Open-eared and wide-eyed: experiencing Ojai Festival via livestream

Read more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub 

I couldn’t make my semi-annual pilgrimage to the Ojai Festival this year, its 80th anniversary, but was happy to stay home. I had a few tickets, but high gas prices, unreasonable airfares and other logistical hiccups grounded me.

With a heavy-heart I gave my stubs to a friend who lives in Ojai, checked the festival schedule online to see what I was missing and stumbled on their livestream, something I had hardly noticed before. Ojai has been livestreaming since 2012 and it shows. The festival producers have mastered the art of concert filmmaking - crystal clear acoustics (you can hear the birds singing!), angles and closeups that put you in the musicians’ laps, and cadenced multi-camera editing.

I saw and heard so much more than I would have in the seats, or on the lawn. And the bonus content was first rate, particularly ’Ojai Talks’ with outgoing artistic and executive director Ara Guzelimian (who this year is outgoing in more ways than one, he’s leaving his position after an impressive two tours and eleven years) interviewing this year’s music director Esa-Pekka Salonen and violinist Leila Josefowicz. 

I saw and heard so much more than I would have in the seats, or on the lawn

This year, Ojai presented a showcase of European and American modernism, with Salonen on his third tour as music director. Salonen programmed four of his own brilliant pieces, including a US premiere, and manfully conducted the Colburn School orchestra, stabbing and twirling his baton like a sharpshooter with a sixgun.

Many of the works were by Salonen’s teachers (Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni, Witold Lutosławski) as well as his friends and colleagues (Steven Stucky, Magnus Lindberg, Oliver Knussen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho). Stravinsky’s Pulcinella was back, in a glowing finale performed with warmth and colour by the young student players of the Colburn School Orchestra. But the true highlight of the festival, from my livestream perspective, was the explosive performance of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto by Leila Josefowicz. 

She killed it and Salonen was her partner in crime, steady as a rock as she lunged at him, grinning, almost biting him, sweating and bug-eyed, totally immersed in the composer’s dazzling soundworld, while slipping in an inventive cadenza of her own.

The only other performance of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto that comes close, to me, is by Patricia Kopatchinskaja (another past Ojai music director), but her drama is more studied, like the Meisner Technique. Josefowicz is pure Method Acting, she totally inhabits the pieces she plays. It is indeed not even acting. It is uncaged, and Salonen’s jaw-dropping reaction was genuine and priceless. 

Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself, start the tape at 41:50. (One hopes the Ojai Festival eventually posts a cutdown of the finale, of just the Ligeti piece. I’ve already watched it half-a-dozen times.) 

Guzelimian proudly introduced the Colburn Orchestra as the Curtis Symphony Orchestra of the West, and they lived up to it, supporting Josefowicz expertly, led by their composed concertmaster Ray Ushikubo. The quartet of squealing ocarinas in the second and fourth movements was spellbinding. Four woodwind players performed double duty dropping the oboe, bassoon and two clarinets to blow the fist-size flutes, creating a microtonal chorus that attracted the famous Ojai birds singing in the trees. The orchestra was a joy to hear and watch.

The intensity of this year’s programming combined with the beauty of the young Colburn Orchestra, the gravitas of the great Salonen, the drama of Josefowicz and those remarkable closeups, makes it very clear that the Ojai Festival is not only the most open-eared festival in America it is also the most wide-eyed.