Each year, the Festival conducts an audience survey as an ongoing effort to measure various aspects of our own performance and receive feedback from patrons. Below are the results from this past Festival in June. We strive to improve our efforts and appreciate our Festival community’s interest in our forward plans.

We welcome any additional comments and observations. Please email us at [email protected] or write your comments below.

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Survey invitations were e-mailed to 2014 Festival attendees the week following the event. Of a total of 678 delivered, 323 were returned for a response rate of 48%.

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 Ratings for the following:

1. Food Trucks on Friday Night:

• Excellent 16%
• Good 41%
• Adequate 18%
• Fair 13%
• Poor 12%
• Comments: Just didn’t have time to try the food trucks and would love to have done so….perhaps more than one night; more food truck varieties; more places to sit

2. Saturday Supper at Libbey Park

• Excellent 45%
• Good 33%
• Adequate 17%
• Fair 2%
• Poor 3%

3. Live Streaming

• Excellent 21%
• Good 56%
• Adequate 18%
• Fair 3%
• Poor 2%
• Comments: Live streaming and intermission interviews seen after returning home; loved it!

4. Gathering Place in Libbey Park

• Excellent 41%
• Good 45%
• Adequate 11%
• Fair 2%
• Poor 1%

View complete PDF >>

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Selections of Enthusiastic Patrons’ Memorable Moments
There were so many memorable moments that were shared. Here are several to read online, or read 2014 Selections of Memorable Moments

Hands down: The Classical Style. We loved it and wished we could sit through it twice. (Two of us are trained musically; the third, just a music lover.) Next I’d have to say Jeremy Denk playing the Ligeti Etudes.

I wished I could spend all four days in Ojai. The organization was perfect. Enough restrooms, very clean. I watched afterwards the videos and the program and artists are outstanding. Also very funny especially my first language is German.

Listening to the musicians at the Gazebo on Friday and hearing Storm.

Lying with my young son under the giant oak on the lawn listening to Mozart on a gorgeous Sunday morning and getting a picture that captured the moment – smiles all around.

Sitting in the middle of the choir at Sunday Sunrise concert.  My whole body was immersed in the sound, and my soul was deeply touched by the power of the voices around me.

Both Late night concerts were excellent.  I loved the discussions on Thu and Fri but must admit that I liked Jeremy’s discussion of the idea of the opera more than the opera itself.  Brooklyn Rider and that venue were amazing but so was Sun morning at Meditation Mount and I am not a choral lover usually.

Sunday morning: sitting in that beautiful bowl with the trees and their dappled sunlight and listening to Mozart and the bird’s responses.  It was exquisite.

 

Libbey Bowl Concerts and Ojai Talks of the 68th Ojai Music Festival, June 12–15, are now archived on our Festival website for your viewing pleasure.

A highlight of this year’s 2014 Ojai Live offerings includes the June 13 world premiere of the new opera with libretto by Jeremy Denk and music by Steven Stucky, The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts). The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) is co-commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, Carnegie Hall, and the Aspen Music Festival and School. The Ojai premiere is supported by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This year, Ojai Live features an enhanced HD five-camera shoot with concert-quality sound produced by Little Dog Live (http://www.LittleDogLive.com). Intermission interviews with artists and special guests were hosted by Fred Child of American Public Media’s Performance Today.

Now in its 68th year, the Ojai Music Festival celebrates its audience whose interest has resulted in record sales. The concentrated four-day Festival draws thousands of curious and engaged music enthusiasts from across the country, and is pleased to serve a growing community worldwide via these live and archival webcasts.

Watch the stream of the Friday evening concert below and view more videos on the archives here >>

Each June, the Ojai Valley becomes a musical epicenter where audience members, industry leaders, musicians, and members of the press come together and experience innovative programming.

After each Festival, we gather feedback from audience members and colleagues, as well as share press reviews of the 2014 Festival. Read excerpts from the media, and for your convenience, download a complete press review sheet as a PDF here >>

“Like all births, there is something new in the room that wasn’t there before. For Stucky and Denk, this is a fleeting instant of transcendence, namely a miracle.”

– Los Angeles Times

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“’The Classical Style’ is a mash-up of Glenn Gould at his most satirical, PDQ Bach at his sauciest and a distractedly erudite Rosen cooking up a French sauce while pontificating on harmonic structure in his kitchen. But underlying the jokes (good ones and the groaners) and tomfoolery, Stucky’s resourceful score and Denk’s droll text produce an ingeniously eloquent musing on the meaning of life.”

– Los Angeles Times

Read Mark Swed’s wrap-up review >>

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“…the concert’s second half was a revelation, with the American pianist and composer Uri Caine and his jazz sextet deconstructing aspects of Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, including the Adagietto of his Fifth Symphony and the conclusion of “Das Lied von der Erde” (for which a cantor was added). Teasing out the earthy building blocks of these complex and deeply felt masterpieces—that is, the folk songs, military marches and Jewish wedding tunes—Mr. Caine and company reimagined Mahler’s Olympian creations in more human-scale terms.”

– Wall Street Journal

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“On Saturday morning, he [Jeremy Denk] and Jennifer Frautschi performed with exquisite concentration all four of Ives’s Violin Sonatas, over the cawing of a multitude of crows. In typical Ojai fashion, the experience was enhanced by the presence of the vocal ensemble Hudson Shad…”

– Wall Street Journal

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“…the definitive factor in Ojai, the thing that sets its apart from ordinary concert life, is the programming. Take that away and you just have pretty concerts in a park. For the listening gourmet, Ojai is the place to taste new things, in abundance, and take a break from Tchaikovsky and Brahms meat and potatoes.”

– Orange County Register

Read Tim Mangan’s two reviews: June 13 issue and June 15 issue

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“…the pleasantly nostalgic backdrop offered by Stucky’s well-crafted and wide-ranging score, which empliys faux 18^th-century music up to Strauss and Stucky himself. Throughout, conductor Robert Spano showed the Knights, the festival’s ‘resident’ orchestra, at their transparent best.” – Musical America

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“He [Jeremy Denk] proved to be a terrific fit for this quirky, brainy, adventuresome little festival…”

– Classical Voice North America

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“…the area’s most consistently thrilling annual event, there was plenty of incredible music to swoon over, obsess about, or just ponder, albeit in new ways.”

– Santa Barbara Independent

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“From that felicitous combination came an effervescent joy in music that Denk emanates by simply being himself, a man of wit and wonder and a performer of infinite possibilities. Musicians and audience alike couldn’t stop smiling with obvious delight as they shared in his bit of musical heaven.”

– Ventura County Star

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The Seven Deadly Sins (libretto by Brecht) was a lot of fun, and well sung by bombshell Storm Large, portraying a woman who experienced all seven and then some, and quartet Hudson Shad.

– Culture Clash
Read Scott Timberg’s review from June 19 >>

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Conductors Eric Jacobson & Kevin Fox, alongside New York’s versatile orchestral collective The Knights and the Ojai Festival Singers left the mixed-age audience of both locals and visitors enraptured by the scope of the multiplicitous beauty and wide-ranging inquiry of the festival’s finale.

– I Care If You Listen 

by Barbara Isenberg
June 2, 2014

These are illustrious times for the pianist and writer Jeremy Denk. Last year he won a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year and signed a book contract to expand a New Yorker article about piano lessons.

A few months ago, he received the $75,000 Avery Fisher Prize, and in a few weeks he heads west to become music director of the 68th annual Ojai Music Festival. The festival, starting June 12, should offer a change of pace for Denk. Instead of his usual concertizing across the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, he’ll be in residence at the four-day festival — and in charge.

“I’ve never curated anything like this before,” the 44-year-old musician said over coffee on the Upper West Side. “I’ve never had the responsibility for a weekend’s stimulation.”

Denk had been friendly with Rosen, who died last year at 85, and greatly admired Rosen’s “The Classical Style.”

He had never written an opera libretto before, either. But besides curating the festival and performing there, he’s come up with “The Classical Style: An Opera [of Sorts],” which will be given its premiere in Ojai. Based on pianist Charles Rosen’s 1971 scholarly book, “The Classical Style,” with music by composer Steven Stucky, the comic opera features such things as Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn playing Scrabble in heaven.

Read the complete article >>

 

 

Relive your favorite moments from the 2014 Festival through our Festival albums. Photos are taken by Timothy Norris for the Ojai Music Festival. Click the photos to view a larger image.

 

 

Listen to the 2014 Festival Preview with Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris and Gail Eichenthal of KUSC:

 

Special thanks to:

The new work by Andrew Norman, set to be performed by Jeremy Denk, will be replaced by another work by Mr. Norman.

Andrew Norman regrets that he was unable to complete his new piece, 140 characters or less, in sufficient time to allow for a premiere at the Ojai Music Festival.  Mr. Denk looks forward to performing the piece at a later date.

SATURDAY, June 14, 6pm

Andrew Norman
Light Screens

Alex Sopp, flute
Colin Jacobsen, violin
Miranda Sielaff, viola
Eric Jacobsen, cello
Mozart/Timo Andres
“Coronation” Concerto Re-composition

Timo Andres, piano
The Knights
Eric Jacobsen, conductor

View the complete Saturday schedule here >>

“I brought my friend’s teenage daughter and son to their first classical performance. We all thoroughly enjoyed Lou Harrison’s ‘Suite for Symphonic Strings’ and both kids are more engaged in their music preferences as a result.” – 2013 Festival patron

As faculty and students prepare for the final weeks of the school year, the Ojai Music Festival is preparing for another amazing four-day music experience, and we invite students to enjoy Ojai 2014 with our special student ticket offer, made possible through the support of the Shanbrom Audience Development Fund.

Students receive 30% off single reserved seats and $5 lawn tickets with a current student ID.

Download an order form here >>

For more information, call Caitlin Praetorius at 805 646 2053
or email [email protected]

With the Festival quickly approaching, now is the perfect time to listen up on some of the programming for this June. You can listen to recordings of some of the works to be performed this year using our Spotify playlists.

Preview 2014 Festival music here >>

Our Ojai North partner, Cal Performances, has produced “3 Minutes With Jeremy Denk” – watch Jeremy preview 2014 highlights, explain The Classical Style…and give a brief music lesson on Bach:

View the 2014 Ojai Music Festival Schedule >>
View the 2014 Ojai North Schedule >>

Purchase tickets to the 2014 Ojai Music Festival >>
Purchase tickets to the 2014 Ojai North >>

The Ojai Music Festival is pleased to announce that American Public Media’s popular radio program Performance Today will return to Ojai in June for a second residency with the Festival. Performance Today and its host Fred Child was seen at the 2012 Festival with Music Director Leif Ove Andsnes. At the Festival, Fred hosted a Concert Insights session, conducted artists and patron interviews, and recorded performances for rebroadcast throughout the year.

Also present in 2012 was 2014 Music Director Jeremy Denk, who sat down with Fred Child at the Sunrise Subscriber Breakfast at the Ojai Valley Inn. At the breakfast, Jeremy spoke with Fred about his plans for the 68th Festival and answered questions from subscribers. The conversation was recorded and later aired on Performance Today.

If you missed the reception, or want to listen again, you can do so below:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/117519844″ params=”color=000000&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Now, almost two years later, Jeremy prepares to return to Ojai for his Festival. Programs and works may have shifted from his “original ideas,” but the spirit of the ideas shared in 2012 still live on in the planned Festival schedule. We’re so excited to have both Jeremy and APM back in Ojai this June – we hope you will join us!

View the 2014 Festival schedule >>
Order series passes online >>

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 >>