“The Ojai Music Festival—the innovative California gathering that puts itself in the hands of a different music director each year—announced this week that it would have an eclectic group of stewards for the five seasons leading to its 75th anniversary in 2021,” reports Michael Cooper in Wednesday’s (2/10) New York Times. “The coming directors include Vijay Iyer, the jazz pianist and composer, in 2017, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer and conductor, in 2018. They had been previously named, but the festival has now also announced the participation of Barbara Hannigan, the soprano and conductor whose star has been rising because of her performances of new works, in 2019; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the searching violinist, in 2020; and, in 2021, Mitsuko Uchida, the pianist and conductor.… ‘All of them are artists of such mesmerizing vitality that I just can’t wait to get their seasons planned,’ Thomas W. Morris, the festival’s artistic director, said.… The music director of this year’s festival, which will take place from June 9 to 12, is Peter Sellars, the opera and theater director, who has planned a lineup of works by Kaija Saariaho, Caroline Shaw and Tania León, among others.”
Posted February 16, 2016
