<\/p>\n
Nostalgia isn\u2019t an Ojai virtue, however, and younger composers kept things current. Messiaen\u2019s nature-consciousness found a counterpart in Gabriella Smith\u2019s \u201cAnthozoa,\u201d for violin, cello, piano, and percussion, which evoked the microscopic bustle of coral reefs, with clicks and rustlings giving way to oceanic hymnal chords. Anna Thorvaldsdottir\u2019s \u201cR\u00f3\u201d (\u201ctranquillity,\u201d in Icelandic) unfurled a not dissimilar soundscape of organic tendrils growing from sustained drones. Meanwhile, the pianist Conor Hanick played two new pieces by John Adams, the most boyish of near-octogenarians; one of them, \u201csong without words,\u201d offered a transfixing instance of Adamsian endless melody, at once radiant and bittersweet.<\/p>\n
Of the half-dozen Ojai festivals I\u2019ve attended, this one was perhaps the most perfectly executed. The excellence of the programming and music-making testified not only to Salonen\u2019s magnetism but also to the behind-the-scenes dexterity of the veteran arts administrator Ara Guzelimian, who has been associated with Ojai for decades and has led its operations since 2020. The ovation that erupted when Guzelimian walked out to introduce the festival\u2019s closing concert was a fitting acknowledgment that golden-age concerts do not happen by themselves.<\/p>\n
That final concert, featuring the student orchestra of the Colburn School, in L.A., at once exemplified Ojai\u2019s ethos and jolted its laid-back atmosphere. Salonen led a buoyant, mercurial ninetieth-birthday tribute that he wrote for the late Frank O. Gehry, titled \u201cFog.\u201d He also presented Stravinsky\u2019s ironic-bucolic ballet \u201cPulcinella,\u201d a bracing prelude to summer. In between came Ligeti\u2019s towering, terrifying Violin Concerto, written between 1989 and 1993. Leila Josefowicz, for whom both Salonen and Adams have written concertos, essayed the solo part for the first time in her career, and she delivered it with such sublime fury that afterward the customarily reserved Salonen did something quite uncharacteristic: he slapped his forehead with his palm and gestured at Josefowicz in happy disbelief.<\/p>\n
I had been waiting more than thirty years to hear this concerto done so intensely. In 1993, when I was a neophyte critic, I went to Boston to report on a Ligeti festival at the New England Conservatory. The composer was in attendance, holding forth in lectures and discussions, his arachnid mind spinning webs across music history. At one point, he gave a virtuosic disquisition on motifs of lament, citing Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, and Purcell (he sang an excruciating version of \u201cDido\u2019s Lament\u201d), not to mention flamenco, Roma music, and funeral songs he\u2019d heard in Transylvania as a child. He also discussed the Violin Concerto, which he was still revising. He related the piece to his attempt to develop a new kind of tonality, one that would absorb tradition without becoming trapped by it. He said, \u201cI am in a prison\u2014one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.\u201d Only Ligeti could find himself in an Escher-like prison with just two walls.<\/p>\n
The concerto is less than half an hour long, yet it contains a universe of possibilities. Folkish ditties dance through fractal textures; standard equal-tempered tuning is juxtaposed with the archaic practice of just intonation; rhythms ricochet against one another; influences of Central African forager music and Indonesian gamelan are audible; the ancient lament resounds. Because of its extreme complexity, the work is seldom programmed, and when it is the realization can fall short of the conception. In 2000, I heard it at Carnegie Hall, with Christian Tetzlaff, Pierre Boulez, and the London Symphony. The notes glittered in place, but the piece came across more as a cerebral design than as a living thing.<\/p>\n
Salonen has dug deeper. He esteemed Ligeti from an early age and worked closely with the composer from the nineteen-eighties onward. When the Sony Classical label launched a recorded survey of Ligeti\u2019s music, in the nineties, Salonen was chosen to oversee the project. Alas, Ligeti proved to be an extraordinarily difficult collaborator, his manic perfectionism colliding with practical reality and leading to unpleasant scenes. One day, Salonen received a fax from him that read, \u201cI promise to be relatively nice tomorrow.\u201d Nonetheless, Salonen never stopped admiring the music, and he bore in mind the psychic pressures that weighed on the man himself. Messiaenic serenity was not within Ligeti\u2019s reach. When I spoke with Salonen at Ojai, he told me, \u201cHere was a man who lost almost all of his family in the Holocaust, and then fled from Hungary to Austria in 1956, in the middle of the night, with dogs chasing him at the border. When that is your starting point, it creates a very bleak world view.\u201d What fascinates Salonen now, however, is not the darkness of Ligeti\u2019s art but its aliveness and freshness: \u201cThe vitality of a piece like the Violin Concerto reminds me of the \u2018Symphonie Fantastique\u2019\u2014it will always surprise you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nostalgia isn\u2019t an Ojai virtue, however, and younger composers kept things current. Messiaen\u2019s nature-consciousness found a counterpart in Gabriella Smith\u2019s \u201cAnthozoa,\u201d for violin, cello, piano, and percussion, which evoked the microscopic bustle of coral reefs, with clicks and rustlings giving way to oceanic hymnal chords. Anna Thorvaldsdottir\u2019s \u201cR\u00f3\u201d (\u201ctranquillity,\u201d in Icelandic) unfurled a not dissimilar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2480880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22008,365925,369875],"class_list":["post-2480879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-magazine","tag-musical-events","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Sublime-Fury-at-the-Ojai-Festival.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2480879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2480881,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480879\/revisions\/2480881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2480880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2480879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2480879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2480879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}