MusicalAmerica - Salonen's Ojai 2026, Part I

Reviews Salonen's Ojai 2026, Part I OJAI, CA – Like Brigadoon, the small California town of Ojai comes to life once a year on a single weekend in June with an improbably durable, world-class music festival. This time, it was observing its 80th year, part of a continuous streak interrupted only by the COVID shutdown in 2020 (they count that fully planned, but never performed, season in the tally anyway). It was a festival of remembrance, but also one of transition, to a new and possibly quite different leader in Teddy Abrams. The Libbey Bowl, Ojai’s main venue located in the town park, was packed over the four days (June 11-14), with all of the evening concerts sold out. Small wonder, given the talent on hand, starting with Esa-Pekka Salonen in his third time around as Ojai music director. Three other former music directors—John Adams, Vijay Iyer, and Peter Sellars—were lurking in the crowd; four more music directors of the past—Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, Patricia Kopatchinskaya, and Mitsuko Uchida—held silent court along the park’s walkways in the form of life-sized, cardboard cutout photos. Past, present, and future music directors were also on hand in, respectively, Thomas Morris, Ara Guzelimian, and Abrams. This was his first visit to the Festival, and he wandered the grounds wide-eyed, amazed that everything he had heard about Ojai being a fantasyland of experimental programming and open-eared audiences was indeed true. This year, the programming links were so extensive and so tightly, and at times obliquely, connected that the whole Festival could have been considered as a single composition, albeit a rather eclectic one. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a common late-night choice in Ojai Festivals past, turned up on opening night, and its “Abyss of the Birds” movement for solo clarinet popped up two more times on Saturday and Sunday mornings as meditations for the dynamically subtle solo clarinet of the New York Philharmonic’s Anthony McGill. Salonen devoted a lot of programming time to remembrances of friends, colleagues, teachers, classmates at the Sibelius Academy, influences, and career landmarks. Oliver Knussen, a familiar guest at the LA Phil during Salonen’s term as music director, was remembered with his lyrical composition for violin and piano, Reflection. It was followed by Salonen’s own tribute, Arabesques for Olly (Knussen’s nickname), where a hidden cellist (Andrew Yee) droned and trilled away at a low volume level underneath an elegy played onstage by another cellist, Jay Campbell. Friday night found Salonen leading a delightful string orchestra piece, Colburn Variations, by the late Steven Stucky, who became a close friend of Salonen’s when he was the composer-in-residence at the LA Phil. I hear this 12-minute piece as a tour through 20th-century music for the benefit of the young musicians at the Colburn School where Salonen heads the conducting program. Stucky was a master at clever pastiche, a trait that he put to use at Ojai in 2014 in his hilarious opera, The Classical Style. Starting with a lush texture ripped out of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the Colburn Variations then paraphrases the ostinatos of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, speeds up into the style of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, evokes the thick sonorities of Honegger’s Second Symphony, and finally goes out the door with neo-classical Stravinsky. Anthony McGill, among Ojai's featured soloists, performing Messiaen's “Abyss of the Birds” Two Salonen classmates from Finland, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, were represented by the entirely dissimilar Related Rocks and Sept Papillons, respectively. The former tumbles along in an abstract exploration of timbres from a collection of gongs, mallet instruments, tom-toms, and other percussion items—allied with two pianos and two not-fully-audible synthesizers. Papillons, on the other hand, found Campbell’s extended techniques on solo cello quietly evoking the special atmosphere of a Libbey Park morning, accompanying an impromptu, realtime aerial dance by yellow butterflies (such is the magic of the Ojai setting). Famed architect Frank Gehry, the late designer of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, received a spot on the list of tributes Sunday with a composer-conducted performance of Salonen’s Fog. (The title represents Gehry’s initials, not the piece’s texture). Written for Gehry’s 90th birthday, the work celebrates the first music ever heard in the then-unfinished hall, J.S. Bach’s Preludio from Partita No. 3 for solo violin. The luminously orchestrated fantasia on the tune was preceded by the original, played by violinist Geneva Lewis, as a reference point. Friday night, Salonen trotted out another of his compositions, kinema, a suite for clarinet (McGill) and string orchestra based on music salvaged from a film that he scored during the COVID shutdown. It’s probably the most immediately attractive thing Salonen has written to date. Salonen’s Six Preludes for Piano—mostly consisting of gifts or elegies for friends and colleagues (Stucky, Paul Crossley, Steven Witser) and the equivalent of Leonard Bernstein’s “anniversaries” for piano—were reduced to four by pianist Conor Hanick; the U.S. premiere of Salonen’s Drømmelogikk for violin and cello on Thursday (as seen and heard on Ojai’s livestream) struck me as a passionately written and played episode of agitation that eventually fades to a nearly sentimental close. Top: Mitsuko Uchida, one of several cardboard cutouts of former Ojai music directors positioned along the walkways.