Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

A view of the new Libbey Bowl Photo: mine 2011

For better or worse, the most interesting thing at this year’s Ojai Music Festival was the feeling that the festival was embarking on a new phase in its history. The most obvious reason for this was the completion of the brand spanking new Libbey Bowl, the outdoor amphitheater in Ojai’s Libbey Park that has been the long-time home of the festival. Designed by Ojai architect David Bury, the new stage and seating area replaced the prior badly deteriorating stage while adding several modern improvements. Sadly, Bury died just before this year’s festival began preventing him from seeing the first of the music festival’s programs to occupy his design. The stage’s shell itself is now higher and more deeply slanted with more support for lighting and other equipment. The first thing I noticed about the new bowl was how much improved the sound was. While the Libbey Bowl relies on amplification like many outdoor venues, the sound was more focused and concentrated than I remember. Of course amplification in a new space is always touch and go, and even here, the amplification seemed ragged to me at times compared to before.

Even more noticeable from the audience's perspective, however, was the new seating space. Gone are the willy-nilly seating sections in favor of a single large area that fans out on both sides of the stage. The tiered asphalt that surrounded the stage is gone in favor of a more evenly graded concrete. This admittedly has a colder feel, but is certainly more predictable for people with canes and mobility issues. My favorite thing about the new space, though, is the seats. Individual outdoor seats replace low to the ground wooden branches that were as ugly as they were profoundly uncomfortable. And while the new seats may kill the festival’s long-standing seat cushion market, I can never remember being so comfortable in Ojai during a show. Yes, the Libbey Bowl has lost some of its charm with this new development. Gone are the trees that rose out of the center of the seating space, obstructing views in all directions. I missed their unexpected shade during the shows, but on balance, I think it was time for the festival to move on space-wise and I was glad to see the new Libbey Bowl.

The bowl wasn’t the only feeling that something was changing, however. There also seemed to be a sense of corporate encroachment in the air. The City of Ojai had seriously debated whether or not to allow corporate sponsorship of the Libbey Bowl, finally rejecting the idea. And while the Festival has typically had some level of corporate sponsorship, it was unnerving to see the giant wooden mobile display case and showroom placed in the park to remind everyone of their need for a Lincoln automobile amid the purveyors of locally made olive oil. The warping covers on the paperbacks of the Penguin Books booth which has long been a feature of the festival seemed sad by comparison to the sleek black machines dotting the walkway to the amphitheater. It’s by no means the end of the world as we know it, but it underscores the economic realities that Ojai, like all arts organizations face these days.

And finally, many, many miles away there was the birth of a new project for the Festival with the first installment of “Ojai North!”. This week the same programs from last weekend's shows will be reprised as part of the CalPerformances series in Berkeley. Both the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Dawn Upshaw will be on hand if you'd like to revisit any of the shows I've mentioned here. I'd recommend seeing Upshaw perform George Crumb's The Winds of Destiny on the 16th and the 18th in particular. And even if the music itself wasn't the catalyst for this year's changes in Ojai, it's still what this great festival is all about, and giving more people a chance to see it is a good thing.

Labels: Ojai festival 11

Richard Tognetti (left), Dawn Upshaw (center) and members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra Photo: mine 2011

The other artistic axis of this year’s Ojai Music Festival was the Australian Chamber Orchestra conducted by artistic director and violinist Richard Tognetti. The eleven members of present in Ojai this weekend served as the primary ensemble for both of the festivals’ evening programs on Saturday and Sunday. Both shows covered an unusually large range of works with varying degrees of success. Saturday’s show was organized under the title “No Return” and included works dealing with moments of finality or irreversible change, according to the program notes. It seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but it did provide an excuse for an interesting collection of works. The first half was dominated by Giacinto Scelsi’s Anagamin a microtonal wash with strong Eastern influences. Scelsi’s music always seems surprising to me with a reckless abandon and it provided a clever launching pad for Schnittke’s Trio Sonata that the ensemble dove into immediately afterward without pause. Schnittke’s music had a greater sense of stability and it struck me as more somber than some of his other more playfully ironic works. As a footnote to this, Tognetti played a lead solo role in the final piece prior to the intermission, his own Deviance, a tongue-in-cheek reworking of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. Tognetti’s replication of the familiar virtuosic lines of Paginini’s piece are set against a sort of decaying arrangement in the other strings that seemed to reference the Scelsi in particular.

The second half of the Saturday program included Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Bach always seems to crop up in contemporary music performances where he is admired for his intellectual rigor, so it was no surprise here. The ACO’s performance seemed dry to me, however, with Tognetti placing a greater emphasis on polish. It lacked cohesion at times as well as a certain period spiritedness. Some of the same issues haunted Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. This darkest of Romantic works benefited from the lovely outdoor Ojai night which was markedly warmer than the previous night. Tognetti and the ACO didn’t seem totally attuned to this surrounding, however, and the two lovers in Dehmel’s original poem seemed plagued by a stray ray of high gloss sunshine intruding on their nighttime confessions.

Sunday’s program with Tognetti and the ACO was a similar grab bag of odds and ends, this time bringing in the talents of this year’s festival artistic director Dawn Upshaw. She gave probably the best performance of the whole weekend in this concert with Five Hungarian Folk Songs from Bela Bartok. Her ease and shading of these mostly somber songs she had selected for the evening managed to bring out the folk elements of the pieces without sacrificing any of her own natural vocal warmth. Keeping with a nationalism theme, the ACO concluded the Sunday evening after the Bartok with a chamber orchestra orchestration of Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor. The ethnic origins here seemed hazy and the larger ensemble arrangement of the quartet seemed to add little to the work overall. Sunday’s show started on a more positive note with Webern’s Five Pieces for Strings, whose movements were alternated with those of George Crumb’s Black Angels. Crumb’s string quartet was written in 1970 and was intended to capture some of the emotional strife in a country at war. And while it came from a very different time and place from Webern’s miniatures, the musical link between the pieces with their extended playing techniques couldn’t have been more clear in the performance. Crumb uses water-filled glasses in the final movement, “God-music”, but even this seemed right at home against the old Viennese master.

There was a song cycle in the first half of the Sunday show as well by Maria Schneider whose jazz band had played earlier the same day. The songs, written especially for Dawn Upshaw were based on poems from Ted Kooser written in response to early morning pre-dawn sights and experiences he’d had while undergoing cancer treatment. There is a deep reflection on mortality and living in the words Schneider captured well, albeit in a jazzy movie music kind of way. It seemed about as far as you could get from Crumb and Webern and I’ll admit I could have used about 10 minutes of it instead of around 30 with its piano and horn jazz arrangement and swelling strings.

Was this the best Ojai program ever? Probably not. There was certainly a wide scope of works played by familiar and new faces. But the shows seemed rather undercooked. Some of this went hand in hand with a festival that seemed to be testing new waters this year. But I’ll say more on that later.

Labels: Ojai festival 11

Dawn Upshaw with George Crumb (far right), Gilbert Kalish and members of red fish blue fish Photo: mine 2011

There is a history of particular artistic collaborations in the arts that can become synonymous with certain time periods or places. In the opera and vocal arts world, we have been watching one of those landmark pairings unfold between soprano Dawn Upshaw and stage director Peter Sellars. One, if not both, of these artists have had their hands in most of the important vocal music events of the last two decades. Sellars directed Upshaw in several important operatic stagings in the 1990s including Handel’s Theodora at Glyndebourne, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in Paris, and Messiaen’s St. Francois d’Assise in Salzburg. In the early 2000’s there were a number of world premiere works as well, including John Adam’s El Niño and Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin where he memorably talked her into lying on her back half-submerged on a flooded stage. Stirring images to be sure, and recent seasons have provided new outlets for their work together in a series of staged and semi-staged solo works and song cycles. Los Angeles has been lucky enough to see the two together in Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone and a semi-staged version of Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente. So it was exciting to see Upshaw and Sellars together again in another new collaboration on Friday night at the 65th Ojai Music Festival. (the following two video clips feature Sellars and Upshaw working together in Salzburg in the late 1990s and more recently talking about their work together in Ojai.)


The work was George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny (American Songbook Vol. IV). Crumb was on hand for the performance, and the evening started in the most engaging of ways with a conversation between Sellars, Crumb, and pianist Gilbert Kalish who also performed that evening alongside percussion ensemble red fish blue fish. It was an interesting conversation and contrast between Sellars, one of the most politically inclined theater directors around and Crumb, one of the least politically-minded composers by his own description. Sellars gave Crumb several opportunities to talk about sociopolitical undertones in his Songbook series, but the composer demurred insisting that he prefers to let the music go where it takes him. Of course, hearing arch commentary in Crumb’s now multi-volume settings of over 70 American songs is tempting. As evidenced earlier this season on the Los Angeles Philharmonic stage, Crumb’s preservation of the lyrics and vocal melodies to songs such as “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Shenandoah” stands in high contrast to the thorny dark avant-garde arrangements that surround them (See the final video clip for a sample of the music performed by a college graduate ensemble.). The Winds of Destiny is true to form. The eight songs here are all from the civil war era including several spirituals such as “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and those mentioned previously. The score is for soprano and percussion alone, but as Crumb himself noted, the era of percussion as punctuation in a musical sentence is long gone, and the wide array of instruments sang out in numerous colorful ways the average listener might not expect from the description of a song cycle for soprano and percussion.


Given that most of the songs in this cycle are associated with a time of war and unrest, Sellars went for the clear contemporary parallels. Upshaw arrived on stage in desert fatigues and laid down to sleep on an elevated bed. Her character was a modern day American soldier returned from any one of America’s current ongoing military conflicts. She is now marked with the specter of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and is filled with feverish twisted dreams and memories of the horrors she has seen in foreign lands. The cycle opened with a haunting “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” which set the tone for this very unsettled and sleepless night. Upshaw and the players were amplified and at turns she could sound both tortured and enlightened. She would sit on the edge of the bed, and then later stand in front of it with microphone in hand like some rock singer. Later the soldier would cradle her pillow as if it were an infant or drink mouthwash in an allusion to the drug problems common in one so troubled. I was most taken with the final visual, the soldier performing “Shenandoah,” perhaps one of the loveliest of all traditional American songs, with Crumb’s haunting, decaying musical setting as she punted with a pole on some imaginary river of the mind.


It was a stirring if somewhat grim performance. Upshaw sang with an urgency that wasn’t always about simply producing beautiful sound, although that was not an uncommon occurrence. Not all of the staging elements worked. Some of the falls Sellars had Upshaw execute as if in response to exploding bombs could look clumsy and comical. But overall, the emotional intensity of the performance outstripped its political agenda.

In a crafty move, Upshaw, who is this year’s musical director at the festival, and Sellars paired this performance with a highly contrasting but complementary one. The Sakhi ensemble alongside Ustad Farida Mahwash presented several ghazals, or folk songs and melodies from Afghanistan. Unlike the American songs that preceded them, these works concerned matters of love and spirituality. Instead of the angst and violence of peoples at war, these traditional songs stood in contrast as a reminder of those human attributes that persevere in even the worst of circumstances. It was a touching counterpoint in an evening of committed and heart-felt performances with much, much more than music making on its mind. And it was a great evening for revisiting the contributions of two long time collaborators.

Labels: Ojai festival 11