Ojai Music Festival Goes Virtual
Under normal, non-pandemic conditions, this would be the week that the 805 goes global. The Ojai Music Festival, which replaces its ambitious long weekend program with an enticing menu of virtual events, has the most significant impact on world culture (albeit under the admittedly specialized rubric of contemporary classical music).
As a measure of its importance, the New York Times and the New Yorker frequently come out to cover the fest. Ojai’s lofty list of composer-directors in charge over its seven-plus decades includes Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss, John Adams, Steve Reich, Peter Maxwell-Davies, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and in the past two years, powerhouse women — Patricia Kopatchinskaya and Barbara Hannigan.
This year, the year that live music died (or was temporarily quarantined), the eagerly anticipated edition of the 74th annual festival, under the guidance of heralded composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher, is forced to go global in a different sense, taking to the worldwide web.
