Ojai Music Festival - 2024 Program Book

0606-06092024 MITSUKO UCHIDA MUSIC DIRECTOR

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78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

| JUNE 6-9, 2024 | 1

Contents Festival Events Thursday, June 6 PAGE

PAGE

37

Ojai Talks

3:00pm

38

Opening Night Concert

8:00pm

Friday, June 7 PAGE

4

About the Cover: Otto Heino Blue Glazed Stoneware Vase

6

Message from the Chairman of the Board Board of Directors & Board of Governors List

8

42

Ojai Dawns

8:00am

46

Morning Concert

10:00am

50

Shifting Ground

3:30pm

52

Evening Concert

8:00pm

Saturday, June 8 PAGE

Message from the Artistic and Executive Director

10

Message from the Music Director Q&A with the Artist

14

Music Director Bio The Importance of Being Ernest

by Ara Guzelimian

17

Music Director Roster

20

The Sense of Discovery by Thomas May

56

Morning Concert

10:00am

28

Deepen Your Experience

60

Shifting Ground (repeat performance) 3:30pm

29

Ojai Valley Venue Map

62

Evening Concert

34

Festival Information

36

Free Offerings and Events

78

Ensemble/Artist Profiles

8:00pm

Sunday, June 9 PAGE

66

Morning Concert

10:00am

86

2023-24 Annual Giving Contributors

70

Kafka Fragments

2:30pm

89

Future Forward Campaign

74

Finale Concert

5:30pm

90

Institutional Funders

91

Lifetime Giving

92

Longtime Festival Attendees

94

Share Your Story Profiles

95

Matilija Society

96

BRAVO Education & Community Program

98

Arts Management Internship Program

99

Special Thanks

100

Volunteers

101

Staff & Production

102

Advertiser Index

Cover art: Otto Heino Blue Glazed Stoneware Vase Image courtesy of John Moran Auctioneers & Appraisers, Monrovia, CA

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5/15/24 4:43 PM 78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

| JUNE 6-9, 2024 | 3

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About the Cover: Blue Glazed Stoneware Vase by Otto Heino (Image courtesy of John Moran Auctioneers, Monrovia, CA) The distinguished American potters Otto (1915-2009) and Vivika Heino (1910-1995) moved to California in 1952 and eventually to Ojai in the early 1970s, where they bought the Lloyd Wright house originally designed for their great friend, the ceramicist and artist Beatrice Wood. The Heino studio was a much loved Ojai destination for a generation of artistic visitors.

Otto Heino was born in New Hampshire to a large immigrant Finnish family, first studying pottery with Vivika (whom he would soon marry) at the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts. He served in World War II as a gunner aboard a B-17. While in England, he met Bernard Leach, who introduced traditional Japanese techniques and designs to British pottery – an influence that can be seen in Otto and Vivika’s work. They have been recognized and honored as being among the most significant American potters of the 20th century, with their work exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among many other galleries and museums.

The couple worked so closely and inseparably in their work that the majority of their pieces are signed simply “Vivika + Otto,” regardless of who worked on each one.

Poignantly, the work featured on our cover is signed simply “Otto” as it dates after Vivika’s passing in 1995.

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78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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A Message from the Chairman of the Board Welcome to the 78th Ojai Music Festival. Welcome back to our long-term supporters and patrons, and a special welcome to those attending for the first time. We are thrilled you are joining us with the incomparable Mitsuko Uchida as Music Director accompanied by the remarkable Mahler Chamber Orchestra. It will be an exciting musical journey.

We are grateful for your support. All of you; audience members, donors, artists, and volunteers make the festival possible. We are especially appreciative of the Ojai community for your gracious welcome and hospitality.

Everyone is part of the warm and innovative atmosphere for which our Festival is celebrated. Thank you for being here and helping to sustain the festival’s future.

As evident from this year’s programming, the Ojai Music Festival continues to thrive artistically. Thanks to Ara Guzelimian’s leadership along with a devoted, professional staff and a dedicated Board of Directors, the Festival is financially sound. Together we are committed to ensuring the ability to serve you and the music that inspires us all.

This year I am delighted to announce that, in the fourth year of our Future Forward campaign, we have met 98% of our goal. We have just $60,000 left to raise. We are grateful to everyone who has contributed to the campaign.

We are asking for your help to close the gap. Please consider making a gift. The Festival offers enormous artistic and economic value to all of us. Our investment can ensure that the Ojai experience we all love can be sustained for future generations of musicians and audiences. Your support, at any level, will be greatly appreciated.

Enjoy the music, the company, and our priceless time together.

JERRY EBERHARDT

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

JERRY EBERHARDT Chair

KATE BARNHART WILLIAM J. SHANBROM Co-Chairs

BARRY SANDERS Vice Chair - Governance DON PATTISON Vice Chair - Development CATHRYN KRAUSE Secretary HOPE TSCHOPIK SCHNEIDER Treasurer MARGARET BATES, MD JAMIE BENNETT MICHELE BRUSTIN NANCYBELL COE LAUREL CRARY OFWC President RUTH ELIEL STEPHAN FARBER FRED FISHER GREG GRINNELL LUTHER LUEDTKE THOMAS MCNALLEY, MD GLENN MERCER NEIL SELMAN MAURICE SINGER BRIDGET TSAO BROCKMAN Directors Emeritus RICK GOULD, MD JOAN KEMPER STEPHEN J.M. MORRIS ESTHER WACHTELL ARA GUZELIMIAN Artistic and Executive Director

For more information on how you can have an impact, visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or visit our Future Forward Campaign Booth in Libbey Park.

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SASHA AND BILL ANAWALT ANN BARRETT BARBARA BARRY MARJORIE BEALE AND WILLIAM MEYERHOFF SUE BIENKOWSKI MERRILL AND JUDY BLAU EVELYN AND STEPHEN BLOCK SUSAN BOWEY BARBARA COHN TOM AND LILY BROD PAMELA BURTON AND RICHARD HERTZ JILL COHEN BARBARA DELAUNE WARREN KATHLEEN AND JAMES DRUMMY MICHAEL DUNN WILLIAM DUXLER CONSTANCE EATON AND WILLIAM HART LISA FIELD RUTH GILLILAND AND ARTHUR RIEMAN ELIZABETH GREENBERG LENORE S. AND BERNARD A. GREENBERG CHRIS HACKER AND WILL THOMAS LINDA JOYCE HODGE JON AND MARY HOGEN SCOTT JOHNSON SUZY AND MOE KRABBE LESLIE LASSITER KATHY AND DAVID LEEDS RAULEE MARCUS SHARON MCNALLEY PAMELA MELONE CLAIRE AND DAVID OXTOBY LINDA AND RON PHILLIPS PETER SCHNEIDER ABBY SHER SHELLEY AND GREG SMITH ANNE-MARIE SPATARU JANE TAYLOR AND FREDERIC OHRINGER GARY WASSERMAN JANE AND RICHARD WEIRICK SUSANNE WILSON JOAN WYNN CATHY ZOI AND ROBIN ROY

SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL JUN 12 - AUG 3

EXPERIENCE MAGIC THIS SUMMER. We invite you to immerse yourself in our 77th Summer Music Festival in the wonderous setting of Santa Barbara. Be moved by 60+ powerful teaching artists and the rising talent of our 137 fellows.

M U S I C A C A D E M Y. O R G

Delight in the artistry of our world-class musicians featuring 130 events including special performances by Joshua Bell, Timo Andres, Lawrence Brownlee, Conor Hanick, Jeremy Denk, Steven Isserlis, Leila Josefowicz, and the Takács Quartet.

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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Photo by Square Productions

A Message from the Artistic and Executive Director Every time I return to this magical setting and gathering, I wonder anew at how improbable it all is. Take in the elements that make up this week – an astonishing gathering of great musicians, one of the most receptive and responsive audiences in the world, a small-town setting of great informality and beauty, and the sense of community that pervades it all. So, to begin, my heartfelt thanks to each of you, whether musician or audience member, first-time visitor or life-long devotee, local resident or traveler from far away. It is all of you who transform the improbable into something so tangible and treasurable.

It is particularly meaningful to welcome Mitsuko Uchida, one of the great musicians of our time, back to Ojai as this Festival’s Music Director. Mitsuko made a memorable first appearance here at the 1996 Festival, led by that year’s Music Director Pierre Boulez, and has returned twice since then.

My admiration for her is boundless. She lives deeply in a profound commitment to the music she plays, whether old or new, revisiting the works which are closest to her with a constant sense of exploration and discovery.

A measure of that is the depth of her partnership with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. They are in the midst of a five-year project centered on revisiting the Mozart piano concertos. There is a fitting spirit of collaboration and friendship in their work together, a chamber music-like bond that continues to deepen with each encounter. We also pay tribute to Mitsuko’s longstanding relationship with the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where she has mentored a generation of young musicians that include several who are central to us in Ojai this year – Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Alexi Kenney, Jay Campbell and the members of the Brentano Quartet are all Marlboro alumni. Mitsuko has also personally invited numerous distinguished composers to be in residence during Marlboro and several of them are well represented at our Festival – Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, and Jörg Widmann.

As always, we welcome back old friends – harpist Julie Smith Phillips, who played memorably in the John Adams-led 2021 Ojai Festival – and have the pleasure of discovering artists new to the Festival such as accordionist Ljubinka Kulisic and percussionist Sae Hashimoto.

It is always the interplay of the expected and unexpected, the old and the new, the known and the unknown which gives our Festival its character. We are very fortunate in the company we keep, beginning with each of you. Thank you for being here!

ARA GUZELIMIAN

The position of Ara Guzelimian as Artistic and Executive Director is made possible by the generous support of Jill and Bill Shanbrom and the Shanbrom Family Foundation.

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78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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A Message from the Music Director I am so delighted to be returning to Ojai, a place of happy memories and wonderful musical associations for me.

My first visit took place in 1996, one of the hottest summers in memory and, yet, the concentration on stage and in the audience was complete, with the focus entirely on music.

And I treasure every moment I spent with Pierre Boulez, the Music Director that year. I was also delighted to return a few years later in the company of David Zinman. The combination of deeply serious music-making amidst the natural beauty and informality of Ojai remains very special to me.

I am joined this year by my friends and colleagues of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), with whom I have been working closely as an Artistic Partner for many years now.

I saw an absolute potential in this group of musicians, an intensity of commitment that I felt immediately, and which has deepened over our many collaborations together. This intensity and love of music has been quite amazing in our work together. And, by now, we are a family. We have been exploring the rich world of the Mozart piano concertos together over the past five years with tours and projects throughout the world, with growing delight and understanding at each turn. The MCO musicians have their own special relationship with Ojai and have cherished their time here in the past, as Ojai fulfills every European’s dream of the ultimate California experience. I know they are thrilled to be back.

We will be joined by a group of guest artists whom I have come to know and admire through my work at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont each summer – soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Jay Campbell, and the Brentano String Quartet.

Marlboro has as its central idea the luxury of time to explore music, most often in a combination of senior and junior artists that brings a unique meeting of perspectives. As a result, there is a freshness of ideas that confronts you, ideas that you had never thought of or perhaps had forgotten.

Similarly, the presence of a visiting composer at Marlboro has enlivened each summer with some of the most compelling musical thinkers of our time and they are represented in this year’s Ojai programs – Sofia Gubaidulina, Kaija Saariaho, György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann, and Helmut Lachenmann among them.

The consistent thread in all these experiences is the sense of discovery. As a musician, you discover something different, something new every day. That is the meaning of life. We are all so glad to be on this voyage of discovery with you in Ojai.

MITSUKO UCHIDA The residence of Mitsuko Uchida as Music Director is made possible by the generous support of the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.

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Q&A

With the Artist Mozart remains a constant in your repertoire.

Some of the most poignant music ever written is by Mozart. Nobody else could write like him—it’s as if the notes just fell out of the sky into his lap. Mozart takes one note then spins it into another and then changes his mind – every note is like a child that you have to try and catch, which makes it so exciting as a performer.

One strong element of the Ojai Music Festival is the presence of musicians who share a history with you at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, where you serve as co-artistic director.

I normally don’t take Marlboro music making out into the “real world.” The beauty of Vermont is too much a part of that experience—it’s not that the teacher teaches the student, but we instead share the music and explore it together, in this idyllic space. For me, that environment is one of the greatest attractions.

That has been one of the hallmarks of your career—pairing classical repertoire with works by contemporary composers like György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann.

It has been one of my greatest privileges. Life is about discovery, curiosity. Every piece of music to which you’ve introduced or thought you knew can always be a new discovery. And if you discover something different from what you’ve heard before, that is one of the gifts of live performance.

How would you summarize the Festival as well as your ongoing projects at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere?

Playing concerts is something extraordinary. On the concert stage, something happens because of the concentration of people around you. And you are sharing this music—not only with the other players, but with everyone in the space. All we can do is be honest enough to share this extraordinary thing and for the music to continue to thrive.

Adapted from the Carnegie Hall program book.

Reprinted by kind permission by Carnegie Hall.

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2024 Music Director One of the most revered artists of our time, Mitsuko Uchida is known as a peerless interpreter of the works of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven, as well for being a devotee of the piano music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and György Kurtág. She was Musical America’s Artist of the Year in 2022 and is a Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist across the 2022/3, 2023/4 and 2024/5 seasons. Her latest solo recording, of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, was released to critical acclaim in 2022, was nominated for a Grammy® Award, and won the 2022 Gramophone Piano Award.

She has enjoyed close relationships over many years with the world’s most renowned orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and – in the US – the Chicago Symphony and The Cleveland Orchestra, with whom she recently celebrated her 100th performance at Severance Hall.

Conductors with whom she has worked closely have included Bernard Haitink, Sir Simon Rattle, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Vladimir Jurowski, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, and Mariss Jansons.

Since 2016, Mitsuko Uchida has been an Artistic Partner of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom she is currently engaged on a multi-season touring project in Europe, Japan and North America. She also appears regularly in recital in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York and Tokyo, and is a frequent guest at the Salzburg Mozartwoche and Salzburg Festival.

Mitsuko Uchida records exclusively for Decca, and her multi-award-winning discography includes the complete Mozart and Schubert piano sonatas. She is the recipient of two Grammy® Awards – for Mozart Concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra, and for an album of lieder with Dorothea Röschmann – and her recording of the Schoenberg Piano Concerto with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra won the Gramophone Award for Best Concerto.

A founding member of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and Director of Marlboro Music Festival, Mitsuko Uchida is a recipient of the Golden Mozart Medal from the Salzburg Mozarteum, and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association. She has also been awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Wigmore Hall Medal, and holds Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 2009 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Mitsuko Uchida made her first Ojai Music Festival appearance in 1996 for the 50th Anniversary with Music Director Pierre Boulez and later returned as Co-Music Director in 1998. She also performed at the 2004 Ojai Music Festival.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Fleischmann, Artistic Director of the Ojai Festival from 1998 – 2003 and a formidable figure in the musical life of Southern California for more than 40 years. Even before his time formally leading the Ojai Festival, Ernest was one of the Festival’s most loyal and invaluable friends.

Ernest was born in Germany, fleeing to South Africa with his family as a teenager. He received degrees in both music and accounting, backgrounds that served him well in his long, distinguished career.

After early positions in Europe, he came to the U.S. to become Executive Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1969, holding that post until 1998. His legendary tenure saw countless major milestones – among them, the appointments of Carlo Maria Giulini, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel, the creation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the Green Umbrella series (named by Ernest in one of his more fanciful inventions!), a much expanded Hollywood Bowl series (including the eternally popular fireworks concerts) as well as the Disney family gift and the architecture competition which led to the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

He formed a close friendship with Lawrence Morton, the visionary Artistic Director most responsible for the innovative DNA of the Ojai Festival and remained a true ally to the Festival in all his LA Phil years, making certain that the planning of the orchestra’s season dovetailed perfectly into its availability for regular visits to Ojai – these led to milestone collaborations with Pierre Boulez at Ojai from 1984 to 2003.

It was fitting that his tenure as Artistic Director of the Ojai Festival itself became a capstone to his long career. During his time in Ojai, he created memorable Festivals with Music Directors such as Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pierre Boulez, and Mitsuko Uchida.

Many years ago, it was Ernest who took a leap of faith and offered me a position at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which was to be my first experience in arts administration – a defining time for me. He was bold and fearless in championing innovation and fresh ideas, a role model to a generation of budding artistic leaders.

We remember him with admiration, fondness and gratitude.

—ARA GUZELIMIAN

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Photo above: Ernest Fleischmann with, from left to right, Thomas W. Morris, Pierre Boulez, and Ara Guzelimian at the 2003 Ojai Festival.

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The Sense of Discovery Returning to the Ojai Music Festival (OMF) is, for Mitsuko Uchida, an aesthetic homecoming. The qualities that characterize Ojai and its audience — an open-eared curiosity combined with intensity of concentration — also neatly describe what sets Uchida’s artistry apart. So, it’s not surprising that she asserts such a strong connection with the Festival, where she first appeared during the milestone 50th season in 1996, returning two years later for her first round as Music Director.

director of artistic planning. “The players feel very close to her musically, and she is very aware of the individual personalities as she interacts with each particular personality and way of playing.” In fact, Uchida’s double role of directing her fellow musicians from the keyboard (following Mozart’s own practice when performing his concertos) is referred to as leading or directing rather than conducting to emphasize that this is a first-among-equals scenario and without an intermediary filter.

Uchida’s thoughtful programming, a mixture of familiar classical names with Modernist pioneers and contemporary composers, reflects a sensibility that values discovery in its deeper sense. Rather than a superficial peek into something unknown, discovery becomes a process of ongoing revelation and unsuspected connections.

This is in keeping with the origins and philosophy of the MCO itself. Founded in 1997 by Claudio Abbado, the ensemble has become celebrated for the chamber music– like vitality and interaction of its performance style. The musicians maintain Abbado’s emphasis on close listening to one another, which has strengthened their intense bond as a touring ensemble. “The fact that they have no fixed home base adds a dimension of intense collaboration and coherence, because it grows out of the musicians themselves,” notes Guzelimian. “Mitsuko and the MCO have lived with this music deeply for the last few years. So it has the benefit of this experience of digging deeper and probing for every imaginable dimension and perspective of these amazing concertos.”

Another way to think of this: For Uchida, all of the composers we will encounter during this 78th edition of OMF are contemporaries. They have been brought together to participate in a present-tense conversation — with each other, with herself and her fellow performers, and with you as the audience. Consider the example of Mozart. A central pillar of the pianist’s career, his piano concertos justify Uchida’s recurrent fascination precisely because she refuses to approach these works as “standard rep” — comfort food to trigger predictable reactions — but finds in them an inexhaustible, ever-renewable source of discovery.

Together with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), Uchida embarked on a significant new chapter in her Mozart interpretations. She began collaborating with the ensemble as an Artistic Partner in 2016 and has been presenting a major cycle of the concertos since 2019.

Uchida never tires of exploring how Mozart, with each new manifestation of the genre he essentially invented, discovers new potential within its framework.

The special advantage that her work with the MCO enables is to approach the piano concertos as chamber music. “It really is as if she were playing with each individual musician,” according to Maggie Coe, MCO’s

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The MCO’s trademark close listening will be on particularly thrilling display in their first evening concert, when they perform Schoenberg’s hyperkinetic Chamber Symphony No. 1 without conductor. To accomplish such a feat, says Guzelimian, “they really have to live in the piece and communicate with each other at an astonishing level.”

Uchida has long been intrigued by the connections between Viennese Classicism and the radical extension of musical language pursued by that reluctant revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg, in the same city more than a century later. To challenge misunderstandings of Schoenberg as “cerebral” and off-puttingly abstract — which persist even now, 150 years after his birth — she has programmed three of the composer’s most intensely expressive works from his fervently creative period early in the century.

Schoenberg’s irrepressible appetite for discovery led him to seek out “air from another planet” — to quote the Stefan George poem he sets in the final movement of the pathbreaking work that the Brentano String Quartet performs on opening night. Uchida’s vision for the Festival weekend extends to the discoveries of entirely new sound worlds by several preeminent contemporary composers.

Characteristically, Uchida has developed a personal understanding of their distinctive musical perspectives through her interactions with their work as a performer and as co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. Helmut Lachenmann, Jörg Widmann, György Kurtág, Sofia Gubaidulina, and the late Kaija Saariaho all spent memorable summers at Marlboro as composers-inresidence. Though each has developed a unique, utterly singular musical language, they share a seriousness of purpose and commitment to the necessity of their art that resonates profoundly with Uchida’s understanding of her own creative work. In the case of Gubaidulina, she even made a pilgrimage to the reclusive composer’s home outside Hamburg to persuade her in person to accept the invitation to come to Marlboro.

Another key aspect of Uchida’s musical life is her mentorship of several generations of younger artists who have been shaped by their time at Marlboro. Her programming reflects this through the selection of guest artists, who in turn have suggested music that has special significance for each: the Brentano Quartet, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, violinist Alexi Kenney, and cellist Jay Campbell (an especially familiar face to Ojai audiences through his appearances here with the JACK Quartet and AMOC).

During one of his summers at Marlboro, for example, Campbell played Gubaidulina’s extraordinary early work In Croce for the composer herself. His partner for that program is the new music accordionist Ljubinka Kulisic, who has coached with Elsbeth Moser, the original arranger of the cello-accordion version of the score. Another key participant in this weekend is the Japanese-born percussionist Sae Hashimoto, who plays works by Saariaho

and Lachenmann which have become central to the percussion repertoire.

While the last three editions of the Festival have focused intensively on American music, this weekend’s spotlight is squarely on prominent European composers, with the exception of the Saturday morning program featuring musicians from the MCO and Kulisic. Their selection of pieces by John Adams, John Zorn, and Missy Mazzoli represents a European perspective on the American scene today. Kulisic will also play a Sunday morning concert exploring John Cage’s music for accordion, much of it from the late 1940s and ‘50s.

The chamber music–like communication central to Uchida’s rapport with the MCO has a corollary in the theme of friendship that is threaded across the programs.

Mirroring the pianist’s friendships with the guest artists and contemporary composers she has chosen are the bonds that personally linked Mozart and Haydn — also key presences on the programs, both of whom grace the opening and closing concerts — as well as those between Schoenberg and his admiring student Anton Webern.

Friendship, the intimacy of making music together, the shared pleasures of discovery — all of this takes center stage over the next few days, in true Ojai tradition.

—THOMAS MAY Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in an array of international publications, including the New York Times and Gramophone. The English-language editor for Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, he also writes for such institutions as the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Davos Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and The Juilliard School. He blogs at memeteria.com.

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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1

Featuring Anna Thorvaldsdottir, composer Seth Parker Woods and Katinka Kleijn, cellos Cory Smythe, piano Steven Schick, conductor and percussion

2025 Series Passes On Sale Now! OjaiFestival.org | 805 646 2053

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Ojai Valley School Upper Campus

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Chamber On The Mountain An extraordinary musical experience in a setting of extraordinary beauty

Sunday June 16, 2024 3:00 pm

Christopher Goodpasture

Armen Guzelimian Pianist

Sunday October 6, 2024 3:00 pm

Pianist

Credit: Jiyang Chen

Fortepianist

Diana Tash

Mezzo-Soprano Credit: Philippe Morotti

Daniel Adam Maltz

Credit: Bradford Rogne Photography

O Ce ur le 12 br th a Se tin as g on !

Copyright: Daniel Adam Maltz

The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts Presents

Sunday Nov. 10, 2024 3:00 pm

Tickets $35 at ChamberOnTheMountain.com Performances take place at Logan House, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai Meet the Artists! A reception will be held following each performance.

Chamber On The Mountain | 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Rd. (in Upper Ojai) | Ojai, CA 93023 | (805) 646-3381

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

| JUNE 6-9, 2024 | 27

Deepen Your Experience

LOWER PARKING LOT

P

North

Path to Ojai Trail

OJAI CHATS Learn about concert works from the composers! John Schaefer will host 30-minute chats throughout the weekend at the Libbey Park Gazebo. Look for the daily schedule of featured guests on our free Mobile App or on the program pages.

Back Ticket Gate

GREEN ROOM IN THE PARK An important part of the Festival is enjoying the wonderful setting of Libbey Park. Visit our special surroundings in the center of the park, meet up with friends, and enjoy drinks and small bites. Learn more about the Festival, our Future Forward Campaign, Ojai Festival Women’s Committtee, and our BRAVO education program. Be sure to visit Bart’s Books booth on the weekend. Plus, enjoy coffee at Pinholita Coffee Van, a battery-operated café on wheels!

TENNIS COURTS

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Reserved Entrance

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FESTIVAL POP-UP BOUTIQUE Take home something to help remember your Festival experience!

Visit our pop-up market featuring 2024 Festival T-shirts, as well as essentials including hats, seat cushions, blankets, CDs, and more swag!

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Accessible Parking

Topa Topa Street

P

P

RESERVED PARKING

VIP PARKING

Pass Required

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Post Office Tower

Trolley Stop

East Ojai Avenue ARCADE SHOPS

STAY CONNECTED Keep in touch with the latest news and updates both during and after the Festival.

Facebook.com/OjaiFestival

FESTIVAL LOUNGE Pass Required

Playground

OJAI BEYOND The Festival’s live online community continues to grow through our live stream broadcast. Since its inception in 2012, we have expanded Ojai’s global footprint, building vastly larger audiences and deepening relationships with patrons throughout the year.

Please enjoy your favorite Festival concerts from this year and years past at OjaiFestival.org free of charge after the Festival.

Lawn Entrance

South Signal Street

SUPPERS IN THE PARK Enjoy a gourmet boxed dinner with wine provided by The Ojai Vineyard. Friday, June 7 with Catering Connection and Saturday, June 8 with Lorraine Lim Catering.

ADA Gate

Visit our mobile-friendly website on your device for the latest updates at OjaiFestival.org

PUBLIC PARKING

P Trolley Stop

Scan the QR code below to download our free OMF mobile app to view concert info, Festival venues, programs notes, health and safety updates, Explore Ojai, and digital content.

Ojai Valley Venue Map

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Libbey Bowl 210 S. Signal Street

Chaparral Auditorium (Legacy Hall) 414 E. Ojai Avenue

Libbey Park Gazebo

This map is not to scale

THURSDAY, JUNE 6 3:00PM Ojai Talks (Ojai Presbyterian Church) 8:00PM Opening Night (Libbey Bowl) FRIDAY, JUNE 7 8:00AM Ojai Dawns (Zalk Theater, Besant Hill School) 10:00AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl) 11:30AM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo) 3:30PM Shifting Ground (Greenberg Activity Center) 6:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo) 8:00PM Evening Concert (Libbey Bowl)

Zalk Theater Besant Hill School 8585 N. Ojai Road

Greenberg Center Ojai Valley School Lower Campus 723 El Paseo Road

Ojai Presbyterian Church 304 Foothill Road

SATURDAY, JUNE 8 8:00AM Morning Meditation (Chaparral Auditorium) 10:00AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl) 11:30AM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo) 3:30PM Shifting Ground (Greenberg Activity Center) 6:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo) 8:00PM Evening Concert (Libbey Bowl) SUNDAY, JUNE 9 8:00AM Morning Meditation (Chaparral Auditorium) 10:00AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl) 11:30AM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo) 2:30PM Kafka Fragments (Greenberg Activity Center) 4:00PM Community Concert (Libbey Park Gazebo) 5:30PM Festival Finale (Libbey Bowl)

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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THE 23RD ANNUAL / FEBRUARY 10-16, 2025

2024 2025

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GABRIEL KAHANE

LONDON PHILHARMONIC WITH PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA CONRAD TAO EMANUEL AX & ANTHONY MCGILL LONDON SYMPHONY WITH YUNCHAN LIM

2025 ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

CAROLINE SHAW

VIENNA PHILHARMONIC WITH YANNICK NÉZET-SÉGUIN AND MORE!

THE PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY & LAGUNA BEACH LIVE! PRESENTS A MULTI-DAY SERIES OF CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CONCERTS, COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND DYNAMIC SPECIAL EVENTS IN LAGUNA BEACH, CA

FEB 14 / 8PM

FEB 16 / 3PM

Kick off the Festival‘s opening with a concert featuring Caroline Shaw joined by a string quartet and chorus.

Performing a new work inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Library of Babel,”Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from life in a world oversaturated with information.

SHAW & FRIENDS

FEB 15 / 8PM

SHAW & SŌ PERCUSSION

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion dissolve the boundaries between classical and pop, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as James Joyce, ABBA, American roots music, and Christian hymns.

SHAW & GABRIEL KAHANE

CONCERTS @ LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE LAGUNA BEACH, CA

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Festival Information BOX OFFICE HOURS The Festival Box Office is in the center of Libbey Park, just North of the Tennis Courts. Our friendly staff and interns will be glad to help you with ticket purchases and questions, as well as ordering your 2025 Festival series passes.

Assisted listening devices are available for checkout at the Box Office. Please bring a valid photo ID. If you cannot use your tickets, convert them to a tax-deductible contribution at least one day before the concert. Tickets received less than 24 hours in advance may still be converted. Stop by the Box Office or call our Ticket Donation Hotline at 805 646 2192.

HOURS OF OPERATION: Thurs., June 6 12pm-9pm Fri., June 7 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sat., June 8 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sun., June 9 9am-1pm / 4pm-7pm LATE SEATING Performances start at the time designated on your ticket. In deference to the comfort and listening pleasure of the audience, late-arriving patrons will not be seated while music is being performed. Latecomers are asked to wait quietly in the designated areas until the first break in the program when ushers will assist them to their seats.

Late seating breaks vary by concert and are at the discretion of the House Manager in consultation with the conductor and performing artists. Please note that select performances may not have late seating opportunities. Chimes will ring before the concert starts and before the end of intermission.

Please note: Artists and programs are subject to change without notice. In the event of a weather emergency, concerts may be canceled without ticket refunds.

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PHOTOS AND RECORDINGS Photography, audio recording, and videography are prohibited during Festival performances.

We appreciate your cooperation in helping us create an environment for the artists that is not distracting.

PHONES AND ELECTRONIC DEVICES As a courtesy to others, please turn off your phone, car alarm, and any other electronic device that makes noise or emits light before the start of Festival performances. Efforts to control paper rustling will be appreciated by both audience members and artists.

ALCOHOL & DRINKS POLICY Due to City of Ojai’s policy, alcohol that is purchased at the Festival’s Green Room in the Park must be consumed in the designated restricted areas. Alcohol purchased at the Green Room will be permitted only in the lawn area of the Bowl. We appreciate that patrons do not bring beverages in the reserved seating sections of the Libbey Bowl. No food or drinks will be allowed in our off-campus venues. No outside alcohol may be brought into Festival concerts and events.

SMOKING POLICY Both Libbey Park and Libbey Bowl are designated no-smoking zones (including vape pens, e-cigarettes) by the City of Ojai. The Festival’s office, donor lounge, off-campus events, and backstage are also non-smoking areas.

LAWN SEATING As a courtesy to other lawn patrons, blankets and low-rise chairs are preferred. Please bring low-rise, beach-style chairs with legs of 10 inches or less. Patrons with higher-rise chairs, such as camping or deck chairs, will be asked to move to the house right side of the lawn. Please do not leave valuable items in the lawn area and be sure to remove lawn chairs at the end of each Festival day. The Festival is not responsible for lost or damaged items.

LOST AND FOUND If you lose or find an item, please check in with the Festival Box Office, just outside the entrance to Libbey Bowl.

RESTROOMS The Festival provides and maintains portable restrooms which are located 50 yards east of the Box Office in Libbey Park.

ADA ACCOMMODATIONS Seating for patrons with wheelchairs is available in a reserved section of Libbey Bowl. Please contact the Box Office as early as possible for special seating requests. A handicapped parking lot is located on Signal Street for vehicles displaying a DMV handicapped parking hang tag or license plate. Early arrival is encouraged, as these spaces fill up. For patrons requiring a short walk into Libbey Bowl, a handicapped drop-off point is located near the backstage on Signal Street. Please notify the barricade attendant and they will direct you. There is also nearby parking for the drivers of those needing assistance. For listening devices, please visit the Box Office. Public restrooms at the east end of Libbey Park are wheelchair accessible. Please contact an usher if you need assistance.

SERVICE ANIMALS Patrons with disabilities are welcome to bring service animals. Service animals, as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks directly related to a person’s disability. The dog must be able to rest in the seat area of the individual with a disability, excluding aisles or walkways. Please note that any animal whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support does not qualify as a service animal under ADA regulations.

We reserve the right to withhold or remove a service dog that fundamentally alters the nature of our programming by behaving in an unacceptable way during a performance, and/ or if the person with the disability does not or cannot control the animal. No other animals or pets are permitted at Festival concerts and events.

IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY Emergency exits are clearly marked, please take note of your nearest one as you enter. In the event of an emergency, ushers and Festival staff will provide instructions. Contact an usher or member of the Festival staff if you require medical assistance.

AFTER THE PERFORMANCE We appreciate your cooperation in helping to clear the seating area after concerts. Be sure to take all lawn chairs and personal items with you when you leave the Bowl and please dispose your trash in the Festival recycle boxes.

GO GREEN The Festival strives to minimize its ecological footprint. We encourage you to do your share by separating your trash and using our recycle boxes provided by E.J. Harrison & Sons, and by using our complimentary water refill stations located throughout the Park and inside the Bowl. The same program book can be reused throughout the Festival and recycled at Festival’s end by dropping at the front gate.

ATMs There are a few banks within walking distance of Libbey Bowl: Pacific Western Bank (110 S. Ventura Street), Bank of America (205 W. Ojai Avenue) and Wells Fargo Bank (202 E. Matilija Street).

HEALTH & SAFETY PROTOCOL The Ojai Music Festival is committed to protecting and ensuring the health and safety of its staff, artists, volunteers, and the Ojai community. Your support and participation are greatly appreciated.

During the 2024 Festival, masks are optional but recommended for individuals who are at increased risk for severe disease. We will have hand sanitation supplies available throughout the Festival campus. Please stay at home if you have any symptoms of illness. These guidelines are subject to change based on the advice of public health officials and conditions at the time of the Festival. Keep informed with any updates on our free Mobile App.

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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Free Offerings and Events An important part of the Ojai Music Festival’s tradition is offering free events and musical surprises including pop-up performances during our four days together.

Check the Festival’s free Mobile App for times and places!

THURSDAY, JUNE 6 6:30-7:00PM

Musical Pop-Up Libbey Park Gazebo

FRIDAY, JUNE 7 11:30AM-12PM

Ojai Chats with Jay Campbell and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds Libbey Park Gazebo

6:00PM-6:30PM

Ojai Chats with Alexi Kenney and Xuan and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds Libbey Park Gazebo

SATURDAY, JUNE 8 8:00-8:30AM

Morning Meditation with Jay Campbell Chaparral Auditorium

11:30AM-12PM

Ojai Chats with Rick Stotjin and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds Libbey Park Gazebo

To get alerts and notifications or to check out happenings around Ojai at local businesses, go on the Festival’s free Mobile App.

6:00PM-6:30PM

Ojai Chats with Aliisa Neige Barrière and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Soundsr Libbey Park Gazebo

SUNDAY, JUNE 9 8:00-8:30AM

Morning Meditation with Ljubinka Kulisic Chaparral Auditorium Music of John Cage Cheap Imitation I and II (1969) Dream (1948) Souvenir (1948)

11:30AM-12PM

Ojai Chats with Ljubinka Kulisic and Sae Hashimoto and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds Libbey Park Gazebo

3:00PM

BRAVO Instrument Petting Zoo Libbey Park

4:00-5:00PM

Community Concert with MCO members Libbey Park Gazebo

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Thursday, June 6, 2024 | 3:00-5:00pm Ojai Presbyterian Church

OJAI TALKS PART I

Music Director Mitsuko Uchida with Ara Guzelimian BREAK

PART II

2024 Featured Artists with host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds

Ojai Talks is made possible by the generous support of Drs. Bridget Tsao and Bruce Brockman

OJAI PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 304 N. FOOTHILL ROAD, OJAI

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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Thursday, June 6, 2024 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl

Brentano String Quartet: Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin violins, Misha Amory viola, Nina Lee cello | Mitsuko Uchida piano | Lucy Fitz Gibbon soprano Joseph HAYDN

String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3 (“Bird”) I. Allegro moderato II. Scherzo: Allegretto III. Adagio ma non troppo IV. Finale: Rondo: Presto Brentano String Quartet

Arnold SCHOENBERG

Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 I. Leicht, zart (light, delicate) II. Langsam (slow) III. Sehr langsam (very slow) IV. Rasch, aber leicht (brisk, but light) V. Etwas rasch (somewhat brisk) VI. Sehr langsam (very slow) Mitsuko Uchida piano

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cathryn and Tom Krause

INTERMISSION Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART

Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 Mitsuko Uchida piano

The concert appearance of Lucy Fitz Gibbon is made possible by the generous support of Hope Tschopik Schneider The concert appearance of the Brentano String Quartet is made possible by Carolyn and Jamie Bennett

Arnold SCHOENBERG

String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10

I. Mässig (moderato) II. Sehr rasch (very fast) III. Litanei (“Litany”): Langsam (slow) (poetry of Stefan George) IV. Entrückung (“Rapture”): Sehr langsam (very slow) (poetry of Stefan George) Brentano String Quartet | Lucy Fitz Gibbon soprano

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Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809) String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3 (“Bird”) Hob. III:39 (1781) Arnold SCHOENBERG (1874-1951) Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (1911)

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-91) Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 (1782) Arnold SCHOENBERG (1874-1951) String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10 (1907-08)

Wit, Fantasy, Rapture Only a little more than a century and a quarter separates the quartets by Haydn and Schoenberg that frame our opening program, and both works emerged from the same Austro-German tradition. Yet being able to hear, on the same program, the shift in what had been thought musically possible by the time we reach the final movement of the Schoenberg allows us to relive one of the most momentous turning points in the history of Western music.

Schoenberg’s Second Quartet embodies a musical Copernican Revolution in its quest for “the emancipation of the dissonance” — that is, the dissolution of the laws and conventions of tonal harmony that had served as the bedrock for that tradition. (The presence of a solo soprano alongside the classical quartet of string players is merely one aspect of the work’s innovations.) The fourth and final movement, in which this rupture dramatically occurs, represents a pivotal moment for the birth of the Modernist outlook.

Modernism’s unfolding — in particular, its embrace of the so-called atonality (never a very helpful word) that Schoenberg transformed into a lingua franca for 20th-century composers — would be

experienced by many as traumatic and destabilizing. Yet the composer described the introductory music to the Second Quartet’s notorious finale in terms of the poetic vision he chose to set: “becoming relieved from gravitation — passing through clouds into thinner and thinner air, forgetting all the troubles of life on earth …”

But Haydn, too, must be credited with radically changing perceptions of what the language of music can encompass.

One of the leading architects of Classical style, Haydn depicted a stunning negation of the order on which it is based in the evocation of Chaos in his late masterwork The Creation.

The dichotomy becomes possible only through the deliberate subversion of tonal rules and the expectations established

by Classical style. Haydn continually generates ideas from the tension between conventional patterns and his subtle ways of undermining them — the driving force of this composer’s much-lauded “wit.”

With his tirelessly innovative output of string quartets and symphonies, Haydn developed genres principally meant for entertainment into vehicles for sophisticated contemplation (without ever losing sight of the former).

It was only with the Op. 33 set, written in 1781 — when he was approaching 50 — that Haydn actually began using the term string quartet (preferring the term divertimento prior to that). He announced that these quartets had been written “in a new and special way.” The nickname “Bird” refers to the imaginary evocation of avian chirping in the first movement, but we can also hear the wonderful opening of the C major Quartet as a teasing exploration of tonality that alternately seizes and lets go of the home key in surprising feints.

Mozart must have been especially enchanted by the contrast in mood between the Adagio’s intimacy and the unbuttoned comedy of the final movement. Haydn was one of the few living composers he deeply admired, and the two became friends after Mozart had settled in Vienna in 1781. Each welcomed the influence of the other.

The Fantasia in D minor dates from 1782, the same year Haydn’s Op. 33 quartets were published, but was likely left unfinished. Only after Mozart’s death was the manuscript published. For the missing measures at the end of the piece, Mitsuko Uchida supplies her own ending based on the opening. The Fantasia’s tempo changes several times, suggesting CONTINUED }}

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WIT, FANTASY, RAPTURE an improvisational attitude: At the heart is an aria-like Adagio of cutting pathos.

The tonal shift to D major in the Allegretto conclusion has the effect not so much of a resolution of the grief preceding it as of a past joy recalled.

Uchida oscillates with ease between the idioms of the First and Second Viennese Schools. Just five minutes or so in duration, the Six Little Piano Pieces comprising Schoenberg’s Op. 19 can seem, in her hands, to “anticipate” the variability of Mozart’s Fantasia. These hermetic, freely atonal miniatures dating from early 1911 — the first five were composed in a single day — condense implicitly longer forms (such as an entire aria in No. 5) into aphorisms. Schoenberg’s later systematic codification of his ideas led to the charge that it is overly “cerebral,” but this music vibrates with emotional intensity and expression — above all in the last piece, No. 6, written independently in 1911 in response to the death of his admired Mahler.

Turmoil in Schoenberg’s personal life is inseparable from the composition of the epochal Second Quartet. He started writing it in 1907, when he was experiencing marital strain with his first wife, Mathilde, along with a kind of separation anxiety over the departure of his champion Mahler for the New World.

The strain worsened, and Mathilde left her

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husband in 1908 to pursue a relationship with the Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl. After Schoenberg persuaded Mathilde to return, Gerstl committed suicide. The painter’s boldly original work, meanwhile, left a strong mark on the composer.

Ironically, Schoenberg seems on one level to be moving into a more Classical direction in this score. While his First String Quartet is cast in a large-scale single movement, the Second is a shorter composition that reverts to the familiar four-movement design, the first three of which adhere to the paradigm of a sonata form first movement, a scherzo, and a slow movement. The final movement, the longest, omits a key signature (though Schoenberg set the others in F-sharp minor, D minor, and E-flat minor, respectively).

Schoenberg’s sardonic humor emerges in the scherzo, whose middle section quotes the Viennese folk song “O du lieber Augustin.” Originating in the plague years, the song’s phrase “alles ist hin!” (“It’s all over!”) might serve as an epigram for this turning point in musical and cultural history.

In his Transfigured Night of 1899 — another piece informed by his relationship with Mathilde — Schoenberg had combined poetic inspiration with

string chamber music. But he actually incorporates texts by the German Symbolist poet Stefan George (18681933) into the last two movements of the Second Quartet. Adding a soprano was all the more provocative, since the string quartet was understood as the quintessentially instrumental form of discourse. More than Beethoven in the Ninth, Mahler’s song movements in the Wunderhorn symphonies would seem to be the pertinent model for Schoenberg.

The slow Litany movement unfolds as a set of variations — not on a theme per se, but on fragments and themes derived from the opening movement and the scherzo. George’s text expresses a mood of gloom, grief, and longing that casts a retrospective light on the preceding movements. Entrückung (“Rapture”), the text used in the finale, opens with the line Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten (“I feel air from another planet”).

Conventional tonality is affirmed by the “gravitational” pull of the tonic, but in the brave new world into which Schoenberg ventures here, the loss of that compass triggers an exhilarating sense of weightlessness. Even with the return to F-sharp major at the conclusion, the sensation of a radiantly floating vision of a new reality lingers.

—THOMAS MAY

08.02.2024

LOBERO THEATRE

FLAMENCO ARTS FESTIVAL 2024 FLAMENCO ARTS FESTIVAL USA presents, direct from Spain, Mercedes de Córdoba and company in the West Coast Premiere of Ser...Ni Conmigo Ni Sin Mí, with a pre-concert reception and after party to celebrate!

For tickets visit LOBERO.ORG or scan the QR code

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New Music Decanted 2024 Summer Festival

Kaija Saariaho

The Complete Chamber Music

Napa, California August 16 - 18

Reserve Your Tickets NewMusicDecanted.org Sponsored By 78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

| JUNE 6-9, 2024 | 41

Friday, June 7, 2024 | 8:00am Zalk Theater, Besant Hill School

OJAI DAWNS Jay Campbell cello | Sae Hashimoto percussion | Ljubinka Kulisic accordion Giuseppe COLOMBI

Ciaccona Jay Campbell cello

Kaija SAARIAHO

Dreaming Chaconne Jay Campbell cello

Helmut LACHENMANN

Intérieur I Sae Hashimoto percussion

Helmut LACHENMANN

Toccatina Jay Campbell cello

Sofia GUBAIDULINA

In Croce Jay Campbell cello | Ljubinka Kulisic accordion

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Don Pattison The concert appearance of Jay Campbell is made possible by the generous support of Abby Sher The concert appearance of Sae Hashimoto is made possible by Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney The concert appearance of Ljubinka Kulisic is made possible by Claire and David Oxtoby There is no intermission during the concert

ZALK THEATER, BESANT HILL SCHOOL 8585 OJAI SANTA PAULA ROAD

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Giuseppe COLOMBI (1635-94) Ciaccona (date unknown) Kaija SAARIAHO (1952-2023) Dreaming Chaconne (2010)

Helmut LACHENMANN (b. 1935) Intérieur I (1965-66) Toccatina (1986), arranged for cello

by Jay Campbell Sofia GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931) In Croce (1979), arranged for accordion and cello in 1991 by Elsbeth Moser

Sound Production Last night’s opening concert invited questions about what it means to evolve and innovate within a shared language — the system of Western tonality as shaped and challenged by Haydn, Mozart, and Schoenberg. We continue this morning with a trio of contemporary composers who interrogate our assumptions about instruments themselves and the kinds of sounds they produce.

We open the program with Kaija Saariaho’s Dreaming Chaconne, her contribution to a project she helped to organize to celebrate the 50th birthday of her compatriot, the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen. A total of 31 composers from 12 countries were invited to create a variation on one of the earliest pieces known to be written for solo cello: a chaconne by the Italian composer Giuseppe Colombi (1635-94) for an earlier and larger form of the cello called a basso (which Jay Campbell plays as a prelude to Saariaho’s variation). None of the composers was aware of which colleagues had also been invited to participate — hence the title Mystery Variations for the overall project.

Saariaho’s fabric of slow trills between stopped notes and natural harmonics, feathery slides, and tremolos forms a

sonic veil behind which the shape of Colombi’s chaconne remains only as a spectral memory.

The eminent German composer Helmut Lachenmann, who was invited by Mitsuko Uchida to a residency at the Marlboro Music School and Festival last year, has for decades pursued his fascination with what he terms the “anatomy” of sound and its production. Intérieur I is a breakthrough work from the mid-1960s that embodies Lachenmann’s radically new focus on composition as the production of sounds and the conditions under which this occurs. Percussion instruments had been a kind of last timbral frontier for Modernism.

But Lachenmann’s approach defamiliarizes the musician’s and audience’s relationship with the panoply of largely untuned percussion instruments.

Various types of drumsticks, mallets, even the player’s hands are not used in the expected ways but produce odd rubbings and ghostly tremolos: a kind of music “in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves,” as the composer described his concept of instrumental musique concrète.

The mindfulness Lachenmann demands is immediately apparent in the briefer and later Toccatina, originally written for solo violin but performed here in Jay Campbell’s arrangement for cello.

Referring to the classical toccata, the title plays on the idea of instrumental virtuosity through dexterous touching and fingering of the instrument. (The Italian root toccare, “to touch,” itself draws attention to the physical production of sound.)

Lachenmann adapts percussive effects in mesmerizing ways, asking the player to tap the metal screw of the vertically held bow onto the instrument’s strings (and even includes an extra clef detailing the positions of these contact points).

Campbell likens performing Toccatina to undertaking “a very intense tightrope walk.

The sound is so tiny and fragile. It’s very playful — and dangerous.”

Sofia Gubaidulina came of age as an outsider in the Soviet Union — an artist of half-Russian, half-Tatar origins — which encouraged her openness to exploring unconventional sonorities. Many of her compositions reconsider the raw material — the physical manifestations — of musical facts: pulses, breaths, tunings.

At the same time, Gubaidulina’s Russian Orthodox faith has inspired her to

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SOUND PRODUCTION interpret these “facts” in spiritual and even mystical terms.

In Croce incorporates the Christian symbol indicated by the title (“On the Cross”) into the music itself through a series of literal and figurative “crossings” of register and texture between the instruments: cello and organ in the original version of 1979 and cello and bayan (Russian button accordion) in the later arrangement we hear. But the surface plan of this drama is not as schematic as a simple summary might indicate.

Gubaidulina encourages a suspension of our sense of ordinary time as we enter this labyrinth of fluctuating intensities.

Gubaidulina extracts a remarkable variety of colors from the unusual pairing of instruments, stretching each to its limits.

The bayan begins in a lofty, diatonic A major space, while the cello emerges from the depths on a low E, striving to break free with anguished chromatic slides. They gradually exchange positions, reaching a climax where the two lines cross. The piece ends with the cello sounding almost flute-like in its otherworldly high perch against the deep rumbling of the bayan far below — where the cello, in a final gesture, again meets its counterpart via a descending glissando.

Mitsuko Uchida and Helmut Lachenmann, Wilmington, VT, 2023.

Photo by Ara Guzelimian.

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—THOMAS MAY

Jay Campbell and Sofia Gubaidulina at Marlboro Music Festival, VT, 2016.

Photo by Pete Checchia, courtesy of the Marlboro Music Festival.

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Friday, June 7, 2024 | 10:00am Libbey Bowl

Julie Smith Phillips harp | Jay Campbell cello | Sae Hashimoto percussion | Rick Stotijn double bass Brentano String Quartet: Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin violins, Misha Amory viola, Nina Lee cello Kaija SAARIAHO

Fall Julie Smith Phillips harp

Helmut LACHENMANN

Pression Jay Campbell cello

Sofia GUBAIDULINA

Five Etudes I. Largo II. Allegretto III. Adagio IV. Allegro disparato V. Andante Julie Smith Phillips harp | Sae Hashimoto percussion Rick Stotijn double bass

Béla BARTÓK This concert is made possible with the generous support of Carol and Luther Luedtke OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Jay Campbell There is no intermission during the concert

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String Quartet No. 5 I. Allegro II. Adagio molto III. Scherzo: alla bulgarese IV. Andante V. Finale: Allegro vivace Brentano String Quartet

Kaija SAARIAHO (1952-2023) Fall (1991)

Sofia GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931) Five Etudes (1965)

Helmut LACHENMANN (b. 1935) Pression (1969-1970)

Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945) String Quartet No. 5 (1934)

Incorrect Paths Over the past decade, Mitsuko Uchida has invited three of the four composers on this morning’s program to participate in the composer residency program at the Marlboro Music Festival — artists she admires as “some of the most compelling musical thinkers of our time.” (Music by two other former composers-in-residence — György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann — can also be heard on Sunday’s programs.)

The late Kaija Saariaho in fact returned to collaborate with the Marlboro musicians over two back-to-back summers in 2014-15. Fall is an arresting example of Saariaho’s ability to convey an assemblage of freely associated images through the interchange of acoustic and electronic sounds and a poetics of timbre. Scored for solo harp and electronics, Fall is the second-to-last section of her ballet score Maa (Finnish for “land,” “earth,” “world”).

In lieu of a plotted scenario, Maa explores themes of “passing from one state to another; opening doors, gates, falling, crossing the Water,” the composer writes.

Fall in particular evokes “an idea about falling into an underworld.” It traces an arc that begins in the harp’s highest register, where the soloist is instructed to play “sorrowfully, always with expression,” and culminates in a violently downwardsweeping glissando.

What associations do we bring to each instrument, even before a note emerges?

In his pivotal early piece Pression for solo cello, the German composer Helmut Lachenmann challenges us to radically rethink what the cello represents — and, in the process, aims to provoke us out of complacent “habits” in approaching the phenomenon of a performance.

Lachenmann uncovers “such a subtle spectrum of pitch to noise that, by the end of the piece, you start hearing noises in interesting new ways,” cellist Jay Campbell points out. “When I play it, I feel like I’m discovering the cello again.”

Pression intensifies our focus on the physicality of the cello and of the musician’s relationship with this body of wood and tense strings stretched over a bridge, of finger flesh versus bow wood and hair. Only at the center of the piece is a “normal” note produced in the expected way. Even the score is unconventional — not the code for an already finished composition but a graphical prescription illustrating what actions the cellist is to take.

Sofia Gubaidulina is similarly represented by an important early work. In fact, she has characterized Five Etudes for harp, double bass, and percussion from 1965 as the work in which she first found

her distinctive voice. Born in the great crossroads city of Kazan on the Volga River in the Tatar Republic, she came of age in the Soviet Union and took to heart the words of advice she received from Dmitri Shostakovich, who led her examination committee when she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1959: “Don’t be afraid to be yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect path.”

Gubaidulina’s originality in Five Etudes is apparent in both the formal design and the unusual soundscape. Instead of a traditional genre — she has no interest in the gradual improvement of technique suggested by the conventional etude — the work comprises five miniatures in different tempos. With her configuration of harp, double bass, and tuned and untuned percussion, Gubaidulina constructs an intriguing variety of sonic pictures framed by mysterious double bass pizzicati that seem to emerge from deep in the earth.

She evokes the energy of improvised jazz (second piece) and of a manic scherzo (in the fourth piece, a “desperate Allegro”), while the central Adagio brings to mind an archaic ritual or elegy, eventually merging with silence. “From this moment, I realized that I would pay no attention at all to anybody else,” Gubaidulina remarked of Five Etudes. “I would do as I liked.”

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INCORRECT PATHS The interest in the materiality of instruments and their sonorities manifested by the first three works on our program is mirrored by the string quartets of Béla Bartók. His six contributions to the genre span three decades, mapping the Hungarian composer’s development as an artist. They form a cycle that is regularly compared to Beethoven’s quartets, a pinnacle of formal, expressive, and technical innovation.

The tactile energy of the “Bartók” or “snap” pizzicato — in which the string(s) is plucked vertically and released so powerfully that it rebounds against the fingerboard — is a well-known example of the palette of “special effects,” along with exaggerated sliding, playing with the wood of the bow, raspy scratching at the bridge, and other techniques that are integrated into the language of the quartets. Bartók’s tireless research into Eastern European and North African folk music informs myriad aspects of the quartets, each of which inhabits a distinctive world.

The String Quartet No. 5, the only one of the six commissioned for an American audience, originated when the legendary music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, its dedicatee, requested Bartók to contribute a work for a chamber music festival she was sponsoring.

The composer, who would reluctantly emigrate to the United States in 1940, was still living in Budapest and reportedly

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isolated himself to complete the score within a month in the late summer of 1934, at the beginning of an especially productive creative period; the Kolisch Quartet gave the premiere at the Library of Congress in 1935.

Regarded as less overtly experimental and more extroverted than its predecessors, the Quartet No. 5 unfolds in five movements showing Bartók’s ongoing fascination with arch form: Revolving around a lively scherzo at the center are two slow movements, which themselves are framed by two fast-paced outer movements. The opening Allegro, in turn, is shaped as a microcosm of arch form, with the material from the exposition reversed when presented again in the reprise. Bartók posits an alternative to Schoenberg’s 12-tone method in his novel use of a melody-centered chromaticism.

Another Bartók signature, the composer’s so-called “night music” style, comes to the fore in the mysterious atmospheres and arresting timbral vocabulary of the slow movements. The central Scherzo adapts the uneven rhythmic patterns and vigor of Bulgarian folk music. A vivid sense of combustible energy drives the finale. Punctuated by sudden pauses, this vehement music swerves into an enigmatic episode toward the end that renders the material in an out-of-tune, amusement-park-like parody.”

—THOMAS MAY

Mitsuko Uchida and Kaija Saariaho, Marlboro Music Festival, VT, 2014. Photo by Allen Cohen, courtesy of the Marlboro Music Festival.

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Friday, June 7, 2024 | 3:30pm Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

SHIFTING GROUND Alexi Kenney violin | Xuan visual art Rafiq BHATIA

Descent

J.S. BACH

Allemande from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004

Paul WIANCKO

Allemande from X Suite

— Angélica NEGRÓN

The Violinist for violin and electronics, story by Ana Fabrega

—

Shifting Ground is produced in collaboration with Baryshnikov Arts, New York City.

Visual art by Xuan commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman The concert appearance of Alexi Kenney is made possible by the generous support of Michele Brustin The concert appearance of Xuan is made possible by Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner There is no intermission during the concert GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS, 723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI)

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J.S. BACH

Grave from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003

Nicola MATTEIS

Alia Fantasia

Kaija SAARIAHO

Nocturne for solo violin

Salina FISHER

Hikari for solo violin

— Mario DAVIDOVSKY

Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape

— Matthew BURTNER

Elegy (Muir Glacier 1889-2009) for violin and glacier sonification

J.S. BACH

Chaconne from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004

Rafiq BHATIA (b. 1987) Descent (2021) J.S. BACH (1685-1750) Allemande from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (1720)

J.S. BACH (1685-1750) Grave from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 (1720)

Mario DAVIDOVSKY (1934-2019) Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape (1988)

Nicola MATTEIS (1650-1714) Alia Fantasia (c. 1700)

Matthew BURTNER b. 1971) Elegy (Muir Glacier 1889-2009) for violin and glacier sonification (2017/2020)

Paul WIANCKO (b. 1983) Allemande from X Suite (2019)

Kaija SAARIAHO (1952-2023) Nocturne for solo violin (1994)

Angélica NEGRÓN (b. 1981) The Violinist for violin and electronics, story by Ana Fabrega (2023)

Salina FISHER (b. 1993) Hikari for solo violin (2023)

J.S. BACH (1685-1750) Chaconne from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (1720)

Artist’s Statement by Alexi Kenney I must have been about 10 years old when I first heard J.S. Bach’s Chaconne, introduced to me by my then-teacher Jenny Rudin. I remember being first overwhelmed by its magnitude, its complexity, its difficulty, then enchanted by its mysterious power to hold me enraptured and transported for a full 13 minutes.

Over the years, the Chaconne has come to occupy maybe the biggest and most important place of any piece of music in my life: It provides a meditative landscape for me to think through creative thoughts; it continues to be the piece I turn to to get myself back into playing shape after taking breaks away from the violin; and, several years ago, it was the only way that seemed to make sense to process the death of the same teacher who had taught it to me when I was young.

Through my lifetime of loving the Chaconne came the idea that inspired Shifting Ground: Bach is connected to

everything. Beyond his music’s most important capacity to speak straight to the soul, Bach’s influence ripples through time and transcends genre. The structures, harmonies, and counterpoint he mastered are present in just about every genre of music we listen to today, and certainly have lived in the consciousness of almost all classical composers and performers who came after him.

Shifting Ground is a program whose titular word ground bears homage to Bach’s era, the Baroque, in which a bass line (also called a ground bass) is repeated with embellishments and variations on top of it.

This is the form that the Chaconne takes over the span of its 13 minutes: a constant cycling and recycling of the same bass line, on top of which Bach constructs a whole life.

This program is also an excavation of music’s roots, and an observation of their manifestation and development through time. It opens with Rafiq Bhatia’s Descent,

where the solo violin dangerously careens down the entire length of its register until it hits rock bottom. Kaija Saariaho, Paul Wiancko, and Salina Fisher all intentionally used Bach as a jumping-off point for their works on this program. Nicola Matteis was Bach’s contemporary, yet I feel as though his spiritual and almost ambient music could easily be written today. Angélica Negrón’s raucous and beautiful nightmare The Violinist is a narrated short story that provides a moment of respite and humor in the program, while Mario Davidovsky explodes Bach’s world into outer space, creating chamber music between violin and synthesizer. In the final piece before the Chaconne, Matthew Burtner’s Elegy ruminates on the impermanence and fragility of our natural surroundings, placing the violin over a field recording of Muir Glacier as it slowly melts due to climate change. And finally the Chaconne, a sort of extension of all that we have heard, and a final meditation on humanity itself.

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Friday, June 7, 2024 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl

Mahler Chamber Orchestra Mitsuko Uchida piano and director José Maria Blumenschein concertmaster and leader Igor STRAVINSKY

Fanfare for a New Theater Matthew Sadler and Alexander Freund trumpets

Anton WEBERN

Five Movements for Strings, Op. 5 I. Heftig bewegt (violently animated) II. Sehr langsam (very slow) III. Sehr bewegt (very animated) IV. Sehr bewegt (very animated) V. In zarter Bewegung (with gentle movement)

Arnold SCHOENBERG

Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 INTERMISSION

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Ann Barrett in memory of Olin Barrett OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Alexi Kenney and Xuan

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Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 482 I. Allegro II. Andante III. Allegro Mitsuko Uchida piano and director

The residency of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is made possible by the generous support of the Colburn Foundation, Carol Colburn Grigor-Dunard Fund USA, Kathleen and James Drummy, Berta and Frank Gehry, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, and Terri and Jerry Kohl

Igor STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) Fanfare for a New Theater (1964)

Arnold SCHOENBERG (1874-1951) Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (1906)

Anton WEBERN (1883-1945) Five Movements for Strings, Op. 5 (1909; arranged for string orchestra 1929)

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-91) Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 482 (1785)

Creative Outbursts Igor Stravinsky knew how to call an audience to attention. His Fanfare for a New Theater has the honor of throwing the first musical pitch for this evening’s concert. But this is no standard-issue fanfare. Written for the opening of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1964 (since renamed the David H. Koch Theater), the piece is of late vintage and represents the composer’s late period, when he had come to admire and experiment with the serial method of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers.

More than a matter of new methods, Stravinsky’s shocking embrace of a personal approach to serialism had philosophical implications, challenging the longstanding polarization of 20th-century Modernism into pro-Stravinsky versus proSchoenberg camps.

Two trumpets, less than a minute of music: Fanfare manages, with such minimal means, to compress an astonishingly complex yet vivid sonic picture of unity and individuality, of festivity both solemn and playful.

It was, specifically, his admiration of the music of Schoenberg’s student Anton Webern that brought Stravinsky around to the untapped potential of the “method of composing with 12 tones which are related only with one another” (as Schoenberg once defined his 12tone serial technique). Webern himself internalized, with an uncanny intensity, what he learned from his teacher but transformed it into a distinctive language of his own.

Five Movements for Strings, an arrangement for string orchestra from 1929 of Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, was his first contribution to the genre. He had composed the latter in 1909, the year after Schoenberg’s epochal String Quartet No. 2 (which was performed on last night’s opening program). Webern had also concluded his formal study with his mentor in 1908 and soon adopted his own approach to the unrestricted atonality that Schoenberg was pioneering. For example, Webern pushed the principle of brevity and compression to an extreme, developing a signature aphoristic style that his teacher likened

to “a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath.”

The range of expressive and sonic terrain encompassed by Five Movements certainly belies the composition’s relatively brief duration: the fifth movement, with its poetry of spareness, is the longest but lasts only about four minutes; the shortest, at the center, is less than a minute. Webern mimics aspects of a Classical long-form work with an opening allegro based on contrasts; a muted slow movement; a skittish scherzo; another, rather unworldly, slow movement (calling for ghostly sul ponticello); and a finale that seems to dramatize the dissolution of organized sound into silence “with tender animation.”

Schoenberg responded to the new century’s pervasive sense of artistic crisis with an astonishing outburst of creativity.

His ongoing quest to advance the musical tradition to which he felt so profoundly connected led to his experiments with a language no longer tethered to the gravitation toward a tonal center — to what became known as atonality. A pivotal work tending in this direction is CONTINUED }}

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CREATIVE OUTBURSTS the Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1906.

“I believed I had now found my own personal style of composing … and that a way had been shown out of the perplexities in which we young composers had been involved,” Schoenberg recalled, describing the initial joy he felt after completing the score. But he soon found this assessment to be “as lovely a dream as it was a disappointing illusion.” The Chamber Symphony thus sets the stage for the even more radical breakthroughs of works like the String Quartet No. 2 two years later. It is not “atonal” (Schoenberg anchors the piece in E major) but it does rely on a harmonic vocabulary that is tonally ambiguous.

By scoring the work for 15 soloists, Schoenberg renounces the gigantizing tendencies of late Romanticism (though he had yet to complete his massive oratorio Gurre-Lieder) in favor of concision and compression. Time is

compressed as well: the dimensions of a full-scale symphony are concentrated into 20 or so minutes, though Schoenberg maximizes the sense of expressive content. Architecturally ingenious, the Chamber Symphony can be parsed as a seamless symphony incorporating a first movement (brief introduction — another rousing fanfare idea to compare with Stravinsky’s — and exposition), a scherzo and trio, a slow movement, and a finale (presenting a recapitulation) — or as a single-movement sonata with interludes bridging the main sections.

Schoenberg referred to the “centrifugal” tendencies of his thematic material.

Through its restlessly overlapping gestures and polyphonic adventures, the Chamber Symphony conveys a sense of hyperactively firing musical synapses — as if the composer were trying to portray the process of evolution itself. The effect is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.

Dating from December 1785, an especially fecund period of Mozart’s piano concerto production, the Piano Concerto in E-flat major tends to be eclipsed by the two concertos he had written earlier that year.

But K. 482 explores a unique soundscape of its own by replacing the oboes with the mellow sonority of clarinets and engaging the woodwinds in elegantly intimate conversations with the piano soloist, who makes her entrance playing material that will have an integral role in the development of the first movement.

Mozart fills the canvas of this spacious opening movement with a prodigal abundance of thematic and lyrical ideas (in contrast with Haydn’s tendency towards the thrifty use of material).

The shift to a minor key (C minor) for the variation-based Andante initially comes as a surprise but, in Mozart’s hands, gives the concerto an indelible emotional depth.

His obsession with opera also leaves a mark. Mozart was already hard at work composing the first of his collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro (which would be premiered in the following May). Something of the bittersweet Eros that pervades Figaro might be said to flavor the Andante as well.

Another surprise is the gently sensuous, minuet-like andantino episode that arrives in the middle of the catchy finale — more evidence of the Figaro sound waiting in the wings. An amiable nod to the temperament of Mozart’s friend Haydn, who understood his younger peer’s genius like no one else, appears near the very end — yet in a touch that fully reaffirms Mozart’s own personality, as composer and pianist alike.

—THOMAS MAY

Arnold Schoenberg | Photo: UCLA Archives

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Announcing the 106th Concert Season 2024/2025 Presenting the world’s finest classical artists since 1919

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Sir Antonio Pappano

INTERNATIONAL SERIES at the Granada Theatre MASTERSERIES at the Lobero Theatre

Anne Akiko Meyers

Yefim Bronfman

Season Subscriptions On Sale Now! For more information, visit camasb.org C O M M U N I T Y A RT S M US IC A S S O C I AT IO N O F S A N TA B A R B A R A

78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

| JUNE 6-9, 2024 | 55

Saturday, June 8, 2024 | 10:00am Libbey Bowl

Ljubinka Kulisic accordion | Rick Stotijn double bass Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra John ZORN

Road Runner Ljubinka Kulisic accordion

Missy MAZZOLI

Dark with Excessive Bright Rick Stotijn double bass | José Maria Blumenschein concertmaster and leader Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra

John ADAMS

Shaker Loops Shaking and Trembling Hymning Slews Loops and Verses A Final Shaking Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra: Alexandra Preucil, May Kunstovny, and Naomi Peters violins, Yannick Dondelinger viola, Stefan Faludi and Christoph Richter cellos, Naomi Shaham double bass

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Rick Stotjin There is no intermission during the concert

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The residency of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is made possible by the generous support of the Colburn Foundation, Carol Colburn Grigor-Dunard Fund USA, Kathleen and James Drummy, Berta and Frank Gehry, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, and Terri and Jerry Kohl

John ZORN (b. 1953) Road Runner (1985)

Missy MAZZOLI (b. 1980) Dark with Excessive Bright (2018)

John ADAMS (b. 1947) Shaker Loops (1978; rev. 1983)

animated film. The quotes shift abruptly from classical rep (“a la Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody”) to pop culture (the Dragnet theme) and dance styles, with instructions to “make mistakes, drunkenly” or “knock on door” mixed in among other frenzied gestures.

in particular as an opera composer: Her remarkable Breaking the Waves received a new production this spring at Detroit Opera, and she is at work on a Met commission to adapt George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Mazzoli has become a sought-after voice in the concert hall as well, receiving commissions from such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, National Symphony, and, in the case of Dark with Excessive Bright, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which cocommissioned the piece in 2018 with the London-based Aurora Orchestra.

Changing Contexts However straightforward they may seem on the surface, musical quotations can open up astonishingly complex, even subversive dimensions. Like the language of Western tonal harmony itself, their effect in a composition is deeply reliant on context. Schoenberg’s famous allusion to a Viennese folk song in the second movement of his landmark String Quartet No. 2, for example, has generated endless interpretations.

A lot of fun is to be had with the restless collage of quotations that the uber-prolific John Zorn has jam-packed into Road Runner. But their manic velocity and the randomness give the piece a surreal (if not sinister) edge. The epitome of the downtown New York composer, Zorn composed Road Runner in 1985, the year of his breakthrough album of Ennio Morricone covers, The Big Gundown, (and a decade before launching his experimental Tzadik Records label).

No interpretation can be the same, since Zorn loads the piece with options for improvising and “noodling” on the accordion. Illustrated by pasted-on cutouts of images of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, the graphic score comprises 23 short, block-like sections that proceed spasmodically, like a stop-start

“Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear, / Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim / Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes”: Along with her allusions to Baroque style, Missy Mazzoli’s composition takes its title from a literary quotation — namely, this passage from the beginning of Book III of Paradise Lost, in which Milton attempts to describe the ineffable by depicting God. Another quote is in order: “Her phrases remind me of a great novelist’s sentences, even those of my favorite novelist, Henry James, in the way that they seem always to be searching, falling back, leaping forward; in their hesitation and their charge, their faltering and their determination.” — from the writer Garth Greenwell, who was enlisted to write the liner notes for the BIS recording of the solo violin version of Dark with Excessive Bright.

Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2022, Mazzoli has earned acclaim

Initially written for ACO’s principal double bassist Maxime Bibeau, Dark with Excessive Bright shows Mazzoli’s fascination with the drama inherent in the concerto format. The phrase by Milton that she chose as her title “is a surreal and evocative description of God, written by a blind man,” Mazzoli writes. “I love the impossibility of this phrase, and felt it was a strangely accurate way to describe the dark but heartrending sound of the double bass itself.”

Immersing herself in Baroque and Renaissance music while composing the piece, Mazzoli became intrigued

by Bibeau’s double bass, “a massive instrument built in 1580 that was stored CONTINUED }}

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CHANGING CONTEXTS in an Italian monastery for hundreds of years and even patched with pages from the Good Friday liturgy. I imagined this instrument as a historian, an object that collected the music of the passing centuries in the twists of its neck and the fibers of its wood, finally emerging into the light at age 400 and singing it all into the world. While loosely based in Baroque idioms, this piece slips between string techniques from several centuries, all while twisting a pattern of repeated chords beyond recognition.”

John Adams’s early work Shaker Loops, which first established his wider reputation, has in turn been quoted in other contexts. This music can be heard accompanying pivotal scenes in films as disparate as the Charles Bukowski– inspired Barfly (1987) and Io sono l’amore (2009, from Luca Guadagnino’s “Desire” trilogy). Showing the composer’s fondness for punning and allusive titles, Shaker Loops combines the prominent use of “shakes” (another term for trills) with the looping technique that Steve Reich made into a springboard for his brand of Minimalism.

Shaker Loops developed from an earlier piece Adams wrote during the mid-1970s period of electronic experimentalism that preceded his turn to the idioms of Minimalism. Scored for a string septet

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(three violins, viola, two cellos, and contrabass), the original Shaker Loops was premiered in San Francisco in December 1978, but Adams published a version for string orchestra in 1983, codifying some of the aspects in the original score that had been left up to the performers. This revised version can also be played by a septet — the format in which we hear the piece this morning — which, according to the composer, brings out the “clarity and individualism” of the piece.

Adams hit on a metaphoric connection between the string techniques he uses extensively throughout the piece — quivering tremolos on a single note or between different notes — and the ecstatic, transcendent dancing of the apocalyptic religious sect colloquially known as the Shakers, although he does not actually quote any Shaker tunes (such as “Simple Gifts,” the signature of Copland’s Appalachian Spring).

“Loops” refers to the Minimalist technique of repeating short fragments from a prerecorded tape over and over: When the same track is duplicated and replayed at different rates with the original track, an acoustical moiré pattern emerges that seems to change despite the repetitions.

Shaker Loops is built from this inherent dichotomy between stasis and change, the motoric and spiritual.

Shaker Loops is designed in four movements, each seamlessly connected to the next. The two outer sections mirror each other in their frenetic “shaking” and dramatic contrasts of volume. The contemplative second section (“Hymning Slews”) counterbalances this rapturous restlessness with haunting string glissandi in slow-motion grace. (Slew is another term from the electronic realm, referring to these glides between notes.) “Loops and Verses” mediates between tranquility and the agitated shaking music. This section climaxes in a series of tempo accelerations for the ensemble that Adams singles out as “the emotional high point of the piece.” The registration drifts upward to segue into “A Final Shaking,” which briefly incandesces before turning inward.

Shaker Loops was the first John Adams work to capture the attention of Peter Sellars. “It was thrilling,” the director recalls, “because here was music that was genuinely dramatic. Shaker Loops builds up these incredible sweeps of tension and then goes into astonishing release and then adrenalin-inspired visionary states: That is absolutely what you hope for in theater. I realized that this is theater music, with the ability to build and sustain tension.””

—THOMAS MAY

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Saturday, June 8, 2024 | 3:30pm (Repeat Performance) Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

SHIFTING GROUND Alexi Kenney violin | Xuan visual art Rafiq BHATIA

Descent

J.S. BACH

Allemande from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004

Paul WIANCKO

Allemande from X Suite

— Angélica NEGRÓN

The Violinist for violin and electronics, story by Ana Fabrega

—

Shifting Ground is produced in collaboration with Baryshnikov Arts, New York City.

Visual art by Xuan commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts This concert is made possible with the generous support of Meg Bates and Scott Johnson There is no intermission during the concert

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS, 723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI)

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J.S. BACH

Grave from Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003

Nicola MATTEIS

Alia Fantasia

Kaija SAARIAHO

Nocturne for solo violin

Salina FISHER

Hikari for solo violin

— Mario DAVIDOVSKY

Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape

— Matthew BURTNER

Elegy (Muir Glacier 1889-2009) for violin and glacier sonification

J.S. BACH

Chaconne from Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004

See p. 51 for statement on Shifting Ground by Alexi Kenney

Congratulations to the Ojai Music Festival on another spectacular season of artistic excellence.

–Stephan Farber | Founder & CEO

Investment Management | Family Office Services www.soundpostcapital.com

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Saturday, June 8, 2024 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl

Mahler Chamber Orchestra Mitsuko Uchida piano and director José Maria Blumenschein concertmaster and leader Aliisa Neige Barrière conductor Vicente Alberola clarinet Claude DEBUSSY (arr. Benno SACHS)

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Kaija SAARIAHO

Lichtbogen Aliisa Neige Barrière conductor INTERMISSION

Esa-Pekka SALONEN

Elegy (from kínēma) Vicente Alberola clarinet

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART

Piano Concerto in B-flat major, K. 595 I. Allegro II. Larghetto

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Nancy and Barry Sanders The concert appearance of Aliisa Neige Barriere is made possible by Linda Joyce Hodge OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Alissa Neige Barrière

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III. Allegro Mitsuko Uchida piano and director

The residency of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is made possible by the generous support of the Colburn Foundation, Carol Colburn Grigor-Dunard Fund USA, Kathleen and James Drummy, Berta and Frank Gehry, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, and Terri and Jerry Kohl

Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918) Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894; chamber arrangement by Benno Sachs, 1921)

Esa-Pekka SALONEN (b. 1958) Elegy (from kínēma) (2021) Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-91) Piano Concerto in B-flat major, K. 595 (1791)

Kaija SAARIAHO (1952-2023) Lichtbogen (1986)

Color Theory The solo flute’s melody wafts by, as if carried by a breeze — a dream lazily materializing, undecided as to its direction.

The opening bars of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun never seem to lose the capacity to cast their tantalizing spell, lulling our overstimulated systems with the pleasures of ambiguity.

This was a moment of great awakening, however, for Pierre Boulez. He declared that the faun-blown flute “brought new breath to the art of music” and hailed Debussy’s early piece for ushering in nothing less than the birth of musical modernism: “Overthrown was not so much the art of development as the very concept of form itself.” Like the last movement of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, with which we opened the festival, these gentle strains represent one of the key turning points of modern music.

In fact, for all the differences between the French and German traditions — differences emphasized by Debussy himself, who once gleefully referred to the development section in a Beethoven symphony as the part where he could step out to enjoy a cigarette break — Schoenberg was keen to champion his colleague. In 1918, he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances, with the aim of offering sympathetic

audiences in Vienna first-rate, thoroughly prepared presentations of a wide range of contemporary composers. (Critics were forbidden entry.)

Numerous compositions by Debussy appeared on the programs, which featured chamber orchestra versions of larger orchestral scores. An arrangement of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun for 12 instruments made by Benno Sachs, one of Schoenberg’s rehearsal conductors, was scheduled for 1922 but had to be canceled when post-war hyper-inflation forced the Society to close. This is the version we hear in tonight’s performance.

Debussy’s point of departure, Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune from 1865 (published in 1876), conveyed a radically innovative vision of its own. (Mallarmé also inspired Boulez’s longest work, Pli selon pli.) In this poem, Mallarmé modernized the ancient pastoral eclogue of Virgil into a dramatic monologue revolving around the erotic rhapsodies of its protagonist, a lustful rural god who takes the shape of a humangoat hybrid. The faun fantasizes about his dalliances with nymphs “in the heat of the afternoon,” as Debussy described it.

The enigmatic “prelude” appended to the title refers to the composer’s initial plan

to write a triptych (including an “interlude” and a final “paraphrase” as well) for a dramatic reading of the poem planned by Mallarmé. But Prelude stands complete on its own terms, a self-contained musical interpretation of Mallarmé’s ode to sex and art. The sensation of the ebb and flow of desire and of borderline states in this music has a particular translucency in Sachs’s chamber scoring.

Kaija Saariaho once remarked that she was especially drawn to Debussy in her early years because of his “fantastic ear” and “because his music is so fluid in form and yet so difficult to analyze.” Lichtbogen, too, begins with the sound of a flute (in this case, an alto flute), but its sustained drone on F-sharp opens the portal into a vastly different cosmos of shimmering, hallucinatory sonorities created from discreetly blended acoustic instruments and live electronics.

In the early 1980s, Saariaho chose Paris as her home and became associated with Boulez’s IRCAM research center there.

Lichtbogen is the first composition she created using computer tools from IRCAM “in the context of purely instrumental music,” as the composer notes. Although Lichtbogen is not a work of program music, Saariaho refers to her impressions of seeing the aurora borealis in the Arctic CONTINUED }}

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COLOR THEORY sky when she began composing it on a commission from the French Ministry of Culture. (The German title — literally, a “bow of light” — refers to an electric arc.)

“When looking at the movements of these immense, silent lights which run over the black sky, first ideas concerning the form and language for the piece started to move in my mind,” Saariaho writes, though she leaves unresolved the question as to whether there is any “dependence … between this phenomenon of nature and my piece.” Saariaho was also wellacquainted with Goethe’s description of the almost-imperceptible transitional states between light and shade in his Theory of Colors and has referred, in other contexts, to that source as an inspiration in the development of her musical thinking overall.

But a single musical gesture served as the source generating the mesmerizing color-fields of timbre that form the soundscape of Lichtbogen. Saariaho undertook a computer analysis of a harmonic on the cello produced with extra bow pressure, magnifying and distributing its components. The nine instrumentalists and live electronics weave an aural texture that seems static while actually changing subtly and gradually — like a mobile sculpture in radically slowed-down motion.

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The loss of this extraordinary voice in contemporary music has been keenly felt since Saariaho’s passing a year ago. The fourth movement of the clarinet concerto kínēma by her friend and compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen serves as an elegy in her memory on this occasion. Originally composed in 2021 for Christoffer Sundqvist (principal clarinet with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra), kínēma comprises a series of five “scenes,” as Salonen calls them. He drew the musical material from his score for the 2021 Finnish film Odotus (“The Wait”), a romantic drama set on an isolated archipelago in the Baltic Sea. The fourth movement is an homage to the legendary Finnish film director Jörn Donner.

By virtue of its position as the very last of his piano concertos — premiered early in 1791, the year of his premature death — K. 595 has long carried associations of leave-taking as well. A hiatus of three years separates this work from his previous concerto (K. 537), reflecting the decline in demand ascribed to changes in public taste as well as economic recession.

The Concerto in B-flat major is characterized by the pared-down simplicity of Mozart’s late style. Gone is

the brightness of trumpets and drums typical of the great concertos from the 1780s, with an emphasis on intimate, chamber-like textures instead. Mozart similarly composes with notable economy in his treatment of the thematic material, tending towards monothematic elaboration of the opening Allegro’s main theme, for example.

The in medias res accompaniment at the outset recalls the opening of the great G minor Symphony from 1788 and marks the first of several enigmatic gestures to come — woodwind flourishes that interrupt the main theme, the recurrent grace-note giggles. Mozart’s abrupt changes of key are especially remarkable here.

The keyboard writing is luminous. The soloist does not engage in contests of feat but rather exchanges of confidence with the orchestra. Mozart deepens the emotional contours of the Larghetto’s radiant song through the simplest of gestures — momentary mutings or new timbral shadings. Even the more conventionally extroverted attitude of the finale gives way to unusual harmonic excursions. For all the catchy familiarity of its main theme, Mozart’s subtle variations underline the constancy of change and transience.

—THOMAS MAY

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LEARN HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK 78TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL

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Sunday, June 9, 2024 | 10:00am Libbey Bowl

Alexi Kenney violin | Sae Hashimoto percussion Brentano String Quartet: Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin violins, Misha Amory viola, Nina Lee cello Jay Campbell cello | Ljubinka Kulisic accordion Heinrich Ignaz Franz BIBER

Passacaglia for solo violin Alexi Kenney violin

Kaija SAARIAHO

Six Japanese Gardens I. Tenju-an Garden of Nanzen-ji Temple II. Many Pleasures (Garden of the Kinkaku-ji) III. Dry Mountain Stream IV. Rock Garden of Ryoan-ji V. Moss Garden of the Saiho-ji VI. Stone Bridges Sae Hashimoto percussion

Joseph HAYDN

Sonata II Grave e cantabile (“Hodie mecum eris in paradiso”) Sonata V Adagio (“Sitio”)

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Ida and Glenn Mercer The performance of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Croce is made possible by Raulee Marcus OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Ljubinka Kulisic and Sae Hashimoto There is no intermission during the concert FREE COMMUNITY CONCERT at Libbey Park Gazebo, 4:00pm

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from The Seven Last Words of Christ

Sonata VI Lento (“Consummatum est”) Brentano String Quartet Sofia GUBAIDULINA

In Croce Jay Campbell cello | Ljubinka Kulisic accordion

Heinrich Ignaz Franz BIBER (1644-1704) Passacaglia (1676)

Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809) The Seven Last Words of Christ (excerpts) (1786)

Kaija SAARIAHO (1952-2023) Six Japanese Gardens (1994)

Sofia GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931) In Croce (1979); arranged for accordion and cello in 1991 by Elsbeth Moser

Paths and Pilgrimages How often do we hear a composition described as a “journey” we are invited to undertake? The Western classical tradition in particular has encouraged forms — the best example of which is the sonata form refined by Haydn and Mozart — that evoke a sense of actively traversing a series of musical “events” to reach a “destination” (such as the presentation of a new theme, or the transition to another key).

The much older passacaglia form takes its Italian name from a combination of the Spanish words “to walk” and “street” (whether from street performances or the practice of instrumentalists taking some steps while performing). The simple, continually repeating bass line that characterizes this basic form can suggest a pilgrim’s steady progress against the ever-changing landscape of melody and ornamentation — as in Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Passacaglia in G minor, one of the earliest extant works for solo violin.

(The difference between a passacaglia and a chaconne — such as Bach’s D minor Chaconne, with which this piece by Biber is often compared — became erased over time, but that is another story.)

Solo but not standalone, the Passacaglia is the capstone of the great BohemianAustrian composer’s monumental cycle of 15 Rosary Sonatas (one for each of the 15

Mysteries comprising the Roman Catholic set of prayers known as the Rosary). While the violin is accompanied through the rest of the work, it emerges alone in the Passacaglia, with a return to “normal” tuning following the series of unusual or “scordatura” tunings used for each sonata from the second onward. (Note that the term sonata depicts a musical type different from the aforementioned classical sonata.)

Biber’s original manuscript also prefixes each sonata with a specific engraving corresponding to the devotional mystery in question. An image of a guardian angel watching over a walking child graces the Passacaglia, and the four-note bass pattern that is repeated 65 times, forming the musical foundation of the piece, is associated with a hymn to the guardian angel. Violinist Alexi Kinney likens the Passacaglia to a “portal movement” or gateway that marks “the beginning of something and the end of something: a death-and-rebirth moment.”

In Buddhist practice, walking represents an important mode for encouraging meditative focus. Kaija Saariaho does not explicitly refer to Buddhism in her commentary on Six Japanese Gardens but describes the work simply as “a collection of impressions of the gardens

I saw in Kyoto during my stay in Japan in the summer of 1993 and my reflections on rhythm at that time.” Yet some of her movement titles refer to specific Zen Buddhist temples in the Kyoto region.

Even more, the combination of acoustic and electronic musical environments (including monk-like vocal chanting among the pre-recorded samples activated in live performance by the soloist) can awaken responses that bring to mind the meditative function of Zen gardens.

“I’m not a religious person,” Saariaho said in a 2014 interview with the conductor Clément Mao-Takacs. “For me, music is a study of my own self and of the human spirit. I’ve always believed music to be very deep, or at least it can be very deep.” It is in this sense that Saariaho explored the legacy of the Baroque Passion genre, for example, in her innovative La Passion de Simone (featured at the 2016 edition of the Ojai Music Festival). The focused attention on specifically musical aesthetics that her earlier Six Japanese Gardens fosters likewise seems to parallel the mindfulness sought by Buddhist meditation.

All six parts of the work, writes Saariaho, “give a specific look at a rhythmic material, starting from the simplistic first part, in which the main instrumentation CONTINUED }}

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PATHS AND PILGRIMAGES is introduced, going to complex polyrhythmic or ostinato figures, or alteration of rhythmic and purely coloristic materials. The selection of instruments played by the percussionist is voluntarily reduced to give space for the perception of rhythmic evolutions.”

This reduction of colors, however, is counteracted by the electronic part, which extends to include a new palette of “nature’s sounds, ritual singing, and percussion instruments” recorded by percussionist Shiniti Ueno, for whom the score was written. It is inscribed “in memory of Toru Takemitsu.”

Regarded as one of Haydn’s boldest compositions — and one of his best known during his final years — The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross was commissioned in 1786 for the Good Friday service held at an underground chapel in the southwestern Spanish port city of Cádiz.

“After a short service, the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words, and delivered a sermon on it, after which he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar,” wrote Haydn in his preface to a published edition of the

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score. His task was to supply music to fill the intervals between these moments of silent prayer and the celebrant’s return to the pulpit to continue with the next of the Seven Words. (Word in this context applies to what are actually statements by Jesus on the Cross — and one question — as distilled from the three Gospel accounts though not all contained in any single one.)

In 1787, Haydn published a reduction for string quartet, and he prepared a choral version in 1796. But The Seven Last Words was composed initially for orchestra — an entirely instrumental piece consisting of a string of seven slow movements. These in turn are framed by a slow introductory movement and a Presto finale (the work’s only fast movement) representing the earthquake that follows the death of Jesus.

Each of the seven sonata movements between these refers to one of the traditional Seven Last Words. Haydn later recalled the challenge posed by striving to write “seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners: indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.”

The Brentano Quartet has a long relationship with this music: At the beginning of the century, it commissioned former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand to write new texts to stand in for the sermons traditionally delivered between the movements. For this performance, they present Sonatas 2, 5, and 6.

Two concurrent but diametrical paths, represented by the solo cello and accordion, map out an actual cross to complete the spiritual journey in Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Croce. (See p. 43-44 for more discussion of this work.)

For Gubaidulina, now 92, the material, mortal nature of sounds becomes linked to the search for transcendence. The distinction between staccato and legato playing, for example, which is a basic technical issue with implications for the expressive nature of a phrase, leads Gubaidulina to reflections on the promise of faith as a redemption from the brokenness of everyday reality: “I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word,” as she has said: “As re-ligio, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the binding-together or legato of life.”

—THOMAS MAY

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Sunday, June 9, 2024 | 2:30pm Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

KAFKA FRAGMENTS Lucy Fitz Gibbon soprano | Alexi Kenney violin György KURTÁG (b. 1926)

Kafka Fragments, Op. 24 (1985-87) Part I

This concert is made possible by the generous support of an Anonymous donor There is no intermission during the concert

1. Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt…

2. Wie ein Weg im Herbst 3. Verstecke 4. Ruhelos 5. Berceuse I 6. Nimmermehr (Excommunicatio) 7. “Wenn er mich immer frägt” 8. Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid 9. Die Weissnäherinnen 10. Szene am Bahnhof 11. Sonntag, den 19. Juli 1910

(Berceuse II) (Hommage à Jeney) 12. Meine Ohrmuschel…

13. Einmal brach ich mir das Bein 14. Umpanzert 15. Zwei Spazierstücke 16. Keine Rückkehr 17. Stolze (1910/15 November, zehn Uhr) 18. Träumend hing die Blume 19. Nichts dergleichen

Part II 20. Der wahre Weg

(Hommage-message à Pierre Boulez)

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS, 723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI)

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Part III 21. Haben? Sein?

22. Der Coitus als Bestrafung 23. Meine Festung 24. Schmutzig bin ich, Milena...

25. Elendes Leben 26. Der begrenzte Kreis 27. Ziel, Weg, Zögern 28. So fest 29. Penetrant jüdisch 30. Verstecke (Double) 31. Staunend sahen wir das große Pferd 32. Szene in der Elektrischen

Part IV 33. Zu spät (22 Oktober 1913) 34. Eine lange Geschichte 35. In memoriam Robert Klein 36. Aus einem alten Notizbuch 37. Leoparden 38. In memoriam Johannis Pilinszky 39. Wiederum, wiederum 40. Es blendete uns die Mondnacht

Pushing the Limits “There is no ‘to have,’ only a ‘to be,’ a ‘to be’ longing for the last breath, for suffocation.” (Part III, no. 1)

his only opera, Fin de Partie, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, which was staged at La Scala in 2018.

The koan-like paradoxes that György Kurtág sets to music in Kafka Fragments find their uncanny reflection in the composer’s musical language, in which simplicity is allied with impossibility.

Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, who shows a deep affinity for Kurtág’s style, observes that the Hungarian composer’s works can be “as much about discovering the poetry” in the texts he sets “as about discovering what we would consider to be music. His pitches and rhythms are a deeply thoughtout, distilled refraction of language itself.”

Kurtág spent a life-changing period in Paris in the late 1950s before returning to Budapest during the Cold War. (He still resides there, in the Budapest Music Center, on a street fittingly renamed after his lifelong friend and mentor, György Ligeti.) The first work he composed upon returning, a string quartet, was officially designated Kurtág’s Op. 1. Pierre Boulez’s concerts introducing the Second Viennese composers and other avant-garde trends (all verboten back in Communist Hungary) opened up new vistas — as did the discovery of new trends in literature and theater. Kurtág’s exposure to Anton Webern and Samuel Beckett alike left indelible marks on his musical thinking.

Kurtág’s infinite care with each gesture — which, in turn, makes the most extravagantly taxing demands of concentration on the performers — betrays an undying sense of wonder that the phenomenon of music can even exist.

It’s as if nothing in Kurtág’s universe can be taken for granted. For all the hyperawareness of transience that peers through Kafka Fragments, this is an artist who knows how to wait. Approaching his 100th birthday in 2026, Kurtág has to date published a catalog of works that, heard in their entirety, last only about 10 hours; he waited until his early 90s to premiere

Another creative catalyst was the treatment that the depressed composer received from the therapist Marianne Stein, who encouraged a kind of back-tobasics recalibration of values that radically freed up his imagination. Kafka Fragments, like his Op. 1 string quartet, is dedicated to Stein. An additional impetus that can be felt in this work is the liberating effect of writing pedagogical piano pieces for children, a practice Kurtág began in 1973 and continued long thereafter, with the

aim of stimulating the sense of play in music-making.

As with Beckett, during his Paris sojourn Kurtág alighted on Franz Kafka, with whom he shares his Jewish heritage and a multilingual cultural upbringing, as a kindred spirit. But instead of the celebrated stories and novels, Kurtág was drawn to Kafka’s notebooks, diaries, and letters (especially his deeply personal confessions to the Czech journalist and translator Milená Jesenská) as sources from which to cull a collection of textual fragments.

When he began setting these to music in 1985, Kurtág soon discovered that the process was addictive, comparing his preoccupation to “a little boy nibbling at forbidden sweets.”

Kafka Fragments grew into a four-part design comprising 40 numbers and premiered at the Witten Festival in April 1987; it has become one of Kurtág’s most frequently recorded and performed compositions. Half of the pieces are less than a minute long, while a few last several minutes — including the sole number contained in Part II (“The True Path”), which Kurtág designated as an “hommage-message à Pierre Boulez”).

Kafka Fragments poses endless enigmas in its marriage of de-contextualized literary

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PUSHING THE LIMITS extracts and ultra-condensed musical gestures. Each medium seems at times to aspire to become the other, much as the violinist strives to exchange identities with the soprano, while the latter, notes Fitz Gibbon, is implicitly asked “to imitate the instrument.”

even opera? Regular Ojai Music Festival audiences will recall that Peter Sellars’s famous staging imagined the soprano as an American housewife going about her daily routine so as to extract the “hidden worlds, hidden meanings, and hidden emotion” of this “theater of restraint.”

How are we to approach this collage of piercing, imagistic snapshots (“The onlookers freeze as the train goes past” in No. 10, “Scene at the Station”) and miniature parables, where a grim beauty shares the stage with hopeless hilarity?

Should we think of Kurtág’s work as a song cycle, a duo between the singer and the violinist, a noirish cabaret experiment, a trailblazing genre of theater — or

Kurtág inscribes unforgettable musical counterpoint onto Kafka’s dreamlike imagery of locomotion and exile, fragility, erotic angst, and artistic self-doubt. Yet he posits no unifying narrative beyond the intrepid gaze aimed at the absurdity of the human condition. Violinist Alexi Kenney points out that a remarkable variety of drama is “already inherent within the piece.” Kafka Fragments negotiates

a tightrope walk that “runs the gamut of emotional experience,” including lots of humor alongside its starkly existential epiphanies. Perhaps, Kenney says, the total effect comes closest to that of a tightly constructed opera.

For Fitz Gibbon, the absurdism of the demands on the performers is integral to the story of “struggle” embedded in the texts and their “meditation on our own inadequacy and understanding of our frailty. The striving towards some version of perfection makes the music even more worthwhile. There’s something beautiful about pushing yourself towards a limit that you can never reach. The striving itself is both humbling and deifying.”

—THOMAS MAY

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Save the Date! | November 16 & 17 2024 Hosted by the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee with proceeds benefiting the Ojai Festival and its BRAVO music education and community program.

TOUR distinctive homes adorned with festive holiday inspirations SHOP at the Holiday Marketplace featuring more than 60 vendors Tickets on sale in Fall 2024.

Get more information at OjaiFestival.org

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Sunday, June 9, 2024 | 5:30pm Libbey Bowl

Mahler Chamber Orchestra Mitsuko Uchida piano and director José Maria Blumenschein concertmaster and leader Joseph HAYDN

Symphony No. 46 in B major, Hob. I:46 I. Vivace II. Poco Adagio III. Menuet: Allegretto IV. Presto e scherzando

Jörg WIDMANN

Chorale Quartet (Choralquartett), version for chamber orchestra INTERMISSION

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART

Piano Concerto in G major, K. 453 I. Allegro II. Andante III. Allegretto – Presto

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt COMMUNITY CONCERT at Libbey Park Gazebo, 4:00PM Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra

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Mitsuko Uchida piano and director

The residency of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is made possible by the generous support of the Colburn Foundation, Carol Colburn Grigor-Dunard Fund USA, Kathleen and James Drummy, Berta and Frank Gehry, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, and Terri and Jerry Kohl

Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809) Symphony No. 46 in B major, Hob. I:46 (1772)

Jörg WIDMANN (b. 1973) Chorale Quartet (Choralquartett), version for chamber orchestra (2003; 2020)

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-93) Piano Concerto in G major, K. 453 (1784)

Memories and Journeys Music among friends: This has been a unifying thread of Mitsuko Uchida’s vision for the 2024 edition of the Ojai Music Festival. She joins with her close friends from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to close this year’s edition of the festival with a program framed by a legendary pair of musical friends. Vienna in the late 18th century was the kind of milieu — all too familiar to us today — that fanned the fires of professional jealousy. Yet Haydn was struck with admiring wonder for his colleague from a younger generation. In 1787 he wrote: “If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music … how inimitable are Mozart’s works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive!”

Mozart’s love of Haydn’s music is in turn evident from the influences he eagerly absorbed at different points in his career, affecting both the content and the craft of his own work. The intense pathos of Mozart’s great G minor works, for example, or the apocalyptic D minor doom that envelops Don Giovanni, certainly owe something to the expressionism Haydn pioneered with his so-called Sturm und Drang manner of the late 1760s / early 1770s.

While Haydn’s “storm and stress” symphonies of this period — harbingers of Romanticism’s emotional intensity — are usually associated with darkly tragic minor keys, the major-key Symphony No. 46 (composed in 1772, back-to-back with the “Farewell” Symphony) is a tonal rarity by virtue of being set in B major.

At the time, when well-tempered tuning was still becoming established as the standard, the “remoteness” represented by the key’s five sharps would have been more keenly apparent. But even more than 250 years later, we can still hear Haydn’s wildly daring attitude in playing with expectations. He pretends to simply give up on the first movement’s development section after less than a minute, for example, but the apparent “reprise” is a false flag that plunges us into a stormy passage of real transformation.

Both middle movements unfold as parades of primarily rhythmic and harmonic events, as if melody is deliberately being suppressed. But the minuet’s music turns out to be highly memorable thanks to Haydn’s stroke of architectonic genius in the finale. Energetically forward driven and punctuated by bright splashes of color from the horns, the finale grinds to

a halt and suddenly yields to a lengthy recall of the minuet. It’s as if the process of musical memory, of reprise — so essential to our enjoyment and in particular to the Classical aesthetic — has somehow gone haywire in this symphony. Eventually, the orchestra snaps out of its unprovoked reverie and gets on with the business of the finale. But the shock of such an extensive musical flashback resounds.

The influence of the past can be liberating, even revolutionary. Beethoven would later use a similar stratagem in the finale of his Fifth Symphony. Jörg Widmann, too, frequently engages with the legacy of the First Viennese Classical composers — in the most intriguingly oblique ways. Five of his string quartets reflect in some way or other on Beethoven’s Op. 130. Chorale Quartet, originating from an earlier quartet

by Widmann, reveals a strange relationship with music by Haydn that we encountered earlier this weekend (The Seven Last Words).

The 50-year-old Widmann, a native of Munich who is also a virtuoso clarinetist and teacher, composes prolifically across many genres but is especially at home in chamber music. No surprise, then, that he has developed a close musical friendship

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MEMORIES AND JOURNEYS with Mitsuko Uchida. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere of the chamber orchestra version of Chorale Quartet in 2020.

Initially, Chorale Quartet was composed in 2003 as a single-movement string quartet (the second of his 10 quartets to date).

This slow movement “does not directly reflect” the Haydn source, notes Widmann, but could not have been written “without knowing that work.” Along with the “shocking urgency” of Haydn’s Seven Last Words, he finds “the relaxed and serene acceptance of death” it expresses even more “disturbing.”

Widmann’s own music undertakes an unsettling “final journey” — a key word, he notes, for his conception of the piece — that begins “at the end of the path” with “final tones, phrases from the past which originate from nowhere and do not lead anywhere.” Extended techniques draw attention to the excruciating physicality of musical production — “the horrifying friction of skin on wood” — which is juxtaposed with chorale-like melodies.

But their relationship remains ambiguous.

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Writes Widmann: “I am interested in investigating how, through the course of the work, sound effects no longer represent desolation, and tonal elements no longer represent confidence.”

Uchida and her friends close the festival with Mozart’s K. 453 Piano Concerto in G major from April 1784 — a vintage year indeed of his concerto production.

Especially prized for its refined intimacy, this concerto was performed by Barbara (“Babette”) Ployer, the niece of a Salzburg court official, a few months after Mozart completed it — possibly as a display piece for Ployer, a student he found especially impressive; she was both a pianist and a composer. He even sketched her in the margin of one of his manuscripts.

Mozart plays with the rousing gestures of a march rhythm in several of his concertos from this period — here quickly veering into subtle mixtures of light and shade that might have seemed a nonsequitur from a less-gifted composer. It’s fascinating to compare and contrast his sense of wit with that of his older friend Haydn.

“If I absolutely had to name my all-time favorite piece of music, I think I would vote for the Andante,” Leonard Bernstein once declared in one of his lectureconcerts. The prayerlike lyricism and haunting harmonic fluctuations of this movement embody a vein of Mozart’s piano concertos for which Uchida has long shown an uncanny affinity. Some even hear a kinship here with the “Et incarnatus est” from the Mass in C minor.

Mozart offers a perfect counterbalance to the Andante’s introspection with the finale’s sunlit theme, which looks ahead to Papageno’s chirpy charm. The tune actually has another famous avian association: Mozart recorded that his pet starling was able to whistle it back (though with a few variants of its own).

Five variations follow, each further varying the two repeated halves that comprise the theme. Mozart adds a sparkling, rapid-fire coda, in which the theme returns, as if in the perfectly timed denouement of a wordless comic opera.

—THOMAS MAY

The Ojai Festival Women’s Committee (OFWC) is the largest donor to the internationally acclaimed Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education and Community Program. Through their philanthropic and volunteer activities, the OFWC has raised more than one million dollars over the past 70 years!

An active 100+ member volunteer committee, the OFWC presents unique events throughout the year, including the annual Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace, Art & Music Trips, Concerts, Lectures, and fun Socials, all fostering lasting friendships and the continued gift of music to the community.

Join us!

For more info about the OFWC visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or call Anna Wagner at the festival office 805 646 2094.

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Photo by Deniz Saylan

Ensemble Profiles

MAHLER CHAMBER ORCHESTRA The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), founded in 1997, has established a distinct sound and independent artistic identity. The Orchestra’s philosophy, inspired by founding mentor Claudio Abbado, emphasises the power of listening and communication both structurally and musically; they call it The Sound of Listening. It allows the Orchestra, its musicians and managing office, to operate as a democratic collective.

Engaging with Artistic Partners, including Mitsuko Uchida, Yuja Wang, Pekka Kuusisto, Conductor Laureate Daniel Harding, Artistic Advisor Daniele Gatti, and Artistic Partner for Immersive Experiences Henrik Oppermann/ Schallgeber; the MCO undertakes multiyear projects that explore diverse artistic themes.

With musicians representing 25 nationalities, residing in different parts of the world, the MCO reaches live audiences across 40 countries on five continents. The Orchestra maintains residencies at renowned venues including Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre,

Lucerne Festival, Mozartwoche Salzburg, and Festival de Saint-Denis. They are frequent guests at Philharmonie Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Musikverein Vienna, and Beethovenfest Bonn, and regularly tour Iberian and Asian regions.

Their worldwide presence enables them to authentically engage with a global audience, fostering connections that resonate across borders and cultures.

In the realm of Outreach and Education, the MCO conducts three flagship projects. The MCO Academy allows orchestra members to share their expertise with the next generation of musicians in collaboration with Orchesterzentrum|NRW and undertake residencies at Konzerthaus Dortmund, Kölner Philharmonie and the Philharmonie Essen. Feel the Music introduces music to deaf and hard-of-hearing children, encouraging a multi-sensory experience.

And Welcome Home: a concert about finding the place where you belong, in which

school groups are invited on a multicultural journey, fostering introspection and contemplation on the theme of “Belonging.”

These endeavours highlight the MCO’s commitment to enriching lives through music and promoting inclusivity.

In collaboration with Artistic Partner for Immersive Experiences Henrik Oppermann/ Schallgeber, the MCO explores new digital technologies in and beyond the concert hall.

Their virtual reality series immerses listeners deeper into performances and brings them closer to the music.

Through its vibrant performances, global reach, educational initiatives, and distinct entrepreneurship, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra continues to make a profound impact on the world of classical music.

Listen to the MCO podcast episode with Mitsuko Uchida at www.mahlerchamber.com/play/podcast.

The residency of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is made possible by the generous support of the Colburn Foundation, Carol Colburn Grigor-Dunard Fund USA, Kathleen and James Drummy, Berta and Frank Gehry, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, and Terri and Jerry Kohl

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JOSÉ MARIA BLUMENSCHEIN, concert master of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), is a native of Freiburg (Germany) born of Brazilian parents, currently serves as the first concertmaster of the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne and shares a concertmaster position at the Mahler Chamber Orchestra after serving as associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three seasons. During his tenure

with WDR, he also took two seasons off to perform as the first concertmaster of the Vienna State Opera and Philharmonic.

As a passionate leader, he regularly performs with orchestras and ensembles such as the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, London Symphony Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Dresden Staatskapelle, and NDR Radio Orchestra.

Blumenschein is also a founding member of Kammermusik Köln, a chamber music series in Cologne founded by members of WDR Radio, Gürzenich Orchestra, and Cologne Conservatory members to be the first allyear chamber music series.

Born in 1985, Blumenschein received his first violin lesson at the age of four in Freiburg, Germany, at the Pflüger Institute for Highly Gifted Children. In 1990 he began studies with Vera Kramarowa in Mannheim. In 2001, he was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with conductor and violinist Joseph Silverstein and served as concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

José Maria Blumenschein has been performing with the Mahler Orchestra for almost two decades. Since 2023, he shares the MCO’s concertmaster position with Matthew Truscott.

MAHLER CHAMBER ORCHESTRA MUSICIANS flute JOSÉPHINE OLECH (France)

timpani & percussion MARTIN PIECHOTTA (Germany)

oboe KYEONG HAM (South Korea) CLÉMENT NOËL (France)

violin JOSÉ MARIA BLUMENSCHEIN* (Germany) MAY KUNSTOVNY (Austria) ALEXANDRA PREUCIL (USA) TIMOTHY SUMMERS (USA) ANNETTE ZU CASTELL (Germany) HILDEGARD NIEBUHR (Germany) GEOFFROY SCHIED (France) NICOLA BRUZZO (Italy) JOHANNES LÖRSTAD** (Sweden) CHRISTIAN HEUBES (Germany) PAULIEN HOLTHUIS (Netherlands) NAOMI PETERS (Netherlands) NANNI MALM (Austria) MICHIEL COMMANDEUR (Netherlands) STEPHANIE BAUBIN (Austria)

clarinet VICENTE ALBEROLA (Spain) BENOÎT SAVIN (France) JAAN BOSSIER (Belgium) bassoon GUILHAUME SANTANA (France) PIERRE GOMES DA CUNHA (France) horn PREMYSL VOJTA (Czech Republic) HUGO VALVERDE (Costa Rica) trumpet MATTHEW SADLER (Great Britain) ALEXANDER FREUND (Germany)

viola JOEL HUNTER** (USA) BENJAMIN NEWTON (Great Britain) YANNICK DONDELINGER (Great Britain) JULIA NEHER (Germany) JUSTIN CAULLEY (USA) cello CHRISTOPH RICHTER** (Germany) MARTIN LEO SCHMIDT (Germany) STEFAN FALUDI (Germany) MORITZ WEIGERT (Germany) double bass RICK STOTIJN ** (Netherlands) NAOMI SHAHAM (Israel) JOHANE GONZALEZ SEIJAS (Spain) harp (MCO guest artist) JULIE SMITH PHILLIPS piano (MCO guest artists) NIC GERPE VICKI RAY

* Concertmaster ** Section Leader

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Ensemble Profiles from Bach’s Art of Fugue. Fourteen years later, they revisited Bach’s masterpiece, performing the entire work in an ambitious multimedia project at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The Quartet presented a second multimedia project at the Y, which juxtaposed the poetry of Wallace Stevens with late Beethoven and music by composer Martin Bresnick. Other projects have included a three-program examination of Late Style, presented at Carnegie Hall; a program surveying the music of lamentation over the last 300 years crowned

by Bartók’s Second Quartet; and numerous adaptations of music from Renaissance and early Baroque, including works by Josquin, Gesualdo, Purcell, and Monteverdi.

The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, as well as pianists Jonathan Biss, Richard Goode, and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet also maintains a strong commitment to new music and has expanded the quartet canon by commissioning works from some of the most important composers of our time, among them Bruce Adolphe, Matthew Aucoin, Gabriela Frank, Stephen Hartke, Vijay Iyer, Steven Mackey, and Charles Wuorinen. Commissions and collaborations have included a new quartet from Lei Liang; a viola quintet from James MacMillan; and a large-scale dramatic work, Dido Reimagined, based on the story of Dido and Aeneas, from composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann.

Dedicated and highly sought after as educators, the Quartet are artists-in-residence at the Yale School of Music and spearhead the instruction at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in the summers.

The Quartet has given numerous master classes and workshops across the country and returns annually to the Taos School of Music as visiting faculty.

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. The Quartet has performed in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), the Konzerthaus (Vienna), Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and the Sydney Opera House. Festival appearances include Aspen, Edinburgh Festival, Kuhmo Festival in Finland, and the Seoul Spring Festival of Chamber Music. They made their first Ojai Music Festival appearance in 2017 with Music Director Vijay Iyer.

The Quartet has launched numerous projects that reimagine the standard concert program. In 2002, they celebrated their 10th anniversary by commissioning 10 composers to write companion pieces for selections

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The Quartet has recorded extensively, releasing discs of quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as a recording of the Schubert Cello Quintet with Michael Kannen. Their most recent release features the K. 428 and K. 465 (“Dissonance”) Quartets of Mozart for the Azica label.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intended recipient of his famous love confession.

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET MARK STEINBERG violin SERENA CANIN violin MISHA AMORY viola NINA LEE cello

Artist Profiles VICENTE ALBEROLA, clarinet, is the artistic director of Music Masters Course Valencia (MMCV), principal clarinetist of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and solo clarinetist of Les Dissonances and the Utopia Orchestra.

Alberola studied with Walter Boeykens at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, Belgium. At the same time, he took lessons with George Pieterson (of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) and Larry Combs (of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). For more than 20 years, Alberola was principal clarinetist of the opera orchestras in Madrid and Galicia.

During the last decade, he has been a guest principal clarinetist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the MMCK Tokyo Orchestra.

He has played under the baton of Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Muti, Daniele Gatti, Daniel Harding, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Nicola Luisotti, among others.

In 2003, he was appointed conductor of the Madrid Opera Youth Orchestra, and in 2007, conductor of the Soria Youth Orchestra. He was the chief conductor of the Orquesta 430 of Vigo. He has conducted the Oviedo Filarmonía, the Orquesta de Castilla y León, the Madrid Symphony, the Real Filarmonía Santiago, the Orquesta del Valles, the Valencia Symphony, the National Youth Orchestra of Spain, the Youth Orchestra of the Canary Islands, and the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Galicia. Alberola has also conducted the Mahler Chamber Orchestra

at the Beijing Festival and the Musikfest Hamburg. Recently, he has been invited by the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia and the MMCJ Tokyo.

In the field of chamber music, he is a regular guest at the Beethoven Festival Bonn, the Alélla Festival, and the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris.

ALIISA NEIGE BARRIÈRE, conductor, was born in 1995 into a French-Finnish family in Paris, where her musical studies have included violin, piano, chamber music and choral as well as orchestral conducting. A passionate chamber musician, Barrière has participated in a great variety of projects and masterclasses throughout Europe and the United States, and is interested in performing all music from baroque to contemporary.

In 2018, Barrière resumed her conducting studies and attended a masterclass with Atso Almila (Sibelius Academy) and Luke Dollman (University of Adelaide) in Zlín, Czech Republic, where she led the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra in a program ranging from Mozart to Stravinsky.

She then joined the Panula Academy in 2018-19 for regular guidance from Jorma Panula. She has since regularly worked as an assistant to conductors such as EsaPekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki, Sakari Oramo, Pekka Kuusisto, and Ernest MartínezIzquierdo.

In January 2023, Barrière graduated from the master’s program of the orchestral conducting department of the Sibelius Academy (Helsinki) as a student of Sakari Oramo. In 2021-23 she served as the assistant conductor to Dalia Stasevska with Sinfonia Lahti, and held the position of Young Conductor in Residence with the Århus Sinfonietta in Denmark. In 2023, she was awarded the Young Artist Award at the Mikkeli Music Festival.

In 2024, Barrière will be artist in residence of the Turku Music Festival, curating a series of concerts ranging from chamber music to orchestral music around the concept of uchrony, or alternate history.

Both as a conductor and violinist she is a keen advocate of contemporary composers, believing new voices and points of view are more crucial than ever to open dialogues.

More generally, she is interested in bringing dramaturgy into the concert halls and strives to bring more experimenting to the way we program and present music.

Barrière is a founding member of many ensembles and groups, including the Hindsgavl Nordic Chamber Orchestra in Denmark, the Norwegian contemporary music ensembles Ensemble Temporum and Ensemble +47, and the string quartet Nordlyd.

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Artist Profiles JAY CAMPBELL, cello, is actively exploring a wide range of creative music. He has been recognized for approaching both old and new music with the same curiosity and commitment.

The only musician ever to receive two Avery Fisher Career Grants — in 2016 as a soloist, and again in 2019 as a member of the JACK Quartet — Campbell made his concert debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and in 2016, he worked with Alan Gilbert as the artistic director for Ligeti Forward, part of the New York Philharmonic Biennale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017, he was artist-inresidence at the Lucerne Festival along with frequent collaborator violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, where he gave the premiere of Luca Francesconi’s cello concerto Das Ding Singt. In 2018 he appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie with Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin. He has recorded the concertos of George Perle and Marc-Andre Dalbavie with the Seattle Symphony, and in 2023/2024 will premiere a new concerto, Reverdecer, by Andreia Pinto-Correia with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Portugal, and in Brazil with the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo.

Campbell’s primary artistic interest is the collaboration with living creative musicians, and he has worked in this capacity with Catherine Lamb, John Luther Adams, Marcos Balter, Tyshawn Sorey, and many others. His close association with John Zorn resulted in two discs of new works for cello, Hen to Pan (2015) and Azoth (2020). Deeply committed as a chamber musician, he is the cellist of the JACK Quartet as well as the Junction

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Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao, and multidisciplinary collective AMOC*. Jay Campbell made his Ojai Music Festival debut in 2019 with JACK Quartet under the leadership of Music Director Barbara Hannigan, then returned in 2022 as a member of AMOC*.

LUCY FITZ GIBBON, soprano, is a dynamic musician whose repertoire spans the Renaissance to the present. She believes that creating new works and re-creating those lost in centuries past makes room for the multiplicity and diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. As such, Fitz Gibbon has given modern premieres of rediscovered works by Baroque composers Francesco Sacrati, Barbara Strozzi, and Agostino Agazzari, as well by 20th century composers including Tadeusz Kassern, Florence Price, and Jean Barraqué. She has also worked closely with numerous others, workshopping and premiering works by Kate Soper, Sheila Silver, Reena Esmail, Roberto Sierra, and Pauline Oliveros, to name a few.

In helping to realize the complexities of music beyond written notes, the experience of working with these composers translates to all music: the commitment to faithfully communicate not only the score, but also the underlying intentions of its creator.

In concert, Fitz Gibbon has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra; Albany, Eureka, Lexington, Richmond, and Tulsa symphonies, and the American Symphony Orchestra in her Carnegie Hall debut. In 2022-2023, she appeared in concerts presented by Kneisel

Hall, the Copland House, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Eureka Chamber Music Society, the Sacramento Chamber Music Society, Musicians from Marlboro, and Cornell, Bucknell, and Duke Universities. She also covered the role of Laila in the premiere of Sheila Silver’s A Thousand Splendid Suns with Seattle Opera and appeared in Earl Kim’s Where Grief Slumbers at Boston’s Jordan Hall.

As a recitalist, Fitz Gibbon has appeared with her husband and collaborative partner, pianist Ryan McCullough, in such venues as London’s Wigmore Hall; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, and Merkin Hall; Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center; and Toronto’s Koerner Hall.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, they recorded performances at home and in concert halls to be broadcast around the world. Their discography includes Descent/ Return, featuring works by James Primosch and John Harbison (Albany Records, May 2020) and Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver alongside artists including Dawn Upshaw and Stephanie Blythe (Albany Records, February 2021). A forthcoming album, The Labor of Forgetting, includes the world premiere recording of Katherine Balch’s estrangement.

A graduate of Yale University, Lucy Fitz Gibbon also holds an artist diploma from The Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory and a master’s degree from Bard College-Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program; her principal teachers include Monica Whicher, Edith Bers, and Dawn Upshaw. She previously was Interim Director of Vocal Programs at Cornell University and now serves on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory’s Vocal Arts Programs. She also appeared as voice faculty and guest artist for the Kneisel Hall and SongFest summer festivals.

Artist Profiles SAE HASHIMOTO, percussion, boasts a versatile career driven by her extensive expertise and constant musical exploration.

She excels in classical, baroque, contemporary, and experimental music, showcasing her virtuosity and dedication.

Passionate about modern music, Hashimoto collaborates with renowned contemporary composers like Tyshawn Sorey and Michael Gordon. Notably, she’s premiered several works by John Zorn, recorded on Tzadik label albums. She’s also engaged with orchestral performances, working with groups such as the New York Philharmonic, and is the principal timpanist of Symphony in C. Hashimoto’s original compositions can be heard in her trio, Archipelago X, alongside Brian Marsella and Ikue Mori. Currently, she’s involved in a project for vibraphone and piano with Marsella, with an album slated for release in 2025.

Hashimoto’s percussion journey began in her fifth-grade music class in Osaka, Japan, where she won a drum set in a game of rock-paper-scissors. After completing her master’s degree at Juilliard, she participated in Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, combining musical excellence with education and entrepreneurship resides in New York City.

ALEXI KENNEY, violin, is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart.

He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras in the United States and abroad, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Kenney is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a BorlettiBuitoni Trust Award.

de Lausanne, as well as in a play-conduct role as guest leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, 92nd Street Y, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Kenney was the winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition.

Highlights of Kenney’s 2023/24 season include appearing as soloist with the Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee Symphonies, leading a program of his own creation with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, and debuting a new iteration of his project Shifting Ground at the Baryshnikov Arts and now at the Ojai Music Festival, in collaboration with the new media and video artist Xuan. The album version of Shifting Ground will be released in June 2024.

Chamber music continues to be a major part of Kenney’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Ojai in 2021 with Music Director John Adams, Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto.

He is a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellistcomposer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is also an alum of the Bowers Program (formerly CMS 2) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

In recent years, Kenney has soloed with The Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Chambre

Kenney is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he received an Artist Diploma as a student of Miriam Fried and Donald Weilerstein. Previous teachers in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow by François-Nicolas Voirin.

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Artist Profiles LJUBINKA KULISIC, accordion, is originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and received her Bachelor’s and Master of Arts in Music Performance from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland in Lugano.

After graduating in Switzerland, she moved to Canada for the Doctor of Musical Arts program at the University of Toronto, where she also worked as a teaching assistant for the Contemporary Music Ensemble.

In 2017 she participated in Google Talks in San Francisco, where she presented music for accordion to Google engineers.

Kulisic participated in numerous concerts across Europe and North America. She has performed as a soloist with the New World Symphony in Miami and at the New England Conservatory in Boston as a member of the organization Music for Food, collaborated with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and violist Kim Kashkashian.

In addition to music, she is known in her country of birth for her political engagement.

As a reward for her activism, in 2017 she was awarded the “Super Woman” award in her hometown, from which she had to escape with her parents as a 1-year-old girl due to civil war.

She speaks four languages: Serbian, English, German, and Italian.

JULIE SMITH PHILLIPS, harp, principal harpist of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, is one of the most prominent American harpists today, performing as both an orchestral musician and concert artist. She is a two-time medalist in the USA International Harp Competition, having received the silver medal in 2004 and bronze in 2001. She made her National Symphony Orchestra debut in 2003 and has been honored in numerous other competitions throughout the country.

A recitalist and soloist with orchestra, Phillips’s appearances include multiple solo performances with the New World Symphony, the South Dakota Symphony, the West Los Angeles Symphony, the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, the National Repertory Orchestra, and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, among others.

She has been a featured soloist for American Harp Society National Conferences, the USA International Harp Competition, Lyon & Healy’s 150th Birthday Celebration & Harptacular Concert series, the International Harp Festival, Harp Oklahoma Workshop, and has served as a guest artist at the Young Artist Harp Seminar.

Equally experienced as a chamber and orchestral musician, Phillips collaborates with renowned musicians across the country.

A founding member of The Myriad Trio, she regularly appears in chamber concerts across the country and has performed abroad as well. Her chamber and orchestral festival credits include the Piedmont

& Kingston Chamber Music Festivals, Breckenridge Music Festival, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, Mozaic Festival, Sun Valley Summer Symphony, Tanglewood Music Festival, and numerous others.

Prior to her post in San Diego, she served as acting principal harpist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and principal harpist for the New World Symphony. Phillips is an avid promoter and performer of new music.

Numerous pieces have been written for and premiered by Phillips. She has recorded two albums: The Rhapsodic Harp and The Eye of Night. Phillips received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in harp performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Yolanda Kondonassis.

RICK STOTIJN, double bass, studied at the Conservatory in Amsterdam with his father Peter Stotijn and graduated with the highest distinction.

He continued his studies with Bozo Paradzik at the Hochschule in Freiburg.

He won several first prizes at competitions and was awarded the highest accolade for a musician in the Netherlands, the Dutch Music Prize. According to the jury, “Rick is a versatile musician with moving musicality and overwhelming virtuosity.”

Among the many solo appearances that followed worldwide was a Carte Blanche series in the Recital Hall of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Stotijn performs regularly as a soloist with orchestras such as the Swedish Radio

CONTINUED }}

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Artist Profiles Symphony Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, South Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Toulon Opera Symphony Orchestra, Musica Vitae Sweden, and Joensuu Symphony Orchestra.

He was principal double bassist in the Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchester Berlin (RSO) and Amsterdam Sinfonietta and is currently principal in the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

As guest principal, he plays regularly in the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Orchestra Mozart. He is also a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. In chamber music, he has worked with Janine Jansen, Christianne Stotijn, Liza Ferschtman, Julius Drake, Cecilia Bernardini, Vilde Frang, Julian Rachlin, Lawrence Power, Tabea Zimmermann, Lars Vogt, Christian Tetzlaff, and many others.

Stotijn is a regular guest at festivals such as the Lucerne Festival, Delft Chamber Music Festival, and the International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht. Stotijn is a professor at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf. He performs on a Raffaele & Antonio Gagliano double bass, generously loaned by the National Musical Instrument Foundation.

XUAN, new media artist, is also a filmmaker and pianist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and technology.

A trained classical pianist, she actively develops innovative, cross-disciplinary projects that broaden the immersive scope of new music and performance through the lens of “visual music.” Her work encompasses experimental animation, abstract scenography, music videos, interactive installations and large-scale projection mapping. Her music-driven films explore themes of femininity, power, inner conflict, and multicultural identity.

She has collaborated with artists such as Glenn Kotche, Pierre Jodlowski, Ben Wendel, Nina Shekhar, Annika Socolofsky, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Anzû Quartet, Akropolis Quintet, Nois Quartet, Parhelion Trio, Rubiks Collective, and Ensemble Garage — which have led to live performances at the Metropolitan Museum

of Art, the MCA Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum, University of South Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill, CU Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University, SF Jazz, Le Poisson Rouge, Ad Astra Music Festival, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and CAP UCLA’S Tune In Festival. Xuan was selected to create projections for Art on the MART (2021), “the largest permanent digital art projection in the world” on the on the 2.5-acre façade of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, in collaboration with Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird and Michael Gordon.

Her interactive installations have been exhibited at the ErsterErster Gallery in Berlin; the ibug Urban Art Festival in Reinchenbach; and Design Biennale 2019 in Zürich; the RESCUE Residency in Santo Stefano di Magra, Italy; Sound Forms 2021 in Hong Kong; and at the Rail Yards in Albuquerque, as part of Onebeat’s 10th anniversary celebration in 2022. She was invited to be an artist-in-residence at the Digital Graffiti Festival at Alys Beach in 2023 and the ATLAS B2 Residency in 2024.

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2023-2024 Annual Giving Contributors $75,000+

$5,000-$9,999

Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund Terri and Jerry Kohl Ojai Festival Women’s Committee Audre Slater Foundation

Amphion Foundation Sasha and William Anawalt Barbara Barry Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff Sue Bienkowksi and Wang Lee Judy and Merrill Blau Stephen Block Kyle and Rodney Boone Susan Bowey Lily and Thomas Brod Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz Barbara Cohn Barbara Delaune Warren Michael Dunn Mary* and Bill Duxler Carol Ann Dyer Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman Elizabeth A. Greenberg Chris Hacker and Will Thomas Mary and Jon Hogen Leslie Lassiter Geneva Martin and Patrick D. Garvey Sharon McNalley Linda and Ron Phillips Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher Peter Schneider Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation in honor of Mitsuko Uchida Anne-Marie Spataru John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation Ann and Steven Sunshine Christine Upton Susanne Wilson Joan Wynn Cathy Zoi and Robin Roy

$50,000-74,999 Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Ann Barrett Colburn Foundation Dunard Fund USA Ltd Berta and Frank Gehry Cathryn and Thomas Krause Carol and Luther Luedtke Ida and Glenn Mercer Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation

$25,000-49,999

You Are A Part Of Story Our story as the Ojai Music Festival is possible thanks to you, our Festival family. You inspire us to dream and to plan boldly for the future.

As an audience-supported organization, we are grateful that donations are impactful to the vitality of the Festival. Our community of donors make possible the celebration of each Festival, our free year-round BRAVO music education programs for Ojai Valley public elementary schools, digital offerings, and year-round events.

Thank you. With your support you help bring some of the most influential artistic work to be found anywhere, to this iconic setting. We are truly grateful for every member of the Festival family.

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Michele Brustin California Arts Council Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke Kathleen and James Drummy Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt National Endowment for the Arts Nancy and Barry Sanders

$10,000-24,999 Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust Anonymous (2) Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Carolyn and Jamie Bennett Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer Jill Cohen The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Constance Eaton and William Hart Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney Stephan M. Farber Lisa Field Mechas and Gregory Grinnell Linda Joyce Hodge David and Kathy Leeds Raulee Marcus Mericos Foundation The Ojai Vineyard Ojai Women’s Fund Claire and David Oxtoby Pacific Harmony Foundation Donald Pattison Koni and Geoff Rich Rachel Sater and Tom McNalley Hope Tschopik Schneider Abby Sher Shelley and Gregory Smith Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund Ventura County Community Foundation Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer Drs. Bridget Tsao and Bruce Brockman Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner

$2,500-$4,999 Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi Betsy Bachman and Bob Tallyn Barney and Kate Barnhart E.J. Harrison and Sons Jan and Arnold Friedman Susan H. and David L. Hirsch III Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot Janet Levin and Frank Gruber Dr. Cheryl Lew Dorothy Loebl Margaret and Fredrick Menninger Joan Oliver Ann and Harry Oppenheimer Sandy Robertson and Marshall Donovan Richard Shafer Stephanie and Alfred Shuman Jane and Richard Weirick Emilia Yin and Emmanuel Sharef

2023-2024 Annual Giving Contributors $1,000-$2,499

$500-$999

Susan and Jim Acquistapace in honor of Caroline Pennock Coates Spiller, for giving us our love of music Susan and Michael Addison Margaret and Danilo Bach Mary Baiamonte Dee Dee Dorskind and Bradley Tabach-Bank June and Shed* Behar Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly Marie and Bruce Botnick Burnand-Partridge Foundation Kerri and Dale Climer Janet Clough and Ara Guzelimian in honor of Lawrence Morton Nancy and Herb Conley Barbara and John* Cummings Carin Dewhirst and William Knutson Hung Y. Fan and Michael Feldman Susan Foster Friends in memory of Rajeev Talwani Nancy Gallagher Melissa Gorris Richard Gould Susan and Kim Grossman in memory of Ruth Simon Gina Gutierrez and Gary Richardson Katie and Jeff Haydon The Lenny Bruce Lee Memorial Weird Groove Fund Lauren Hobratsch and Charlie Chang Gary Hollander Kathleen Howe and Jerome Burstein in honor of Don Pattison Naomi and Michael Inaba Diane and Louis Jackson Tara Jeffrey Howard Jelinek Joan Kemper Angela and Matt Kilman Thomas Kren and E. Bruce Robertson Daniel Lewis Pamela Melone Helen Milner Christian Perry Joyce Avery Robinson Regina and Rick Roney Heather and Bob Sanders Kenneth Titley and John Schunhoff Anita Rae Shapiro and Mark Howard Shapiro Ruth Simon* Christine Steiner Peter Strauss and Rachel Ticotin Foundation Mark Summa Anne and Tony Thacher Michael Frazier Thompson in memory of Carol Krause Libby and Sandy Treadwell Debra Vilinsky Sandra Wagner Christine Yano and Scott Wilson BRAVO Program in memory of Ginger Wilson

Eleanor Adams Kay Austen and Craig Houx Marsha Berman Diane Bertoy and Jerome Maryniuk Scott Brinkerhoff Elisa and Eric Callow in honor of Carolyn and Jamie Bennett Donna & Marc Caruso in memory of Bob Emirhanian John B. Dean James Deane Fiona Digney and Michael Lee Parker Jr. Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen Robert Eisler and Liz Sampson Karen and Don Evarts Bob Feldman Emi Ferguson Gloria and Thomas Forgea Andrew Gilman Kathan and Anthony Glassman Janet Greenberg and Mark Kempson Martha Groszewski Herbert Hemming and Ruth Hemming Terry Hoffman Ellen and William Ireland Hannah and Marshall Kramer Carole and Charles Magnuson Carolyn McKnight in memory of Rajeev Talwani Susan and Joseph Miller Marilyn Nissenson Judith Hale Norris and Bill Norris Julie and Tommy Phillips Jane Salonen Lucinda and Tim Setnicka Marjorie Shapiro and Ian Hinchliffe Marisa Silver and Ken Kwapis The Steele Family Nancy Stewart Kent Strother Susan Suriyapa & Luca Ferrero Ann W Wang Kevin Wass Soni Wright Edward Yeung

$250-$499 Lisa and John Adair Karen Bailey Mary Bergen Priscilla Lambert Brennan Ross Conner and Emmett Carlson Esther da Costa Meyer and Christopher Hailey Donald Dietz Diana Feinberg Doris and Caleb Finch Rachel Fine and Christopher Hawthorne Jack Fisher Carol and Paul Gibson Barry Gold

Caroline and Ralph Grierson Jeff and Pat Hall Barbara and Anthony Hirsch Susan and Steven Hodges Judith and Sandor Holly Eric and Cathy Kadison Robin Kissell and George Kushner Ana and Stefan Kozak Efrain Kristal and Romy Sutherland Kristal David Lea Lynn Kuttnauer and Richard Lewis Adam Lowy Lisa McKinnon Judy and Ron Milestone in honor of Nancy and Barry Sanders Hilda Murachanian in memory of Bob Emirhanian Mary and Weston Naef Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye Noreen Stimac and Thomas Powers Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers Anna Thomas Susan and John Trauger Anna and Bill Wagner Robin and James Walther Betsy Watson Ralph E. Wiggen

$150-$249 Susan Anderson Ginny Atherton Roberta Weiser Blau Francisco Bracho Jacqueline Burge Aviva Bergman and Garett Carlson Lynne Carmichael Erica and William Clark Madeline Grass Doss Anne and James Edwards Steve Starkey and Olivia Erschen Susan Feder and Todd Gordon Leslie Hess in honor of Tara Jeffery Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Susan Hubbart Lynn Kirst Dulanie Ellis La Barre Ruthann and Bob Lehrer Mary Ann Makee Gillian McManus and Chris Newell Evelyn Meronk Jo Anne Miller Trisha and Todd Mills Deborah Mintz Suzy Parker Maureen Robinson Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano Ruth Sayre Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince Roberto Suro Phillip Thurber CONTINUED }}

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2023-2024 Annual Giving Contributors Pamela Tonucci Arthur and Judith Vander Glen Wallick Geoffrey Winterowd Bonnie Wright

$75-$149 Royce Adams Lisa and Leslie Anderson Patricia and Martin Angerman Robert S. Attiyeh Susan Bjerre Suzan Boatman Thomas Boo Leni & Jon Boorstin Soo Borson Caryn and Charles Bosson Ruth and Steve Bramson Louise Burnham Packard and Murray Metcalfe Lisa Cervantes Nancy Bankoff Chalifour & Martin Chalifour Vivian and Eric Chiel Francine Cooper Robert Cooper Peter Corrigan Donald Crockett Kerry M. Daniel Susan and Michael DeMatte in memory of Bob Emirhanian Laura Denne in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Wood Pradeep and Ranjit Dhillon Pamela Drexel Rosalind Duhon Suzanne Ecker Lore and Ted Exner Judy Fish Ronald Lee Fleming Etsu Garfias Ronald Garrity Lori Gay David Gilbert and David Farneth Jean E Gress Susie Edberg and Allen Grogan Carole and Roger Hale Douglas Halvorsen in honor of Betty and Bob Emirhanian Judith Herman Camille and Kingsley Hines Robert Huebsch Jeff Ingram Larry Isberg Gail Kammermeyer Clare Kiklowicz Judy Korin Carol and Ed Lane Jason LaPadura and Gary Murphy Karen Lewis Sam Marion John Marshall Barbara Masters Angela and Jeffrey McGregor

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Susie and Rex Meach Barbara Multer-Wellin Carol Munter Nancy and Malcom Murachanian in memory of Bob Emirhanian Kazuhikra Nomura Kathryn Paddock Frederick Peters Marlene Pitkow & Mark Kalow Lori Pond Susan Reardon Diana and Bijan Rezvani Stephen M. Rochford Mary Ellen Rosenberg Pamela and Alan Ross Danner and Arno Schefler Barbara Schwartz and Thomas Moore Sandra and Charles Sledd David Spiro and Richard Ramos Charles Talmadge Barry Tavlin Alice Terrell and Alex Matich Ellie and Dan Thomas Dorothy Wagner Sheila Wald Barbara and Deric Washburn Karen Wilson Kerry Wollam John Ziegwied Anne Zimmerman

Up to $75 Emily Agnew Anonymous Robin Barris Serge Becker Mary Boo Kathy and John* Broesamle Isadora Chesler Marsia Alexander-Clarke Michael Coles Megan Conley Lyn Corum Edward DeLoreto Elizabeth Downing Michele Edelman Carla Fantozzi Martie Flickinger Rodica & Michael Fortner Joel Freeman Celeste Gabriele Daniel Garcia Margaret Gascoigne in honor of Michael Burkhardt Andreas Georgi Brenda L Gertman and Yorel Gertman in honor of Mrs. Florine (Hawkins) Gertman Sylvia Gertmenian in memory of Bob Emirhanian Kevin Gilbert Jonathan F Gunter Farid Hamedy

Rachel Harris Denise Heller Robert Horwitz Linda Hubert and Gus Hubert in memory of Bob Emirhanian Joanna Lynn-Jacobs Lynn Julian Karen Keenan Bijan Khamanian Nancy Kiang Luc Kleiner Liza Figueroa Kravinsky Mike Kravinsky Bryan Lane and Christina Kim Lane Sonya Lehto Jennifer Lewis and Albert Meymarian in memory of Bob Emirhanian Sue McDonald Ann and David Millican Regina Neuman Judd Parkin Daniel Petry Stephen & Sherry Plotkin in memory of Bob Emirhanian Shauna Quill Jesus E Quiñonez Judith Roberts James Robie Andrew Rodriguez Leslie Schenker Natasha Sherman Seana Shiffrin Pam Smith Wendy Stiver in memory of Susan Svrcek, my friend and colleague who passed far too young Leah Sullivan Susan Swinburne Spencer Toler J P Townsend Cynthia Ulman and Lyle Novis Alberta Warner Robert Weirich Leslie Westbrook Andrea and Bernard White Christine White Wayne Wiederhold in memory of Rajeev Talwani Lorraine Wild Peter Witte Kendra Yoes Hiroko Yoshimoto Many thanks to all our generous donors.

Every effort has been made to accurately list Festival donors (5/16/2023-5/13/2024).

If you have any questions or a correction, please contact Anna Wagner at 805 646 2094.

Ojai Festivals, Ltd. Is a 501 c3 non-profit tax exemption organization. *Deceased

Innovation is Our Legacy Join Us in Celebrating Our Story and Inventing the Future The Ojai Music Festival is a creative laboratory for musical innovation — launching artists’ careers, creating new works, starting musical conversations, and weaving together music, artists, and engaged audiences in the enchanting Ojai Valley. The alchemy of Ojai is recognized and respected nationally and internationally — at a level far beyond its size and resources.

You are a part of our story, and this is a moment to celebrate our shared story, your legacy, and most importantly, the vibrant future to come.

For the first time in our history, we’ve launched a $13 million campaign to ensure that the Ojai experience you love can be sustained for future generations of musicians and audiences.

Your investment in the Festival’s Future Forward Campaign will: • Nurture Artistic Excellence • Cultivate a Creative Laboratory • Expand BRAVO Education and Community Programs Join us in our next chapter and help bring the Future Forward!

Campaign Visionary Supporters Join us in thanking these visionary supporters who have participated in the Future Forward campaign. Their support gives the Festival the financial freedom to innovate, build capacity, allow artists to realize their vision, making a lasting impact on music worldwide for the next 75 years and beyond.

We welcome all Festival Family members to join in supporting future of the Ojai Music Festival. For more information about how you can be a part of our story, please contact Anna Wagner at (805) 646-3178 or awagner@ojaifestival.org.

$1,000,000+

$100,000 - 249,000

$25,000 – 49,999

up to $9,999

Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey*

Betsy Bachman Ann and Olin* Barrett Judy and Merrill Blau NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke The Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund Carol and Luther Luedtke Ida and Glenn Mercer Charles Millard* David L. Nygren Donald Pattison

Anonymous Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer Ruth Eliel and William Cooney Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman Mechas and Greg Grinnell Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting Wilson Family Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation

Barney and Kate Barnhart Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz Michael Dunn Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot Pamela Melone Mark Summa Bridget Tsao and Bruce Brockman Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner Merrill Williams* Susanne Wilson

$500,000 – 999,999 Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff Cathryn and Tom Krause Shanbrom Family Foundation

$250,000 – 499,999 Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Jamie and Carolyn Bennett Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Terri and Jerry Kohl Hope Tschopik Schneider Esther and Tom* Wachtel

$50,000 – 99,999 Michele Brustin Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman Kathleen and James Drummy Lisa Field Nancy and Barry Sanders

$10,000 – 24,999 Stephen Block Susan Bowey Stephan Farber Linda Joyce Hodge Raulee Marcus Ojai Civic Association Koni and Geoffrey Rich Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer

Gifts reflects a comprehensive gift which includes an annual pledge, special campaign gift, or an estate gift. *Deceased

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2023-24 Annual Giving Contributors

Work With Us to Help Fight Climate Change JOIN OUR RECYCLING TEAM, as we at Harrison, Gold Coast and Agromin take on the epic challenge of recycling EVERYTHING from organics including food and yard waste to glass, paper, metals and plastics. TEAMWORK is essential for the future of our planet.

INSTITUTIONAL FUNDERS The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust Amphion Foundation Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne California Arts Council Colburn Foundation E.J. Harrison and Sons Mericos Foundation

National Endowment for the Arts Pacific Harmony Foundation VCCF Smith-Hobson Foundation Ojai Festival Women’s Committee Ojai Women’s Fund John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation Ventura County Community Foundation

CORPORATE PARTNERS

VISIT US ONLINE to learn more.

CORPORATE PARTNERS

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Lifetime Giving THANK YOU! Our steadfast supporters make adventurous and transcendent music possible - year after year.

$1,000,000+

$100,000-$249,999

Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey* Ojai Festival Women’s Committee The Shanbrom Family Foundation Esther Wachtell

Anonymous (2) Betsy Bachman Sue Bienkowksi and Wang Lee Judy and Merrill Blau Michele Brustin Lainie and Peter Cannon* Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer Dunard Fund USA Ltd. Constance Eaton and William Hart Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation Richard S. Gould E.J. Harrison and Sons Linda Joyce Hodge Russ Irwin Sandra* and Jordan Laby Robert M. Light* Sharon McNalley The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Ida and Glenn Mercer Charles Millard III* Nesbitt Foundation David L. Nygren Ojai Valley Inn & Spa Ann and Harry Oppenheimer Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Linda and Ron Phillips Fred Rothenberg and Jackie Sherman Catherine and Barry Schifrin Hope Tschopik Schneider Abby Sher Shelley and Gregory Smith John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust Wallis Foundation Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner Jane and Richard Weirick Nita Whaley and Don Anderson

$500,000-$999,999 Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff James Irvine Foundation The Walter Lantz Foundation Terri and Jerry Kohl Cathryn and Thomas Krause The Walter Lantz Foundation Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation

$250,000-$499,999 Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Ann and Olin* Barrett Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Carolyn and Jamie Bennett California Arts Council NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke Colburn Foundation Kathleen and James Drummy Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt Michael Gorfaine, Gorfaine-Schwartz Agency Lenore S and Bernard A Greenberg Fund Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Carolyn Huntsinger* Daniel Lewis E. Louise Gooding* Stuart Meiklejohn Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris Thomas W. and Jane Morris National Endowment for the Arts Ojai Festival Women’s Committee Donald Pattison Nancy and Barry Sanders Hope Tschopik Schneider Ventura County Community Foundation

$50,000-$99,999 Amphion Foundation Anonymous Barney and Kate Barnhart Stephen Block William H. Brady, III* Lynn Bremer William Burr Castagnola Family Fund

Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman Janet Clough and Ara Guzelimian Richard Colburn* Joanne Ernst and James Collins The Aaron Copland Fund Zoe and Donald Cosgrove* Robert C. Davis, Jr Barbara Delaune Warren Carlos Diniz* Christine and Sanford Drucker* Mary* and Bill Duxler Louise and Brad Edgerton Stephan M. Farber Betty Freeman* Berta and Frank Gehry Eve Steele and Peter Gelles Bernard Gondos* Mechas and Gregory Grinnell Mary and Jon Hogen Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Joan Kemper Leslie Lassiter Dorothy Loebl Carol and Luther Luedtke Ginny Mancini Raulee Marcus Pamela Melone Margaret and Fredrick Menninger Mericos Foundation Metabolic Studio, Annenberg Foundation Nancy and William Myers* Neubauer Family Foundation Shelby Notkin Ojai Women’s Fund Claire and David Oxtoby Pacific Harmony Foundation Donald Pattison Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher Jan and Alan* Rains Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman Judith and Ronald* Rosen Rotary Club of Ojai Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting The Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics Wade Family Trust Marilyn Wallace Jeanne C. Wanlass Wells Fargo Bank Ginger and John Wilson* Susanne Wilson Wood-Claeyssens Foundation

*Deceased

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Longtime Festival Attendees THANK YOU, our longtime Festival patrons, attending year after year for a decade or more. You are why we exist. We are grateful for your longstanding appreciation of adventurous music.

SINCE 1980s Marsia Alexander-Clarke Kate and Barney Barnhart Maureen Bauman and Isaac Malitz Elisabeth Clark NancyBell Coe Michael Dunn Mary* and William Duxler Diane and Allen* Eisenman James Farber Jan and Mark Fisher Gloria and Tom Forgea Moey and Bruce Gilman Peggy Grossman and Josef Woodard Linda Joyce Hodge Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson Joan Kemper Lorraine Lim and Glenn Fout Margaret and Fredrick Menninger Annat Provo Stephen Rochford Jonathan Said Helen and Justus Schlichting Jill and William Shanbrom Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson Noreen Stimac and Thomas Powers Anna Thomas Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman Roberta Weiser Blau and Carl Blau Susanne and Blake* Wilson SINCE 1990s

SINCE 1940s Diane and Louis Jackson The Steele Family SINCE 1950s Elisa Callow Tony Thacher SINCE 1960s Diane Eisenman Betty and Robert Emirhanian Caroline and Ralph Grierson John May Mark Swed

SINCE 1970s Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly Barbara and John Cummings Robert C. Davis Richard Ginell Anthony Glassman Judith Holly Patrick Scott and Mark Hilt Eric and Cathy Kadison Susan and Joseph Miller Mark Summa Esther Wachtell

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Lisa and John Adair Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi Lisa Anderson Patricia and Martin Angerman Ginny Atherton Kay Austen and Craig Houx Margaret and Danilo Bach Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff June and Shed* Behar Jeanette and Joel Berkovitz Caryn and Charles Bosson Marie and Bruce Botnick Diana Burman Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz Eric and Elisa Callow Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl Francine T. and Herb* Cooper Peter Corrigan Kathleen Crandall Donald Crockett Edward and William Deloreto Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen Richard Dolen

Sharon and Robert Eaton Ruth Eliel and William Cooney Gerald Faris Diana Feinberg Maudette* and Frank Finck Susan Foster Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman Linda Granat Lennie and Bernie Greenberg Rave Gunewardena and Frank Escher Camille and Kingsley Hines Barbara and Anthony Hirsch Marcia* and Gary Hollander Essie and David Horwitz Cynthia Kaplan Joan Huang-Kraft Cathryn and Tom Krause Susan and David Kuehn Karen and Craig* Lewis Hannah Maclaren Lisa McKinnon Tom McNalley Raffi and Myrna Mesrobian Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris Wyant Morton Mary and Weston Naef Victoria Nightingale Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye Ann and Harry Oppenheimer Nancy Pepper Nancy Perloff and Robert Lempert Joan Passell and Peter Peters Daniel Petry Linda and Ron Phillips Paris Poirier Stephen Pope Sylvia and Shlomo Raz Emilie Robertson Linda Rudell-Betts and John Betts Barry and Nancy Sanders Heather and Bob Sanders Catherine and Barry Schifrin Barbara Schwartz Anita Rae Shapiro and Mark Howard Shapiro Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince Christine Steiner Kit Stolz Ann and Steven Sunshine Kenneth Titley and John Schunhoff Christine Upton Glen Wallick Barbara and Deric Washburn Susan and Michael Weaver Ed Yim

Longtime Festival Attendees SINCE 2000s Caroline Allen Joyce and Ronald Allin Sasha and William Anawalt Susan Anderson Barbara Aran and Lawrence Hawley Elizabeth Bachman Karen Bailey Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff Mary Bergen Susan Bienkowski and Wang C. Lee Rosalyn Bloch Susan Bloom and Dirk Farner Kyle and Rodney Boone Francisco Bracho Bret Bradigan Thomas and Lily Brod Joseph Bulock Betye Burton Cindy Pitou Burton Lisa Cervantes Nancy Bankoff Chalifour Tina Chappel and Thomas Lane Maurice Singer and Hyon Chough Brooks Cochran Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl Sheila and Sidney* Cohn Annete Colfax and Tom Wilson Ross Conner and Emmett Carlson Kyle and Stuart Crowner Nava and Gabriel Danovitch Juanita J. Davis and Dan Saucedo Barbara Delaune Warren Carin Dewhirst and William Knutson Kathy and Jim Drummy Jerry Eberhardt Karen and Don Evarts David Falconer Judy Fish Barry Forman Kimberly Fox and Robert Fink Pablo Frasconi Jan and Arnold Friedman Carol Garramone Berta and Frank Gehry Andreas Georgi Martha Groszewski Gina Gutierrez and Gary Richardson Herbert Hemming and Ruth Hemming Sasha Heslip Mary Ann Hill and Laszlo Engelman Susan and Steven Hodges Terry Hoffman Farzaneh and Brian Hulan Naomi and Michael Inaba

Jeff Ingram Diana Kelly Ruth Lasell and Robert Bonewitz Lydia and Scott Lawson Lynda and Stan Levy Cheryl Lew Daniel Lewis Mary and Robert Lynch Raulee Marcus Geneva Martin and Patrick Garvey Morency Maxwell Christina and Todd McGinley Carolyn McKnight and Rajeev Talwani* Gillian McManus and Chris Newell Sharon McNalley Pamela Melone Carla Melson Elizabeth Memel George Mood Thomas and Jane Morris Nomi Morris Lena Muniz Sara Munshin Stacey Nakasone Jennifer and Richard Niles Victoria and Thomas Ostwald Claire and David Oxtoby Donald Pattison Christian Perry Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano Peggy and John Russell Louise Sandhaus and Michael Shapiro Ruth Sayre Leah and Norm Schweitzer Susan Scott Lucinda Setnicka Abby Sher Thomas Moore and Barbara Schwartz Shelley and Gregory Smith Nancy and Rob* Stewart Susan Suriyapa and Luca Ferrero Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers Alice Terrell and Alex Matich Susan Tova and Lawrence Clevenson Hope Tschopik Schneider Judy and Art Vander Anna Wagner Jill and John Walsh Robin and James Walther Leslie Westbrook Andrea and Bernard White Geoffrey Winterowd Kathy and Larry Yee Charles Zeltzer Anne Zimmerman

SINCE 2010s Susan and Michael Addison Elizabeth Alvarez Lani Asher Mary Baiamonte Ann Barrett Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Carolyn and Jamie Bennett Richard Bentley John Berezney Judy and Merrill Blau Scott Brinkerhoff Nova Clite and Neil Schleimer Barbara Cohn Jared Dawson Jane Deknatel and John Seddon Stuart and Beverly Denenberg Charles Donelan Cynthia and David Dunlop Carol Ann Dyer Adrienne Edgar Doris and Caleb Finch Bonnie Freeman Jocelyn Gibbs Robina and Rene Goiffon Susan and David Hirsch Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Ellen and William Ireland Anne Johnstone Clare Kiklowicz Hannah and Marshall Kramer Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot Sheila McCue Sue McDonald Christina McPhee Maxine Meltzer and Douglas Whitney Ida and Glenn Mercer Helen Milner Rusti and Steven Moffic Rex Moser Anthony Parr Krisanto Pranata Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher Joyce A. Robinson Nikki Scandalios Catherine Sharkey Kathy Solomon and Bob Burchman Eva Soltes Elizabeth St. Clair Libby and Sandy Treadwell Sandra Wagner Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner Joann Yabroff We have made every effort to accurately list our longtime attendees and regret any errors or omissions.

Please stop by our Box Office if you have any questions or changes

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Share Your Story Our patrons are an important part of the Festival’s unmatched legacy and story. We enjoy hearing about favorite Festival moments or what the Festival means in their own musical journeys.

Sierra Dudas I first learned about the Ojai Music Festival during my freshman year of college. I had just moved to Los Angeles to study Music Industry at USC and was eager to learn! That summer in Ojai was magical: I learned so much about marketing & event production and made lifelong connections with peers who loved music just as much as I did.

Diana and Bijan Rezvani Our first experience of the Ojai Music Festival was also our first visit to Ojai, and we knew that we had come across something special. Each year we’re given an opportunity to set time aside and participate in an immersive, guided exploration of music and creativity. We always leave with something new. The design and execution of every aspect of this Festival can only be the result of immense consideration, work, and passion.

Luca and Susan Suriyapa It is morning at the Besant Hill School auditorium in June 2016.

We are still a little sleepy from the full day of music the day before, late-night concert included.

Through the partial opening of the backstage door, the sun is finally breaking through the morning fog. As the Calder Quarter begins to pluck at their instruments, the silhouette of a bare-footed, white-clad, and statuary Davóne Tines appears. His baritone-bass voice, unknown to us all, starts singing and reciting Caroline Shaw’s By and By with such musical and emotional sensitivity and depth that we cannot but shed tears. And so does Caroline Shaw, sitting next to us, so intensely shaken by hearing and seeing her composition come to this new glowing life. And so it goes, another one of the many times at the Ojai Music Festival when we share our love of music (and some tears) with fellow music lovers, musicians, and composers.

Lisa Casoni My favorite thing about the Ojai Music Festival is how surprising it is. I like that it’s not in one venue but in multiple spaces, and how it has evolved. It’s literally changed how I see the art form.

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Have a story to share?

Visit our Festival booth in Libbey Park and we’d love to document it for you!

Matilija Society

THANK YOU! Matilija Society Members are generous donors to the Festival Endowment or have included the Festival in their estate plans.

Matilija Society Members help the Festival to be bold and pioneering in its artistic programs, while deeply influencing the Festival’s capacity to carry out its mission.

We gratefully acknowledge the following Matilija Society members who have included the Ojai Music Festival in their estate plans: Betsy Bachman Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff Carolyn and Jamie Bennett Judy and Merrill Blau NancyBell Coe Sheila* and Don Cluff Lynne Doherty Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt Theresa and Jeff Ferguson Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman Richard S. Gould

Frank* and Linda Granat Cathryn and Tom Krause Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Russ Irwin Raulee Marcus Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris David Nygren Don Pattison Laura and William* Peck Hope Tschopik Schneider Leslie Westbrook Nita Whaley and Don Anderson

Should your name appear here? If so, please tell us about it!

We can tell the world or keep it quiet if you want to stay anonymous.

Either way, knowing about your plans will help us to better prepare for the future.

Making a planned gift is a wonderful way to show your support for the Ojai Music Festival, while achieving your own philanthropic, estate-planning, and financial goals.

Planned gifts can benefit you and your loved ones today and, in the future, and allow the Festival to provide innovative musical programming, create groundbreaking new work, engage students and learners of all ages through arts education, while securing this creative laboratory for generations to come.

We encourage you to discuss your planned gift confidentially with the Ojai Music Festival. Please contact Anna Wagner, Director of Philanthropy at (805) 646-3178 or awagner@ojaifestival.org

Our heartfelt thanks to the following supporters of the Ojai Music Festival Endowment: Barney and Kate Barnhart Betsy Bachman Meg Bates and Scott Johnson Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff June and Shed* Behar Karen Marie Bellavita Jamie and Carolyn Bennett Lerie Bjornstedt* Judy and Merrill Blau Barbara Bowman and Sol de la Torre Bueno Witold Brabec William H. Brady, III* Marion and William Burke* Lainie and Peter Cannon* Ara Guzelimian and Janet Clough, in memory of Lawrence Morton Don and Sheila* Cluff NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke Colburn Foundation Jennifer Coleman Molly Cook Joan Davidson Robert C. Davis, Jr Carlos Diniz* Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen Christine and Sanford Drucker* Constance Eaton and William Hart Merilee* and Samuel Eaton Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt Mercedes H. Eichholz* Yvette Ellis* Betty and Robert* Emirhanian Harriette and Robert Erickson* Evans Foundation Theresa and Jeff Ferguson Lorraine Holve Finch Frank and Maudette* Fink Fund Frances Fitting Ernest Fleischmann* Kate and Richard Godfrey E. Louise Gooding* Helene Gordon and Bill Blackburn Richard S. Gould Dennis Gould Virginia and Richard Gould* Linda and Frank* Granat Caroline and Ralph Grierson Ginger Harmon* Philip Heckscher Janette and Richard Hellmann Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk Natalia and Michael Howe Carolyn Huntsinger* Nancy Huntsinger Russ Irwin Betty Izant* Barbara Jackman Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey* Edith and Jack Jungmeyer* Jorjana and Roger Kellaway Joan Kemper Pat Kennedy*

Margaret Krauss Muriel Lavender Robert M. Light* Andree Lindow Dorothy Loebl Jon Lovelace* Carol and Luther Luedtke Raulee Marcus Elise Marvin* Martha and Thomas May Zelda and Dennis McCarthy Quentin McKenna* Pamela Melone Margaret and Fritz Menninger Lolita and Joe Metscher Charles Millard III* Rachael and Philip Moncharsh Thomas W. and Jane Morris Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris William Myers* Sandi Nicholson Marianne and Philip Nielsen Victoria Nightingale Maj. Gen. Frank Norris David L. Nygren Donald Pattison Laura and William* Peck Barbara and Martin Pops Ruth and Rodney Punt Claire Rantoul Alice and Robert* Rene John Rex* Susan and Mark Robinson Merle and Hans Schiff Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation Helen and Edward Shanbrom* Dorothy and Richard Sheahan* Harry Sims* Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke Paula Spellman Melody and John Taft Sheila Tepper Margaret Thomas* Charlotte and Charles Thompson Glenda Tippett* Hope Tschopik Schneider Ventura County Community Foundation Joan and William Vogel Patricia Weinberger* Jane and Richard Weirick Harriet Wenig* Joyce and Allan West Leslie Westbrook Nita Whaley and Don Anderson Julia and Marc Whitman Margaret and Philip Williams Susanne and Blake* Wilson Helen Wolff Constance Wood Willard Wyman

*Deceased

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BRAVO Music Education & Community Program Even for the majority of students who do not end up in music careers, exposing students to beauty through music education has value because it gives them the chance to create meaningful art. In turn, this grows a creative skillset and builds confidence.

Beauty is important to recognize in education because of its powerful impacts on the way students learn. It increases engagement and memory. It sparks creativity.

Appreciation of music making gives people a personal connection. Our work helps children thrive. We all learn to value diversity and care for each other through making music and art together.

Music can give us strength, highlight feelings and sensations of excitement and thrill. Joy and love last longer than just this moment.

—LAURA WALTER, BRAVO education coordinator

2024 BRAVO by the numbers: The BRAVO program brings beauty into the lives of children. Music can calm us. Lyrics speak to our hearts as poetry. We all wish we could sing and dance more often. Let’s build compassion through music. Let’s create more goodness in the world, that which makes us feel alive.

BRAVO EDUCATION COORDINATOR

Laura Walter EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Bridget Brockman, Co-Chair Judy Fish, Co-Chair Kathy Broesamle Laura Denne Lynne Doherty Rosanne Forgette Gina Gutierrez Martha Highfill Audrey McPherson Jane Roberts Michelle Sherman Lillian Tally Joann Yabroff

INSTITUTIONAL FUNDERS

BRAVO VOLUNTEERS

Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust California Arts Council John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation Ojai Festival Women’s Committee Ojai Valley School Barbara Barnard Smith Fund Ojai Women’s Fund Santa Barbara Symphony Music Van

Helen Allen Babette and Bob Betsy Bachman Fern Barishman Jim Bell Chloe Biondo Dave Cipriani Kerri Climer & Friends Aidan Connelly Caressa Cowan Laurel Crary Kim Eck Michael Estwanik Alex Fager Jodie Farrell Deborah Finley Rosanne Forgette Jackie Francis Donna Freiermuth Andy Gilman

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Shelley Burgon David Cipriani Rosanne Forgette Kathleen Robertson Ruben Salinas Julie Tumamait-Stenslie

3,500 1,207 57 30,460

Children Served Workshops Classrooms Direct experiences

Abby Gonzales Louis Grace Bonnie Griffin Martha Highfill Sophie Holt Raul Kottler Madrigali Fran Malinoff Leigh Ann McDonald Don Midgett Lynn Mullins Gloria Namugga Karen Nelson Cathy Newman Ojai Library Ukulele Group Ann Oppenheimer Nancy Pepper Cindy Pitou-Burton Razzberry Jam

Dori Riggs Jackie Ringhoff Joyce Robinson Anna and Mattie Rowlands Kate Russell Santa Barbara County Flute Ensemble Ruby Skye Gail Smith Starlight Quartet Ray Sullivan Morgan Swaidan Tracy Sweetland Lisa Tkacheck Judy Vander Randee Vasilakos JB White Reggie Wood Kendra Yoes Fereschta Zamadi-Sinclair

Get involved! Learn more about BRAVO at www.OjaiFestival.org

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The Ojai Music Festival BRAVO program brings music and joy to local students and the Ojai community through educational workshops, interactive demonstrations, and free concerts.

BRAVO PROGRAMS INCLUDE: EDUCATION THROUGH MUSIC brings interactive song and play to students in grades TK-3, building empathy, intelligence, and cooperation. Experiences with pitch and rhythm prepare students for further musical experience and increase language and math literacy.

IMAGINE Concert is presented for fourth-sixth grade students. In collaboration with Ojai Valley School and the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund, more than 700 students and 100 adults enjoy music and dance from around the world. Audience members were recently treated to a performance of The Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. In addition, the Festival holds free community concerts during the annual Festival in June.

Our MUSIC VAN visits four Ojai Valley schools and two Ventura-area schools to encourage children to choose their favorite instrument to learn in their own school programs. Everyone learned about sound vibrations and tried every instrument. Special thanks to the Santa Barbara Symphony for the use of its Music Van.

BRIDGE Program enriches our world through interactions of third grade students with our local seniors through music and song games. Children invite the residents to join them in walking or skipping, or even just staying in their place and having a turn in the song!

We introduce ourselves and find out about the lives of the residents, all while singing folk songs.

SCORE is BRAVO’s new music composition enrichment class for public high school students, coordinated by Emily Praetorius with Nordhoff High School music teacher Bill Wagner. The class provides the tools and guidance necessary for students to compose their own musical works, culminating in an endof-year concert where the student pieces are performed. Listening sessions, composition lessons, and guest speakers enhance the class’s exploration of musical composition and contemporary music in general.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE Program conducts inschool workshops with professional musicians, including Chumash song and dance, violin, jazz saxophone, Indian slide guitar, harp, and drumming. The program teaches students about history, geography, and world cultures through music.

MUSIC AND ARTS CAMP is a program held two times during summer.

Children and teachers sing, play, and explore art and storytelling in an interactive environment. We move, we build imagination, and we work together!

Photos by Cindy Pitou Burton, Misty Hall, and Fred Rothenberg

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Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program

“Unique mentorship experiences with the Festival’s staff allowed me to explore different facets of the industry and deepen my commitment to further developing as a well-rounded arts administrator.”

—LANDON WILSON, MANHATTAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC OJAI ALUMNUS 2023

The Festival’s Arts Management Internship program welcomes college students and recent graduates to go behind the scenes working closely with the staff and production team and gain invaluable hands-on experience for their future careers.

Festival interns have gone on to have successful careers in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Those who have gone on to work in the arts have done so at organizations across the country, including AMOC*, Ojai Music Festival, San Diego Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Early Music Guild of Seattle, and Voices of Change, as well as forged new paths as entrepreneurial performing artists and composers.

Colleges and universities represented have included Berklee School of Music, Boston University, CalArts, California Lutheran University, Cal State UniversityLong Beach, Manhattan School of Music, Occidental College, San Diego State University, Stanford University, UCLA, USC, Moorpark College, and Westmont College.

Ojai Music Festival Internship Fellow The 2024 Ojai Music Festival Intern Fellow is Hitesh Benny who is a returning intern from the 2023 Festival and a 2022 volunteer. Hitesh wrote, “Whether it be learning how to communicate confidently and authoritatively, or how to balance my emotions, desires, and longings when there are various duties at hand. Ojai allows me to be myself, and in doing so, I am able to learn what it is that inspires me and how I can be of service to it.”

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Special Thanks The Ojai Music Festival wishes to express our deepest gratitude to the following: Ashly Piano Crafts Besant Hill School/Alex Smith Barbara Bowman Ed Brooks City of Ojai Cohen Siderow Wine Imports LLC/Jill Cohen Custom Printing Gold Coast Ambulance Joan Kemper Kathie Kottler LA Percussion Rentals LS Promotions/Linda Schimmel Lorraine Lim Catering Music Academy Nordhoff High School Music Department/Bill Wagner Ojai Citrus Growers Ojai Presbyterian Church Ojai Valley Museum Ojai Valley School/Tracy Wilson Ojai Wesleyan Church/Pastor Lyn Thomas Pacific Western Bank Pinhole Coffee SANE Living Center Steinway & Sons LA/Benjamin Salisbury Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, Ojai Station Ventura Rental Center Ventura Water Store Viper Security Westridge Market

OJAI FESTIVAL WOMEN’S COMMITTEE

Heartfelt thanks to the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee for all they do in support of the Festival throughout the year. Special thanks to those members who host the Festival Lounge.

FESTIVAL HOUSING HOSTS

An important part of the Ojai Music Festival community is the housing hosts. They graciously open their homes every year to visiting artists, interns, and the production crew.

Their wonderful hospitality makes each visit a memorable occasion for Festival guests. If you are interested in being a Housing Host, call Deirdre Daly at 805 646 2094 or email ddaly@ojaifestival.org.

Students from California Lutheran University at the Ojai Music Festival’s Creative Lab concert, November 2023

OJAINEXT is Ojai Music Festival’s free program to welcome and build community for new audience members – from college students, recent college grads, to young professionals.

What perks will you get as an OJAINEXT Member?

Whether you’re a long-time classical music lover or simply curious about this yearly Ojai staple, look at our various perks to help welcome you to the Ojai Festival community.

• Invitations to special events throughout the year • Discounts on select Festival concerts • Drink voucher for the Green Room in the Park • An invitation to the OJAINEXT member event during the Festival Learn more about OJAINEXT at OjaiFestival.org/OJAINEXT or ask our Box Office staff how to get involved.

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Volunteers

Since the Ojai Music Festival’s founding in 1947, volunteers have ensured the enduring success of the organization, from our renowned four-day Festival to our acclaimed BRAVO music education program. Many thanks to this year’s wonderful community of volunteers for their tireless efforts and kindness.

Vicki Aubert Kristen Babauta Paula Bignardi Bob Birk Charlie Bosson Tom Boyles* Ursula Britton* Dianne Bullard Kat Burke Jenny Silber Butah Susan Carpenito Kelly Carrol Tessa Devoe Christine Fenn Mary Fleming Jacqueline Francis

Eva Gelpi Wendy Gray Kim Halter Jodine Hammerand Angela Petite Hayes Gretchen Hays* Jill Helson Nicole Jahng Athena Kahler Kathy Kelly Vera Kibler Christina Kim Lane Teri La Pata Jordana Lawrence Sophie Loire Robin Marbelle

Sheila McCue April McDermott Stacey Miller McDermott Carrie McDonough Audrey McPherson Allison Monahan Kasey Moore Tisha Morris Karen Nelson Denise Ondishko Peter Parziale* Maggie Pfeffer Cristy Poulos Kate Russell Beverly Schuberth Carla Sherman

Laurie Shrage Toni Solis Tracy Sweetland Jacob Thompson Christopher Ulivo Gretta Ulivo Barry Verga Ruth Walker Brian Wetzel Christine White Sonia Wilczewski Michael Williams Devoney Wolfus Kari Worden Mary Ann Zalokar list as of May 13, 2024

*Special thanks to our long-time volunteers who have been volunteering for 10-plus years.

If you are interested in volunteering at next year’s Festival, please email info@ojaifestival.org.

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Staff ARA GUZELIMIAN Artistic and Executive Director GINA GUTIERREZ Managing Director and Director of Marketing ANNA WAGNER Director of Philanthropy

FIONA DIGNEY Producer and Artistic Administrator AMBER YOUNG Operations and Events Manager BRYAN LANE Patron Services Manager

LYNN DUBOUX Finance Operations Manager MADELINE DOSS Patron Services and Development Associate LAURA WALTER BRAVO Education Coordinator

Production & Operations KATHRYN STURCH Technical Production Manager

TRISTAN COOK Live Stream Director

SHEILA COHN Festival Concierge

MELISSA SOMRACK GORRIS Libbey Bowl Stage Manager

GROPIOUS PRODUCTION/ WALTER PARK Live Streaming Production Company

TIMOTHY TEAGUE Photographer

JONATHAN BERGERON Associate Producer ANNA DROZDOWSKI Greenberg Center Stage Manager MADDI BAIRD Libbey Park Stage Manager MARK GREY Sound Designer and Head Audio Engineer

RAY SULLIVAN Operations Crew Lead EMILY DEL SIGNORE SHANE SCHAFER BRAYDEN MALLECK Operations Crew CARISSA CORRIGAN Operations Assistant

NATHAN GRATER Associate Sound Designer

DEIRDRE DALY Housing Manager

TOBY TITTLE Monitor Engineer

CAITLIN PRAETORIUS House Manager

CHRISTINA GASPARICH Sound Assistant

JUDITH PIAZZA Associate House Manager

NICHOLAS HOUFEK Lighting Designer and Light Board Operator

MATTHEW ARAT MARCO MENDIZABAL ARAUZ JANE ROBERTS TERRY WRIGHT Head Ushers

MOMENTUM MEDIA / VINCE PECCHI Lighting Provider KEITH FENTON DAVID GUTHRIE ALEX HALL-MOUNSEY KIRK ZAHARRIS Lighting Techs CLAIRE CLEARY Associate Lighting Designer MIKE’S TECHNICAL SERVICES/ MIKE TREGLER Ancillary Event Engineer JOEL BERNACHE Steinway Piano Technician RICHARD NEWSHAM Green Room Manager MICHAEL COOLEY Rigger DOOJIE SELINGER Stage Crew LANDON WILSON Artist Liaison

MARY ANN MAKEE Front of House Consultant BRIAN TURNER Patrol Manager JONATHAN ABE DAVID ABE STEVE HOLLAND SEAN MCHALE HOLLY MEADORS DAVID SEIBLE LINDA SEIBLE RAFAEL SIERRA MARSHALL THOMAS BRIAN TURNER BRIANNA TURNER MCKENNA TURNER JIM VERKUIL Patrol Team KATHERINE HARTLEY GEORGE ELIZABETH SPILLER DOMINIQUE WRIGHT Retail & Concessions Team

JOE NORRIS JOHN BOWMAN Parking NIKKI SCANDALIOS Public Relations KERI SETNICKA Social Media Coordinator JERRY MARYNIUK, MD Medical Tent Volunteer Coordinator TARA SAYLOR Volunteer Coordinator LYNN MALONE Suppers in the Park Coordinator GLENDA YOUNG Craft Services LORRAINE LIM CATERING Catering Services MIMI ARCHIE Festival Creative Art Direction KATHLEEN KENNEDY Program Book Graphic Design BITVISION TECHNOLOGY IT Providers DOMINIQUE WRIGHT Assistant Intern Coordinator HITESH BENNY Ojai Music Festival Fellow NICHOLAS BALDWIN KYLIE CLOUTIER MIA CONDON GENNA EBERHARD SAM GERIKE SOPHIE LITTLE MEGAN MORROW MARIAH DIVIANNE MUSNI LILY OWENS QUINN ROSENBERG ZOLA SAADI-KLEIN LAUREN SEBASTIAN NICOLE STIDHAM Interns

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Advertiser Index CULTURE & PERFORMING ARTS

MEDIA & MUSIC

23 IFC 55

4 11 69 22 27 49

59 27 41 1 31 3 26 41 16 7 35 73 41 19 33

2025 Ojai Music Festival canvas & paper CAMA (Community Arts Music Association) Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Chamber on the Mountain Flamenco Arts Festival Hutchins Consort Laguna Beach Music Festival Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Libbey Bowl Canyon Concert Series New Music Decanted (2024 Summer Festival) New West Symphony Music Academy of the West Ojai Film Festival Ojai Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace Ojai Playwrights Conference Santa Barbara Symphony UCSB Arts & Lectures

EDUCATION 45 65 24 5 11 15 19

Agora Foundation Besant Hill School Monica Ros School Oak Grove School Oberlin Conservatory of Music Ojai Valley School Villanova Preparatory School

KCLU KUSC Ojai 101 Guide Ojai Quarterly Ojai Valley News/Ojai Magazine WNYC/New Sounds

SERVICES 69 102 90 25 18 69 59 12 13 17 BC 32 100 61 30

Auction Liaison Custom Printing E.J. Harrison & Sons Frederick Fisher and Partners Gables of Ojai Heritage Financial Humane Society of Ventura County Integrity Wealth Advisors Johnson Fain (Architecture, Urban Design + Planning, Interiors) Ojai Valley Real Estate Patty Waltcher/Berkshire Hathaway Sharon Maharry/Berkshire Hathaway Santa Barbara Travel/Sheila Cohn Sound Post Capital Topa Topa Optometry, Inc.

SHOPPING & GALLERIES 100 IBC 25

Barbara Bowman Boutique Bart’s Books Blanche Sylvia

FOOD & DRINK 24 55 35 65 22 9 65

805.485.3700 customprintinginc.com

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Beato Chocolates Farmer and the Cook Ojai Rotie Pinyon Ojai The Dutchess The Ojai Vineyard Sam’s Place

Gina Gutierrez, managing editor Thomas May, program book editor and annotator Doug Adrianson, June Behar, editorial assistants Kathleen Kennedy of Waller Design, graphic designer Printed by Custom Printing, Inc. Oxnard CA | www.CustomPrintingInc.com

2024 Ojai Music Festival program Ojai Festivals, Ltd. © All rights reserved.

PO Box 185 Ojai CA 93024 805 646 2094 info@ojaifestival.org www.OjaiFestival.org

Over 25 years of experience matching people and property in the Ojai Valley

502 Vista Hermosa Drive is a 5br/4ba mid-century modern, artfully positioned on its nearly one acre lot to command uninterrupted views of the Topa Topas. It offers 3,673 sqft of refined living space and lush, private grounds with stately oaks, drought-resistant landscaping, and fruit trees. Floor to ceiling windows create an ambiance of airy openness, while the pool, spa and lounging areas invite one to enjoy the outdoors. A Tesla Powerwall and 28 solar panels are among the many upgrades. It is a slice of architectural heritage infused with the magical experience of Ojai. More photos and information at: 502VistaHermosaDrOjai.com

I will help you find the home that brings peace to your mind and heart

www.pattywaltcher.com pattywaltcher@mac.com @pattywaltcherrealestate (805) 340-3774 DRE# 01176473

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