by James Rosenfield
all pics by Bonnie Wright
OJAI, CA – The Ojai Music Festival, which wrapped up its 68th edition last weekend, is a unique Southern California blend of gorgeous scenery, intellectual stimulation, dazzling performances, and even a bit of hedonism (hot tubs abound). Ojai is an embarrassment of riches: in addition to films and lectures, there were twelve different concerts from Thursday through Sunday night.
Pianist Jeremy Denk, who — along with Tom Morris, Ojai's Artistic Director — put together this remarkable festival, juxtaposed excerpts from Janacek's On an Overgrown Path on Thursady night with brief Schubert pieces. The resulting dialogue cast a strange compelling light on the two composers, like embers glowing under a full moon. (The moon was indeed full, by the way).
The marquis event of this year's festival was Friday night's premiere of what is likely the only opera ever written about musicology: "The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts)." With music by Steven Stucky and a libretto by Ojai Music Director Jeremy Denk, the opera paid homage to Denk's late mentor and friend Charles Rosen, who was a pianist, musicologist, and author of the seminal book The Classical Style.
Characters include Rosen himself, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – as well as Tonic, Dominant and Subdominant, all "locked in a codependent love triangle." Denk's goofy libretto whizzed by as Stucky's music quoted fragments by the three composers, along with his own stylistic parodies. Call it a highbrow version of "Name That Tune."
Late in the opera a mysterious figure appears, wearing an eyepatch and declaiming the end of the Classical Style as Wagner's Tristan Chord resounds. The attentive Ojai audience got all of the jokes, roaring with laughter throughout. Soprano Jennifer Zetlan sang an impressive and funny Mozart (doubling as Donna Anna); bass-baritone Aubrey Allcock was suitably obnoxious as both Tonic and Don Giovanni. Robert Spano conducted NYC-based chamber orchestra The Knights to a fare-thee-well.
Saturday was an all-day marathon, beginning at 8:00 am with Brooklyn Rider playing music by Glass, Schubert, and Evan Ziporyn, as well as Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen's Three Miniatures for String Quartet. The day ended at about 11:30 pm with Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, sublimely conducted by Robert Spano and featuring the Ojai Festival Singers, who strode in and out of Libbey Bowl — Ojai's recently expanded outdoor venue — bathed in candlelight.
During the day, Denk and violinist Jennifer Frautschi played Charles Ives' four violin sonatas in reverse order – a wise programming choice. The sonatas gain power in reverse; the first is by far the strongest. In between sonatas, the crack male vocal quartet Hudson Shad sang the hymns quoted by Ives throughout. Later that evening, Frautschi delivered a knockout performance of Bach's Sonata No. 3 in C Major for solo violin, biting into the music with relish.
Early evening featured pianist Timo Andres playing a "recomposition" of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto, as Mozart only lightly sketched the left hand part of his penultimate concerto. Andres kept his right hand as Mozart wrote it, while his left hand astonishingly journeyed through musical history…one could hear Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Debussy, Bartok, and doubtless many others. Backed by The Knights, Andres delivered a stunning, and most unusual, tour de force.
Sunday morning featured The Knights playing Mozart's Jupiter Symphony with clarity and verve, followed by Canonade: A melange of musical canons and canon-esque miscellany. Among the oddities was music by Schumann arranged by Georges Bizet (who knew?), and Mozart's Scatological Canons, sung with suitably broad gestures by Hudson Shad, Alex Sopp, and Christina Courtin. They are, without question, the most tuneful and scholarly bathroom humor tunes ever composed.
Denk ended the Festival by knocking off the two books of Ligeti Etudes with astonishing ease, as if he were playing Beethoven's Fur Elise. The Festival then concluded with Denk, The Knights, and the Ojai Festival Singers all performing Beethoven's Choral Fantasy Op. 80: an underrated and underperformed masterpiece that looks ahead to the 9th Symphony's Ode to Joy. And a joy it was, every second of this remarkable musical immersion!
More pics on the photo page.