{"id":693,"date":"2008-06-16T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/?p=19"},"modified":"2008-06-16T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T14:00:00","slug":"ojai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/ojai\/","title":{"rendered":"Ojai"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I played Concertmaster and some chamber music at the Ojai Festival<\/a> in CA. It\u2019s probably the most unique festival I\u2019ve ever been to, combining a beautiful but rustic setting with top-notch concerts, a fanatic and extremely literate audience, and truly eclectic (even bizarre) repertory.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/a>
Photo: Michael McFadden<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition to the festival\u2019s website, you can read about it here<\/a> and here.<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of my personal highlights:<\/p>\n

–\tDawn Upshaw\u2019s incredible talent, featured both in a recital with the fabulous Gil Kalish on piano (outdoors at 11 am on Saturday, and completely packed) along with the Pergolesi Stabat Mater<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

–\ta program of works by Elliott Carter for cello and piano, which was scheduled for Saturday at 1.00 pm and quickly filled up (the tickets were free, but I still found that amazing). So they repeated<\/em> it at 3 and it was full again. Only in Ojai.<\/p>\n

–\t Our performance of Messiaen\u2019s Quartet for the End of Time<\/strong>, which started at 11pm after the crazy program we played at 8pm. Absolutely packed again, despite the hour.<\/p>\n

–\tA conversation with Alex Ross in which he tried to convince me that Prokoviev originally wrote a happy ending for Romeo and Juliet<\/strong>. Of course it turns out he\u2019s right, and that sort of thing is why I\u2019m a regular reader of The Rest is Noise<\/a> , one of the best cultural blogs out there even before the book.<\/p>\n

–\tA performance of Steve Reich\u2019s incredible Tehillum<\/strong> with members of Nexus, the esteemed percussion ensemble who\u2019s worked with Reich for decades (Reich was the composer-in-residence at Ojai this year). I enjoyed playing the piece very much, and also experienced another \u201cfirst\u201d for me when I noticed one of the singer-soloists actually wore flip-flops for the concert. Not sandals, but actual Wal-Mart plastic Britney-grade flip-flops onstage. This is one of the most famous new-music festivals in the country, and has been run for decades by people like Stravinsky and Boulez; we got a soloist who evidently came straight from the trailer park.<\/p>\n

– Quite an impressive display by Music Director David Robertson, who somehow kept his head on and his hands straight through the whole thing.<\/p>\n

I felt very privileged to participate. This was an amazing crowd, truly compelling programming, and some astonishing performances. Next year Eighth Blackbird will host, so get there if you can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I played Concertmaster and some chamber music at the Ojai Festival in CA. It\u2019s probably the most unique festival I\u2019ve ever been to, combining a beautiful but rustic setting with top-notch concerts, a fanatic and extremely literate audience, and truly eclectic (even bizarre) repertory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}