The wildfires that consumed large tracts of Southern California last December came close to ravaging the rustic-bohemian town of Ojai, which has long been the seat of the Ojai Music Festival, America’s most vibrant new-music gathering. Advancing from the north, the east, and the south, the fires got within a few miles of the town before a determined firefighting effort and a lucky shift in the wind held them back. Today, if you survey the Ojai Valley from an overlook you will see charred mountainsides looming over an island of green. Not surprisingly, the 2018 festival, which took place over four days in early June, felt different from past editions, which have unleashed wild sounds in idyllic surroundings. The idyll remained, but it seemed more fragile this time. The sounds could be heard as flashbacks or as forebodings.
The Moldovan-born violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, this year’s music director, had selected her programs long before December, but they spoke with eerie aptness to a town that had faced an apocalypse. The central composer was the twentieth-century Russian ascetic Galina Ustvolskaya, who wrote spiritual music of flagellating force. A world première by the Baltimore-based composer Michael Hersch harrowingly evoked the spread of cancer in a body. Works by György Ligeti and György Kurtág mixed bleakness with black humor. The concerts were heavy going at times, but Kopatchinskaja invested them with vital purpose.
Kopatchinskaja, who is forty-one, is a fascinating musician with a fascinating mind. She is the child of two Moldovan folk-music specialists, both of whom joined their daughter at Ojai to play traditional tunes and dances. In 1989, the family emigrated from Moldova to Austria, where Kopatchinskaja studied violin and composition. She has become known for her free-spirited performing style—she sways about, roams the stage, and sometimes goes barefoot—and for her provocative takes on the classics. Her account of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto follows the score but has the feel of an improvisation. She has developed semi-theatrical concert programs that weave together works of many periods, and she aggressively campaigns on behalf of her favorite contemporary composers, who seldom fall into the easy-listening category. She is sometimes solemn, sometimes whimsical, sometimes both. She opened the festival with Luigi Nono’s 1989 score “La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura,” an avant-garde tour de force for violin and electronics, and she played a section of it while standing atop a picnic table in Ojai’s town park.
Not all of Kopatchinskaja’s ideas cohered. On the first night of the festival, she presented a program entitled “Bye Bye Beethoven,” which protested classical music’s excessive dependence on the past—the sense of being “strangled by tradition,” as she has said. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a versatile Berlin-based group that was on hand throughout the festival, accompanied Kopatchinskaja in a most unusual performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, in which the soloist was ceremonially swaddled in yards of fabric before she played. (Her arms were not constrained, fortunately.) Toward the end, the musicians enacted a rebellion against routine, throwing down their music stands and stalking offstage while a chaotic electronic collage of Beethoven excerpts swelled on the sound system. Kopatchinskaja battled on alone and then collapsed in defeat, as the back wall parted to reveal replicas of various composers’ tombstones.
The theatrics were arresting, but the message felt less than fresh. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d heard Beethoven’s “Fidelio” blown up in similar fashion, in an adventurous production by the Heartbeat Opera. As several Ojai regulars pointed out, an anti-canonical message is superfluous at Ojai, which has celebrated the new since Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez were honored guests. What did impress me, though, was Kopatchinskaja’s commitment to her role. She conveyed the agony of a creative artist who is torn between her devotion to new work and the prevailing pressure to stick with familiar fare.
A concert entitled “Dies Irae” was more convincing, albeit mildly terrifying. The old medieval chant, which begins “Day of wrath, that day turns the world to ash,” was framed as a warning of political and environmental catastrophe. The program began with an ingenious intermingling of movements from Heinrich Biber’s 1673 piece “Battalia,” an evocation of the Thirty Years’ War, and George Crumb’s 1970 “Black Angels,” a white-hot response to Vietnam. Portents of doom thundered from a septet of improvising trombones. The centerpiece of the program was Ustvolskaya’s Composition No. 2, “Dies Irae” (1973), which features eight grinding double basses, a hyper-dissonant piano, and a wooden cube being thwacked with two hammers. The percussionist Fiona Digney, pummelling a conspicuously coffin-like apparatus, made a sound to wake the dead. At the conclusion came a portion of Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes,” in which the instruments expire one by one. At Ojai, musicians held the metronomes while standing in the aisles. The final image was of two children staring out at the audience, one holding the last surviving metronome. The message landed with all the subtlety of Ustvolskaya’s hammer, yet I’ll not soon forget the image.
Hersch’s new piece, a seventy-five-minute vocal cycle entitled “I Hope We Get a Chance to Visit Soon,” caused dissent in the legendarily open-minded Ojai audience: some were deeply moved, others repulsed. Its main text is drawn from e-mails that Hersch received from his friend Mary O’Reilly as she was dying of cancer. One soprano declaims these words while another sings settings of poems by Rebecca Elson, who tells of a similar struggle, in more oblique terms. The unvarnished intimacy of O’Reilly’s language—“I had a rather scary conversation with my oncologist”—made it difficult to find aesthetic distance, though this was perhaps the point: we were being shown the raw material for a work of art alongside its poetic elaboration. Hersch’s music is harsh, relentless, and often deliberately lacking in contrast, but it is gripping in its dogged progress.
Skilled collaborators joined Kopatchinskaja’s quest. Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy were transfixing soloists in the Hersch; Hong also gave a commanding performance of Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments.” The avant-garde virtuosos of the JACK Quartet were bewitching not only in their usual diet of Morton Feldman and Horațiu Rădulescu but also in several of John Dowland’s “Lachrimae,” masterpieces of Renaissance melancholy. Most stupendous was the pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, who, in his spare time, runs the Salzburg Festival. On a blisteringly hot afternoon at the Libbey Bowl, Ojai’s open-air arena, Hinterhäuser sat for an hour and played Ustvolskaya’s six piano sonatas—as staggering a pianistic feat as I’ve seen in recent years. He brought out their violence: the cluster chords, the pounding of high and low registers, the monomaniacal repetition. He also brought out their tenderness, their shards of song. He has traversed the cycle many times, and will do so again this summer, in Salzburg. Only in Ojai, one guesses, has an elderly audience member come up to him in tears, thanking him for the experience.
The new-music scene in Southern California is sufficiently active that there is no need to import Europeans to tackle demanding fare. At Ojai, members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra offered a selection of Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas—fourteen showpieces for solo performers. These were generally well done, but they lacked the specific fire of a Sequenzas concert that I saw last fall at the Los Angeles venue Monk Space, involving local musicians. The diabolically inventive trombonist-composer Matt Barbier, who played “Sequenza V” at that event, participated in the “Dies Irae” clamor in Ojai; Scott Worthington, a double bassist who creates spare, glimmering soundscapes, handled the electronics in the Nono. Ojai could make better use of local talent: Southern California has its own distinctive community of composers and allied artists, who sway between uproarious and meditative modes.
In the same period as Ojai, the fourteenth edition of a festival called the Dog Star Orchestra unfolded at venues in and around L.A. This is the brainchild of the veteran experimental composer Michael Pisaro, who teaches at CalArts, northwest of the city. Pisaro specializes in quiet, spacious music that frequently samples or mimics natural sounds. In August, the Mostly Mozart Festival, at Lincoln Center, will present his work “a wave and waves,” which summons an oceanic murmur from microscopic noises, such as seeds dropping on glass or paper being torn. A Dog Star event at the Coaxial Arts Foundation, in downtown L.A., featured Pisaro’s “Beings, Heat and Cold,” in which performers extract sounds from miscellaneous objects that they have retrieved from streets around the venue. On this occasion, the instrumentation included a traffic cone, a chunk of Styrofoam, a twig, a rock, and a discarded bassinet with a music box attached. Later, the performers elicited daubs of tone from conventional instruments, as if translating those found objects into spectral music.
Another Dog Star event took place in the Mueller Tunnel, a structure on a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of L.A. Several dozen people hiked a mile from the main road to witness a rendition of Heather Lockie’s conceptual piece “Song to Be Performed in a Tunnel in Your Town,” for seven female vocalists. Attired in white dresses, the singers proceeded in shifting formations from one end of the tunnel to the other, emitting ethereal timbres, playing chiming percussion, and scraping rocks against the walls. One vocalist sang Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” a coal miner’s lament. In the final moments, the performers walked into the light at the far end of the tunnel and disappeared around the bend of a mountain path. This felt like an emanation from the California of the nineteen-twenties, when spiritual seekers settled in towns like Ojai and tried to start anew. The cynic in me found the vision hokey; the dreamer in me would have liked to disappear with them. ♦
