-changing string quartet Brooklyn Rider offers eclectic repertoire in gripping performances that continue to attract legions of fans and draw rave reviews from classical, world, and rock critics alike. NPR credits Brooklyn Rider with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble”; the Los Angeles Times dubs the group “one of the wonders of contemporary music”; and Vice likens its members to “motocross daredevils who never screw up a stunt.”
Kevin Fox, conductor
Kevin Fox, Founding Artistic Director of the Grammy-winning Pacific Boychoir Academy (PBA), is one of America’s few full-time boys choir directors. The Los Angeles Times called PBA’s musical sophistication and quality of sound “Astonishing”. Starting in 1998 with six choristers, Mr. Fox now runs the music program for over 170 students in PBA’s after-school program and day school, the only full-time choir school on the West Coast, where students’ daily music studies are integrated into a full academic curriculum.
Jennifer Frautschi
Two-time GRAMMY nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient Jennifer Frautschi has gained acclaim as an adventurous musician with a wide-ranging repertoire. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “violinist Jennifer Frautschi is molding a career with smart interpretations of both warhorses and rarities.” Equally at home in the classic repertoire as well as twentieth and twenty-first century works, in recent seasons she has focused on such composers as Berg, Schoenberg, Prokofiev and Schumann, and premiered several new works composed for her.
Hudson Shad
Though the six-man ensemble Hudson Shad (five singers and a pianist) debuted officially in 1992, their nucleus formed in 1977 when three of them made their Carnegie Hall debuts as soloists in Penderecki’s Magnificat. Throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, their members were in demand as early music specialists, oratorio soloists and opera singers, and most of them sang at one time or another as Gentlemen of the Choir at St. Thomas Church in NYC.
Music Director Jeremy Denk Frames Programming for 2014 Festival
Ojai enthusiastically welcomes back versatile pianist Jeremy Denk, who made his Ojai Music Festival debut in 2009 performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Ives’ First Sonata plus numerous chamber music works. With his wide-ranging repertoire, Mr. Denk regularly collaborates with leading orchestras and festivals, and is an active writer through feature articles in The New Yorker and his blog, “Think Denk,” which delves into both musical and extramusical observations.
In Jeremy Denk’s Own Words:
“The idea of Ojai 2014 emerged from a couple of immediate enthusiasms. One was an album that I had always loved by the jazz pianist and musical thinker Uri Caine, “Primal Light,” in which he takes Mahler and explodes him, or implodes him, I can’t exactly decide which. He takes things that are already in Mahler–a sense of dislocation, of frenetic collage, of all the anxiety of the 20th century and modernism and yet some tenderness vying against it all–and does collages on that cluster of techniques, in a way turning Mahler inside out. Tom Morris and I agreed we loved Uri Caine, and he will be the first night of the Festival.
The other was a dream I had of doing an opera. An opera in which principles of music–harmony, structure–and the big three composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), not to mention various disgruntled young musicians, would find themselves in conversation, immersed or enmeshed or mired in an opera buffa, with all its implausibility and silliness and artifice. Although those of us who perform and love this music like to cultivate an air of seriousness, at times we have to realize there is something ridiculous about the level to which we’ve subjected this music to consideration, analysis, thought. The opera buffa genre is simply a way of exposing this absurdity, turning music inside out to reflect on itself, with hopefully hilarious and intriguing results. The self-awareness of music.
The common thread between these two enthusiasms is essentially screwing (to use the polite word) with the canon. To that end, a lot of the other pieces in the Festival are canonical in peculiar ways, or have a very uneasy relationship with the canon. The Ligeti Etudes (favorite works of mine) are what you might call “new classics,” and they take up the Chopin, Schumann, Scarlatti, and merge them with the remorseless logic of the machine, the complexity of fractals. Uri Caine is going to create a “realization” of the 14 Canons that Bach wrote on the first eight bass notes of the Goldberg Variation ground, pieces which begin as simple lessons in counterpoint and then gradually become ever more intense, chromatic, and you might even say delightfully perverse. Leading to these canons will be scatological canons of Mozart, elaborate canons by Josquin and Thomas Ades and Nancarrow–from the sublime to the ridiculous.
A generation of young Brooklyn composers will be heard, confronting the problems of style in a time when there is no style to speak of. And of course, my perennial favorite iconoclast, Charles Ives, will be represented by the four violin sonatas, ranging from the polite and poetic (“weak stepsister” I believe Ives called his own more lyrical work) to the deranged and confrontational.
2014 Overview
For the 68th Ojai Music Festival (June 12-15, 2014), Mr. Denk and Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris are shaping a program that fully reflects both the ideals of the Ojai Music Festival and the unique and inventive musical mind of Jeremy Denk. The Festival features the world premiere of a commissioned opera, described by Mr. Denk as “at once a love letter to Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, and a satire of classical pomp.” With libretto by Mr. Denk, music by Steven Stucky, and conducted by Robert Spano, the opera is co-commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival, Cal Performances in Berkeley, the Aspen Music Festival and School and Carnegie Hall. The Ojai premiere is supported through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Among Mr. Denk’s collaborators, American composer and jazz pianist, Uri Caine, will perform music from his The Mahler Project, which was a sensation when released on the recording “Primal Light” in 1998, and violinist Stefan Jackiw will join Mr. Denk in a performance of Ives Violin Sonatas (complete). With music by Beethoven, Janacek, Ives, Ligeti, Mozart, Schoenberg, the Festival will also offer works by cutting-edge Brooklyn-based composers. Additional programming details for the 2014 Ojai Music Festival will be announced in the fall.
Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris said, “It is only right that Jeremy Denk returns to Ojai as Music Director, after his sensational debut in 2009. He is one of the most inventive minds in music today, both as a programmer, performer, writer and thinker. I am delighted that the 2014 Ojai Music Festival will showcase all of these myriad talents of Jeremy. It promises to be an adventure that is provocative, stimulating, engaging and fun – all of which represent Jeremy Denk.”
Jeremy Denk, Music Director
“A pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs,” (New York Times) Jeremy Denk has established himself as one of America’s most thought-provoking, multi-faceted, and compelling artists. Distinguished as both a soloist and a chamber musician, he has appeared with numerous orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. He regularly gives recitals in New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and throughout the United States. This season he makes solo appearances in venues including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium and London’s Wigmore Hall. Mr. Denk is known for his witty and insightful writings about music, much of which can be found on his blog entitled “Think Denk” – recently chosen for inclusion in the Library of Congress web archives. In addition to features for The New Yorker, he has written articles for the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, New Republic and the website of NPR Music. Alex Ross of the New Yorker calls him “a superb musician who writes with arresting sensitivity … sophisticated on the one hand, informal on the other, immediate in impact.”
In 2012, Mr. Denk released an album under Nonesuch featuring Ligeti’s famously complex Etudes and Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata. Its success earned it a feature on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, while BBC Music hailed it as nothing short of “a marvel.” He lives in New York City.
Thomas W. Morris, Artistic Director
Thomas W. Morris was appointed artistic director of the Ojai Music Festival starting with the 2004 Festival, a relationship that extends through 2017. Mr. Morris is recognized as one of the most innovative leaders in the orchestra industry and served as the long-time chief executive leader of both The Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Morris is currently active nationally and internationally as a consultant, lecturer, teacher, and writer.
As artistic director of the 67-year old Ojai Festival, Mr. Morris is responsible for artistic planning, and each year appoints a music director with whom Mr. Morris collaborates on shaping the festival’s programming. During his decade-long tenure, audiences have increased, and the scope of the festival has expanded, most recently to include an innovative partnership with Cal Performances in Berkeley, Ojai North!
Mr. Morris is a founding director of Spring for Music, and serves as the project’s artistic director. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Curtis Institute of Music and as chair of its Board of Overseers, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He is also an accomplished percussionist.
About the Ojai Music Festival
From its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has created a place for groundbreaking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic setting 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The Festival presents broad-ranging programs that embrace the music of our time and provides intellectual context and education around Festival programming, creating an immersion experience of adventurous inspiration and vibrant collaboration. Considered a highlight of the summer classical music season, Ojai has remained a leader in the classical music landscape, provoking thought during the Festival and long after about why music matters.
The Ojai Music Festival attracts the world’s greatest musical artists. Through its unique structure of appointing an annual Music Director by the Artistic Director, Ojai has presented a “who’s who” of music including: Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, David Robertson, eighth blackbird, George Benjamin, Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, and Jeremy Denk.
Following the 2013 Festival in Ojai, Ojai North! takes place from June 12-15 in Berkeley, CA. The Ojai Music Festival’s multi-year partnership with Cal Performances makes possible annual reprises of Ojai concerts in Berkeley, as well as co-commissions and co-productions. More than a sharing of resources, Ojai North! represents a joining of artistic ideals and aspirations. The combined efforts of Ojai’s legacy of artistic innovation and Cal Performances’ tradition of groundbreaking productions creates a joint force that allows artists to achieve more than could even be imagined by each organization separately.
Information and Passes
2014 advance series subscriptions will be available in the summer. Program details will be released in the fall. Please call 805 646 2053 or download the order form here >>
Directions to Ojai, as well as information about lodging, concierge services for visitors, and other Ojai activities, are also available on the Ojai web site. Follow Festival updates on the web at OjaiFestival.org, Facebook and Twitter.
Visit Jeremy Denk’s website and blog >>
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming projects. As co-founder and Music Director of adventurous orchestra The Knights and a founding member of genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider, he may take credit for helping to ensure “the future of classical music in America” (Los Angeles Times).
Storm Large, singer
Storm Large: musician, actor, playwright, author, awesome. She shot to national prominence in 2006 as a finalist on the CBS show Rock Star: Supernova, where despite having been eliminated in the week before the finale, Storm built a fan base that follows her around the world to this day.
Gyan Riley, bass
Gyan Riley won his first guitar in a raffle when he was 12 years old. After learning all of the songs in his cassette collection by ear, he began his life-long adventure in music, becoming the first full-scholarship graduate guitar student at the San Francisco Conservatory.
Sarah Rothenberg, piano
Sarah Rothenberg is a pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (Wall Street Journal) who is recognized internationally for her innovative interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature and visual art. Active as performer, writer, concert curator and institution builder, she has been artistic director of Da Camera in Houston since 1994, general director since 2011, and previously was co-founder of the Bard Music Festival.
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
Joshua Rubin is a founding clarinetist and the co-artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), where he oversees the creative direction of more than 60 concerts per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.”
Wilfried Wendeling, video & live electronic music designer
Born in a family of theater and fascinated by connections between scene, text and music, Wilfried Wendling has already realized about 15 multidisciplinary shows, presented in many theaters and operas, on texts of Beckett, Camus, Nietzsche, Perec, Queneau, Jouet, Müller, or Boltanski. His musical compositions are also played on numerous stages and festivals. As a musician and\or video director, he has collaborated with numerous artists of many disciplines. Wilfried Wendling is at present director of France’s La Muse en Circuit, National Centre of Musical Creation.
View Our Must-Visit Ojai Destinations
The valley is full of eateries, shops and activities with their own distinctive “Ojai” flavor. Many are located downtown, while others are hidden away – and are always worth the drive!
Use our “Where To Go” guide to discover a few of the things to do while in town.
Restaurants here >>
Shops and services here >>
If you’re looking to get out for a hike, read our hiking guide >>
Complete 2013 Festival Reviews
DanceTabs
Mark Morris Dance Group at the Ojai Music Festival – California
Marina Harss
June 9, 2013
Mark Morris is halfway through his tenure as Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival (June 6-9). The festival elects a guest director each year; Morris is the first choreographer to get the job. The seemingly ubiquitous Morris has now taken to calling the current season “my festival”; he’s only half kidding. The centerpiece of the second evening (June 7) was a performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group – the only dance performance – at the outdoor Libbey Bowl, a fantastically pleasant amphitheatre set within a park in the center of bucolic Ojai. Pleasant, but not ideal for dance: the stage is trapezoidal, has no wings, and doesn’t provide ideal sight lines. But that’s what summer festivals are all about. It’s cool, the night air smells of flowers and the encroaching dusk bathes the proceedings in a lavender glow.
The focus this year is on American music, mostly by composers from the West Coast, and more specifically by composers connected to the Seattle-born Lou Harrison (1917-2003), an old friend of Morris’s whose music he has turned to again and again. Other recurring names are Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, with side excursions into the work of John Luther Adams, John Cage and Samuel Barber. Most of these composers are mainstays of the Mark Morris troupe. The evening was split into two halves, separated by a magical sunset performance of works for toy piano by Satie and John Cage (played by Yegor Shevtsov, a lanky dreamer).
Read 2013 Festival Reviews
WALL STREET JOURNAL
“The annual Ojai Music Festival, whose 67th season ran June 6 to 9, does many things well. But what it does best is reinvent itself, which it accomplishes by recalling its past while broadening its horizons. This year, that dichotomy was particularly pronounced, with the festival welcoming as its music director the choreographer Mark Morris…”
“Mr. [Mark] Morris programmed only a limited number of dances, all on Friday night—just enough for a bold experiment without fundamentally altering the character of the enterprise. His selections proved apt musically, and his compact and fresh-scrubbed dancers, all from the Mark Morris Dance Group based in Brooklyn, N.Y., seemed incapable of insincere gestures. But his engaging dances—with their signature wit and concentration on the body’s extremities.”
Click here to read the complete review of the Wall Street Journal June 12, 2013
LOS ANGELES TIMES
“But however untraditional a “Rite” for piano, bass and percussion may be, Ojai has a long tradition for being its own Stravinskyan rite of spring. The composer’s close association with the festival in the ’50s made the town musically famous.”
“Reputed to court mavericks, the Ojai Music Festival doesn’t always extend a very large welcome mat. But this offbeat weekend, the mat was massive.Attention was drawn to supposedly kooky and bizarrely neglected West Coast composers who happen to be essential contributors to American music and our national identity.”
Click here to read the complete review of the Los Angeles Times June 7, 2013 >>
Click here to read the complete review of the Los Angeles Times June 11, 2013 >>
SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT
“Every year at this time, one of the world’s best music festivals is reborn, and this phoenix rises right in our backyard. With acclaimed choreographer Mark Morris at the helm, the 67th edition of the venerable Ojai Music Festival could hardly have been more fresh or up to date.”
“Terry Riley’s In C got the full Ojai treatment from a large ensemble on Saturday. Shimmering, pulsing, syncopating, shuffling, and shifting sounds came together and drifted apart as easily and as naturally as the sun filtered through the canopy of trees.”
Click here to read the complete review of the SB Independent June 11, 2013 >>
SANTA BARBARA NEWS PRESS
“Mr. Ives loomed large over the weekend. That old Ives-ian charm and rebel spirit was powerfully moving, from the powerful String Trio (once you closed your eyes to block out the intrusive, uninvited dance component) and gutsy and quote-happy String Quartet No. 2, masterfully delivered by the American String Quartet on Sunday morning, this coming after several beauteous Ives songs on the concert’s first half (wonderfully sung by soprano Yulia Van Doren, mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck, and bass-baritone Douglas Williams).”
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
“[Mark] Morris’ organizing principle was really quite simple. Taking Harrison as his focal point, he added music by Harrison’s teacher Henry Cowell, his confrere Cage and his followers Riley and Adams. The list constitutes a line of American composers, mavericks, innovators and tinkerers one and all, oriented to the West Coast, and strongly influenced by the music of Asia. The music of the father of all American mavericks, Charles Ives, became a natural addition.”
VENTURA COUNTY STAR
“In an Ojai Music Festival that revels in revelations, choosing the multi-talented choreographer Mark Morris as this year’s music director brought multiple bonuses to the alert sensibilities of the traditional festival audience.”
DANCE TABS
“As always, Morris’s ability to shape the sounds coming from the pit through a combined language of gesture and seemingly simple movement is a constant source of surprise and almost primal satisfaction.”
Click here to read the complete review of Dance Tabs June 9, 2013 >>
THE MISREAD CITY
“There are not many ideas we like better than a classical music festival, dedicated mostly to contemporary work, and held almost entirely outside in a verdant valley. This year, the existing Ojai template was sweetened further by a concentration on West Coast composers…”
Click here to read the complete review of The MisRead City June 11, 2013 >>
SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
“This year’s music director, Mark Morris, one of the greatest choreographers of his generation and certainly the most musical (he’s also conducted), proved an ideal advocate for the triumph of song, dance, and American music at this year’s Ojai Festival.”
LA OPUS and HUFFINGTON POST
“Although bursting at the seams with 37 events — Libbey Bowl and off-site concerts, in-town movies, distant seminars and closer pre-concert talks and much more — the thematic focus remained sharp. Building on a festival trend in recent years, the fullness would make it nearly impossible for any single patron to attend all events in the non-stop schedule that revved up each day at dawn’s early light and wound down in the night’s wee hours.”
Click here to read the complete review of LA Opus June 20, 2013 >>
ALL IS YAR
“if you should know anything about Ojai, it is to expect and embrace the unlikely.”
Click here to read the complete review of All Is Yar June 6, 2013 >>
Read complete reviews posted as of June 21, 2013 >>
2013 Festival Photo Album
In just four days we experienced 37 events from music, dance and discussions to fitness classes, singing and marching band appearances! Relive the memories by viewing our photos on our Flickr page.
Please feel free to share your memories with us or any video you may have captured! Email us at [email protected]
Click here for the photo link >>
Updates on Free Events: Sunrise Concert Parking, Gamelan Performances and More!
This year, the Ojai Music Festival will present 37 events in just four days! This includes main Libbey Bowl concerts, Ojai Talks, Ojai Films, Concert Insights, and an abundance of free community events. Here are some new updates on some of these free events to help better prepare you:
|
Sat June 8: The parking lot at Besant Hill will open at 7:00am. Please bring a chair or blanket for the concert, or feel free to wander as you enjoy John Luther Adams’ Strange and Sacred Noise. We highly recommend wearing flat comfortable shoes. Besant Hill School’s address is 8585 Santa Paula Ojai Road.
Sun June 9: Due to the high volume of ticket requests for the Sunday Sunrise Concert featuring John Luther Adams’ songbirdsongs, we are providing a free bus shuttle to take ticketed patrons to Meditation Mount. The shuttle and all concert parking will be located at Boccali’s Restaurant and the first shuttle will begin loading at 7:00am. Please plan to arrive well before the concert starts to guarantee parking. Only authorized vehicles will be allowed at Meditation Mount. Boccali’s address 3277 Ojai Santa Paula Road (located at Ojai Avenue and Reeves Road).
While you wait for the concert to begin at 8:00am, you can participate in bird watching with the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy at 7:15am. Please bring your own binoculars. RSVP at [email protected].
Maps and directions will be available at the Festival box office. If you have any questions, please call our box office at 805 646 2053.
|
Gamelan Performances: Fri, June 7 and Sat, June 8
These two free concerts performed by the acclaimed Gamelan Sari Raras at the Libbey Park Gazebo will be special treats for the community! Limited seating will be provided; we encourage you to bring your own chairs or blankets.
Fitness Classes: Fri, June 7; Sat, June 8; Sun, June 9
Dance with MMDG: Sat, June 8
Festival patrons and the Ojai community have a rare opportunity to join dancers from the acclaimed Mark Morris Dance Group, who will help jump-start the day with basic stretching. The fitness classes will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning, 9:00-10:00am, at the Libbey Park Flagpole Lawn. We recommend wearing comfortable shoes or sneakers.
And there’s more — learn dance moves from dancers of the Mark Morris Dance Group who will teach a few moves from one of the works featured at the Friday evening concert. This free event will be at the Ojai Art Center. We recommend wearing flat shoes (you will also have the option to dance barefoot).
Both events are free and open to the public.
View complete schedule here >>
Anna Bowen, actress
Anna Bowen is thrilled to be performing at the 69th Ojai Music Festival. Her credits include the on-Broadway production of 101 Dalmatians, as well as several off-Broadway productions, including The Music of Motown, Rom and Julz, Doubletime, and Wanda’s World. On the West Coast, she has appeared in Les Miserables, RENT, Aladdin, Aida, Evita, among others, as well as with the Transcendence Theatre Company. Also active on television, her credits include appearances on Castle, Mixology, Law and Order SVU, and As The World Turns. She can be seen around Los Angeles singing with the Overstreets New Orleans Jazz Band, The Melodies, and with eclectic singer Lawrence Rothman. Bowen’s non-fiction book of interviews, Me+You, is available now and her forthcoming work, Being Biracial, will be published next spring.
Charlotte Cannon, actress
Charlotte Cannon, originally from Brighton, England, is a recent alumnus of the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Since graduating last May she has had the opportunity to collaborate on new works with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Chicago Children’s Choir, Red Tape Theatre, The Inappropriate Theatre Company, and Fearless Theatre. She is represented by Stewart Talent.