Sublime Fury at the Ojai Festival

Nostalgia isn’t an Ojai virtue, however, and younger composers kept things current. Messiaen’s nature-consciousness recovered a counterpart successful Gabriella Smith’s “Anthozoa,” for violin, cello, piano, and percussion, which evoked the microscopic bustle of coral reefs, with clicks and rustlings giving mode to oceanic hymnal chords. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ró” (“tranquillity,” successful Icelandic) unfurled a not dissimilar soundscape of integrated tendrils increasing from sustained drones. Meanwhile, the pianist Conor Hanick played 2 caller pieces by John Adams, the astir boyish of near-octogenarians; 1 of them, “song without words,” offered a transfixing lawsuit of Adamsian endless melody, astatine erstwhile radiant and bittersweet.

Of the half-dozen Ojai festivals I’ve attended, this 1 was possibly the astir perfectly executed. The excellence of the programming and music-making testified not lone to Salonen’s magnetism but besides to the behind-the-scenes dexterity of the seasoned arts head Ara Guzelimian, who has been associated with Ojai for decades and has led its operations since 2020. The ovation that erupted erstwhile Guzelimian walked retired to present the festival’s closing performance was a fitting acknowledgment that golden-age concerts bash not hap by themselves.

That last concert, featuring the pupil orchestra of the Colburn School, successful L.A., astatine erstwhile exemplified Ojai’s ethos and jolted its laid-back atmosphere. Salonen led a buoyant, mercurial ninetieth-birthday tribute that helium wrote for the precocious Frank O. Gehry, titled “Fog.” He besides presented Stravinsky’s ironic-bucolic ballet “Pulcinella,” a bracing prelude to summer. In betwixt came Ligeti’s towering, terrifying Violin Concerto, written betwixt 1989 and 1993. Leila Josefowicz, for whom some Salonen and Adams person written concertos, essayed the solo portion for the archetypal clip successful her career, and she delivered it with specified sublime fury that afterward the customarily reserved Salonen did thing rather uncharacteristic: helium slapped his forehead with his thenar and gestured astatine Josefowicz successful blessed disbelief.

I had been waiting much than 30 years to perceive this concerto done truthful intensely. In 1993, erstwhile I was a neophyte critic, I went to Boston to study connected a Ligeti festival astatine the New England Conservatory. The composer was successful attendance, holding distant successful lectures and discussions, his arachnid caput spinning webs crossed euphony history. At 1 point, helium gave a virtuosic disquisition connected motifs of lament, citing Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, and Purcell (he sang an excruciating mentation of “Dido’s Lament”), not to notation flamenco, Roma music, and ceremonial songs he’d heard successful Transylvania arsenic a child. He besides discussed the Violin Concerto, which helium was inactive revising. He related the portion to his effort to make a caller benignant of tonality, 1 that would sorb contented without becoming trapped by it. He said, “I americium successful a prison—one partition is the avant-garde, the different partition is the past, and I privation to escape.” Only Ligeti could find himself successful an Escher-like situation with conscionable 2 walls.

The concerto is little than fractional an hr long, yet it contains a beingness of possibilities. Folkish ditties creation done fractal textures; modular equal-tempered tuning is juxtaposed with the archaic signifier of conscionable intonation; rhythms ricochet against 1 another; influences of Central African forager euphony and Indonesian gamelan are audible; the past lament resounds. Because of its utmost complexity, the enactment is seldom programmed, and erstwhile it is the realization tin autumn abbreviated of the conception. In 2000, I heard it astatine Carnegie Hall, with Christian Tetzlaff, Pierre Boulez, and the London Symphony. The notes glittered successful place, but the portion came crossed much arsenic a cerebral plan than arsenic a surviving thing.

Salonen has dug deeper. He esteemed Ligeti from an aboriginal property and worked intimately with the composer from the nineteen-eighties onward. When the Sony Classical statement launched a recorded survey of Ligeti’s music, successful the nineties, Salonen was chosen to oversee the project. Alas, Ligeti proved to beryllium an extraordinarily hard collaborator, his manic perfectionism colliding with applicable world and starring to unpleasant scenes. One day, Salonen received a fax from him that read, “I committedness to beryllium comparatively bully tomorrow.” Nonetheless, Salonen ne'er stopped admiring the music, and helium bore successful caput the psychic pressures that weighed connected the antheral himself. Messiaenic serenity was not wrong Ligeti’s reach. When I spoke with Salonen astatine Ojai, helium told me, “Here was a antheral who mislaid astir each of his household successful the Holocaust, and past fled from Hungary to Austria successful 1956, successful the mediate of the night, with dogs chasing him astatine the border. When that is your starting point, it creates a precise bleak satellite view.” What fascinates Salonen now, however, is not the acheronian of Ligeti’s creation but its aliveness and freshness: “The vitality of a portion similar the Violin Concerto reminds maine of the ‘Symphonie Fantastique’—it volition ever astonishment you.”