The Libbey Bowl at Ojai Music Festival 2013. | Photo: Courtesy of Ojai Music Festival.
The lush topography of Ojai has long attracted visitors and residents alike to the area, including the Chumash people who are the valley's early inhabitants and from which the name Ojai, meaning moon was derived. The renowned humanist/philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, also had a home in Ojai (he died there in 1986), where he often gave his legendary talks under the trees, in the Mediterranean climate. The region's seductive smell of orange blossoms and the enchanting play of light, not only draws artists, spiritual seekers and tourists, but new music lovers as well.
Indeed, since 1946, the Ojai Music Festival has presented a who's who of the world's greatest musical artists, including Aaron Copland, John Adams, Olivier Messiaen and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In this, the 70th iteration of the festival (June 9-12), internationally acclaimed theater and opera director, Peter Sellars, together with the event's artistic director Thomas W. Morris, has created a program that promises to stimulate, provoke and continue to be boundary-breaking.
When asked what makes Ojai a magical place, Sellars, 58, no stranger to the festival, having been its music director in 1992 and who also directed George Crumb's The Winds of Destiny in 2011 under soprano Dawn Upshaw's musical direction, explained by phone: We are surrounded by just plain noise. It's great to go to a place where things are a little quiet, a little more concentrated. The sense of human contact is low key and immediate and you can be distracted from all the hysteria.
Can we just think about some things that are a little more important? Sellars asked rhetorically, his huge signature laugh resonating.
Peter Sellars is the music director of Ojai Music Festival 2016. | Photo: Ruth Walz, courtesy of Ojai Music Festival.
Of course, 70 years is certainly a milestone, but Sellars said that he prefers to look ahead, not backwards. What's so amazing, he noted, when things are founded and devoted to new music -- contemporary things -- you don't expect them to have that longevity. It's kind of fantastic that something really committed to Modernism, made in that fantastic early postwar California exploratory period, is not only still with us, but has deepened its roots.
And that is very, very moving, added the director whose 1992 appearance saw him stage Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, on the back of a pickup truck with rappers from South L.A. providing the narration, much to the chagrin of that year's OMF music director, conductor Pierre Boulez. I wanted to honor some of the roots and at the same time I wanted to move it forward another 70 years and open it up in new ways.
To that end, Sellars and Morris have assembled what appears to be a woman-centric slate of concerts, with the Finnish composer and Salonen colleague, Kaija Saariaho, who makes her Ojai debut, at the festival's core. On tap is the American premiere of the chamber version of Kaija Saariaho's The Passion of Simone, a meditation on the life of the heroic French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, who died of self-imposed starvation at age 34 in 1943. The text is by Amin Maalouf and features the brilliant young soprano Julia Bullock.
Julia Bullock. | Photo: Christian Steiner, courtesy of Ojai Music Festival.
In a late evening concert Bullock will also pay homage to the trailblazing dancer/singer Josephine Baker, in the world premiere of Tyshawn Sorey's Josephine Baker: A Portrait, in which Bullock sings the role of the iconic African-American chanteuse in Paris. The work is accompanied by the musicians of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), headed by flutist Claire Chase, who initiated several of the festival's projects and commissions, including the chamber version of Simone, which also features the composer performing on piano and drums.
Other women on the roster include Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, who is also a member of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth (the group and ICE will be in-residence at the festival), while new works have also been commissioned from Tania Le n and Sharon Hurvitz for a project that brings together Youth Orchestra LA (YOLA) and ICE at a free family concert and party Sunday afternoon in the nearby town of Santa Paula.
In addition, there will be a performance by the singer, pianist and composer, Leila Adu, while the meditative sounds of Pauline Oliveros will be heard in two weekend sunrise concerts. So, too, will attendees hear the South Indian vocalist Aruna Sairam and Egyptian singer Dina El Wedidi, who, with her band, will perform a new song cycle that represents what Sellars says, is the voice of a generation of young Egyptians who are still determined to step into the future.
Dina El Wedidi. | Photo: Courtesy of Ojai Music Festival.
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To top it off, feminist musicologist, Susan McClary, will be joining Sellars onstage for a series of preconcert talks with the artists. But don't ask the indefatigable music ambassador if this is the year of the woman, because he won't have it:
It was probably inevitable historically, said Sellars, but nobody welcomes you into a concert hall and says, Good evening, all of tonight's music has been written by men.' Whatever! It's not fetishistic; it's not some crazy, out-there idea.
Now there are generations of marvelous women composers who are stylistically and incredibly diverse. They are no longer these lone figures on the landscape, but it's moments about being a person whose full range can be heard across the weekend.
Caroline Shaw. | Photo: Dashon Burton, courtesy of Ojai Music Festival.
A cultural globetrotter, Sellars has called Los Angeles home for some 25 years,
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The Libbey Bowl at Ojai Music Festival 2013. | Photo: Courtesy of Ojai Music Festival. 
