Credit: David Bazemore
This year’s Ojai Music Festival ran from June 7-10 and offered a magical mystery tour through repertoire that was either au courant, centuries old or premiere ready – which has been their raison d’etre since 1946. Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja was a force of inspiration for the dynamic energy she brought to performance, collaboration, and staging conceptualization of brilliantly conceived programming that crossed a spectrum of historically important composers - including Dowland, Ligeti, Ustvolskaya, Hersch, Tigran Mansurian (his velvety beautiful Four Serious Songs for Violin and Strings) and Abrahamsen.
Ojai Music Festival’s mixture of aesthetics with nature gives off mellow vibes, especially at Libbey Bowl, the primary venue where concerts are held in a park surrounded by oak trees. Just go with the flow: sit or crumple in a blanket on the grass, where discreet monitors with speakers were positioned.
Kopatchinskaja, who enjoys performing barefoot, was indispensable to the Festival’s creativity, but there were other top notch artists as well such as – the Berlin-based Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) in their US debut, Jack Quartet, soprano Ah Young Hong, conductor Tito Munoz (Music Director of the Phoenix Symphony) and Viktor Kopatchinsky, Patricia’s father and cimbalom virtuoso.
If the repertoire had an overriding theme, it seemed to promote music that contains metaphysical exploration, darkness, joie de vivre and utter despair. Many concerts were conceived in what Wagner referred to as music drama, a total merging of the visual and performing arts, which produced spellbinding and provocative results.
While I did not attend the opening night’s Bye Bye Beethoven extravaganza, I was there for the three following days of concerts. What follows are highlights and impressions. Kudos also to the pre-concert lectures which featured artists in conversation at the park’s tennis courts.
Let’s begin the music drama analogy with two Saturday evening concerts, which had the look of a dream sequence, with collaboration from the MCO under Munoz, Kopatchinskaja and the Jack Quartet. The various scenes within scenes staging was enhanced by lighting gradations, on stage collage-like projections and musicians playing, pausing or walking around the audience in darkness while holding illuminated and fully charged iPads. The music, which featured three Lachrimae of Dowland, encapsulated the otherworldly ambience.
The other evening concert offered selections from Crumb’s Black Angels, Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique, Lotti’s Crucifixus a 10, where a shining white cross was projected onto the stage, and Ustvolskaya’s Dies Irae, in its US premiere. There is a transcendental quality to these concept performances, especially in Dies irae.
St. Petersburg-born Galina Ustvolskaya studied with Shostakovich but then developed her own unique harmonic and rhythmic formula. An example of this could be heard at Friday afternoon’s concert that featured her Sonata for Violin and Piano, Duet for Violin and Piano and six sonatas for piano, played by Kopatchinskaja and Markus Hinterhaeuser (Artistic Director of the Salzburg Festival). Kopatchinskaja turned pages.
Without a doubt, the accounts given these works had all the ingredients for success: vitality, metric acuity and conviction. The question is whether it was enough to give them lasting power. Ustvolskaya’s writing is linear, intervallic, clustered, dissonant light, repetitious but not in a minimalist sense, and pattern based. It also contains an appealing intangible element that seems to evoke a primal soundscape, as in Dies irae.
If you strip down to a hollow shell the sophisticated rhythmic twists and spicy orchestration of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, you sometimes get a no frills hint at what kind of effect Ustvolskaya was after. The score calls for pounding on a long wooden cube while being accompanied by waves of sparsely embellished sonority. The build up of intensity submerged Dies irae down to the core of Middle Earth, as conceived by Tolkien in his writings. The intense reading included the MCO, Kopatchinskaja and keyboardist Anthony Romaniuk.
On Friday night, a world premiere of I hope we get a chance to visit soon by Michael Hersch was brought into the musical scene by sopranos Ah Young Hong, Kiera Duffy, Gary Louie (alto saxophone), Amy Yang (piano) and members of the MCO under Munoz. This is not a work that goes down easy because of its content in which the composer puts together a musical tribute to honor the life of Mary O’Reilly, a friend whom he lost to cancer in 2009. Perhaps the work also serves as a catharsis for him.
What followed was a riveting, shocking mixture of writings from O’Reilly and others about her suffering and the ordeal of same, described mostly in graphic detail and projected onto two stage right, stage left screens – while the thick, murky score was screaming in sequential agony. This is not to say that Herschs’ new age opera seria approach did not impress for its unique use of bold orchestration and an exotic palette of vocal tricks such as Sprechstimme nuances, made more effective from Hong’s pin point pitch and poignant facial gestures.
Bottom line: kudos to Ojai Music Festival for presenting this work which may not have pleased every listener but certainly got their attention and engagement – as was the case with Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments, which was offered on Saturday afternoon with Kopatchinskaja and Ah Young Hong. Kurtag is a composer whose time has come, in fact, is long over due especially in this country. This work contains 40 snippets of verse from Kafka’s writings, of which some pieces are only a few measures in length.
Violin and voice often share an obtuse dialogue of pitches that mimic the timbre of each instrument, enhancing the surreal quality that makes Kurtag’s music so esoteric – and this interpretation was very fine. Bravo to Saturday afternoon performances of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, with Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell (of the Jack Quartet) and Berio’s Sequenza X for trumpet in C and piano resonance.
In this work, Matthew Sadler (of the MCO) occasionally blows the instrument into the grand’s soundboard, while a nameless pianist sits without playing a note – but makes pretend hand gestures that simulate page turns. Sort of reminds me of 4’33” by Cage.
And a special kudo to Anthony Romaniuk for his improvisational wizardry on harpsichord and piano, on Friday afternoon. His florid account of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 and his own arrangement of Purcell’s Fairest Isle from King Arthur showed why the harpsichord had such a good run – that is until the piano came along.
Sunday afternoon’s farewell concerts were filled with delights, which began with Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee (Snow). In fact, his opera, The Snow Queen will receive a world premiere in 2019 at the Royal Danish Opera. This work is based on ten canons for nine instruments and was performed by members of the MCO under Munoz with Amy Yang and Romaniuk on piano.
The inherent soundworld creates an impressionistic tonality that crystallizes every note and motive into a continuum of patterns, which often evoke chimes blowing in the wind at a different velocity. The effects produced from this diatonic free fall are mesmerizing and pristine, as for example in the opening and closing duet of high register pitches between strings and piano. Totally cool.
The following concert was all about dance or song selections of folk music from countries found in the eastern side of Europe – Moldova, Romania and Hungary featuring Kopatchinskaja, her father and violinist mother, Emilia. What a treat it was to hear Kurtag’s Eight Duos for violin and cimbalom, Op. 4 with Viktor Kopatchinsky’s astonishing pyrotechnical display of reflexes in using the beaters, which fluttered in dizzying rapidity. The Ciocarlia with supportive double bass strumming from Maria Krykov (of the MCO) sounded like Moldovan Bluegrass. Come on down.
Also included was Enescu’s Sonata No. 3 for violin and piano, Op. 25, which received an interpretation from Kopatchinskaja and Amy Yang that sizzled with stylistic integrity. An historic performance of this piece, sourced from the title “dans le caractere populaire roumain” can be heard on YouTube with Enescu and Dinu Lipatti.
Of the Festival’s closing concert, the initial works seemed mainstream after all the cutting edge repertoire that was performed. The MCO’s reading of Bartok’s Divertimento for Strings and Suite from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat came off a bit lackluster, but all was in order with Ligeti’s Violin Concerto under Philipp von Steinaecker.
Ligeti’s music has plenty of harmonic intrigue, and Kopatchinskaja not only personalized the interpretation of this concerto but also devoured its athletic intricacies and sonic mysteries. Her playing was fast, furious, effervescent, sharp, soulful and above all recklessly flawless.
When it was all over, a breathlessness lingered in the air and with it great anticipation for next year’s Ojai Music Festival with Music Director Barbara Hannigan.