Ojai Music Festival’s 75 years of adventurous music-making!
For seven decades, the Ojai Music Festival has been a creative laboratory for the special chemistry that results from combining insatiable curiosity with unbounded imagination. The formula is simple: Each year a music director is given the freedom and resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. More often this unique blend of enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of conductors, performers, composers to push at boundaries and stretch limits.
1940s
1947
May 4 - First concert features French baritone Martial Singher with Paul Ulanowsky in a recital covering repertoire from Rameau to Ravel at Ojai’s Nordhoff Auditorium.
1948
Lawrence Morton becomes first program annotator and begins his association with the Festival; Igor Stravinky’s Histoire du soldat (A Solider’s Tale) is billed as the premiere of the final version of his work.
1949
Ojai Festivals, Ltd. is officially launched as a non-profit organization.
1950s
1954
Lawrence Morton becomes first Artistic Director, working with Igor Stravinsky.
1957
Aaron Copland makes Ojai debut, seen here with Igor Stravinsky.
1957
Aaron Copland makes Ojai debut.
1960s
1967
Ralph Grierson with 1967 Music Director Pierre Boulez
1960
Program Book Cover
1960s
Violinist Eudice Shapiro and 1964-66 Music Director Ingolf Dahl
1970s
1977
Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas conducts
1970
Music Director Pierre Boulez
1973
Lawn patrons
1980s
1980
Poster by Richard Diebenkorn
1980s
Composer Olivier Messiaen with conductor Kent Nagano
1981
Poster by David Hockney
1990s
1993
Music Director John Adams with Ara Guzelimian (Photo by Betty Freeman)
1990
Music Director Lucky Mosko
1990s
Music Director Peter Sellars and composer/conductor Pierre Boulez during his 1996 Music Directorship discuss The Soldier's Tale
2000s
2001
1999 and 2001 Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen
2003
Thomas W. Morris, Music Director Pierre Boulez, Ernest Fleischmann, Ara Guzelimian
2004
Music Director Kent Nagano at the finale concert with composer Unsuk Chin, mezzo-soprano Milena Kitic, and the LA Opera Orchestra
2006
60th Festival anniversary with Music Director Robert Spano
2008
Composer Steve Reich and Music Director David Robertson
2010
Community pop-up featuring classical Indian ragas performed by Aashish Khan and friends, held at the downtown Arcade
2010s
2011
Dawn Upshaw returned as music director to celebrate the opening of the new Libbey Bowl and was featured in the world premiere of George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars
2016
Ojai presents world premiere of Josephine Baker: A Portrait by Tyshawn Sorey with text by Claudia Rankine, featuring soprano Julia Bullock
2017
George Lewis’s Afterword, an opera - a celebration of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) - made its West Coast premiere.
2017
Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer premiered two new works as Music Director: Trouble performed by Jennifer Koh and Emergence featuring Iyer, Stephan Crump, Tyshawn Sorey, ICE, conducted by Steven Schick.
2018
Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja brought music to Libbey Park with Luigi Nono’s La lontanaza nostalgica utopia futura
2019
Music Director Barbara Hannigan conducts The Rake's Progress featuring singers from her Equilibrium Mentoring Initiative and LUDWIG in their US debuts
2020s
2021
Sept 17 - Music Director John Adams (photo by Timothy Teague)
2021
Sept 17 - Attacca Quartet performs with Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi (photo by Timothy Teague)
2021
Sept 17 - Violinist Miranda Cuckson performs Bach's Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 (photo by Timothy Teague)
2021
Sept 19 - Music Director John Adams and composer Gabriela Ortiz with the Ojai Festival Orchestra after the World Premiere of the revised version of Ortiz's La calaca (photo by Timothy Teague)
2021
Sept 18 - Musician Rhiannon Giddens (photo by Timothy Teague)
2021
Sept 18 - Pianist Vikingur Olafsson plays Glass, Debussy and Rameau in the first half of the Saturday morning program (photo by Timothy Teague)