OJAI — You’ll be able to’t escape nature in Ojai. That meant that flutist Claire Chase, this yr’s Ojai Music Pageant music director who is commonly known as a drive of nature, match proper in.
Chase is the proudest flutist I’ve ever noticed. And essentially the most expressive. She holds her head excessive whether or not enjoying piccolo or the 6-foot contrabass flute, as if her instrument have been a magic wand used to activate her voice within the highest registers and the deepest.
The activism is greater than an analogy. Chase can also be a joyous and entrepreneurial music activist, MacArthur “genius,” educator, founding father of New York’s spectacular Worldwide Modern Ensemble and commissioner of a vastly imaginative new flute repertory in her ongoing Density 2036 mission. The present surge of curiosity in Pauline Oliveros is essentially her doing.
For Ojai, Chase collected involved composers on a quest for a form of eco-sonics able to conjuring up the pleasure of nature and, within the course of, saving our sanity. Over 4 days of live shows principally within the rustic Libbey Bowl, the names of most of the works gave away the sport.
“The Holy Liftoff,” “Horse Sings From Cloud,” “How Forests Think,” “Spirit Catchers,” “A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture,” are a number of.
The pageant’s proudest second (half-hour to be exact) was the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s “Sky Islands.” It was the final work in a resplendent Sunday morning program that Chase described as “multi-spiritual” and “multi-species.” The solar discovered its approach by way of the timber because the composer and percussionist Levy Lorenzo stood in entrance of the stage and commenced with a ceremonial pounding of bamboo poles.
“Sky Islands” evokes the magical Philippines higher rainforests, the place sounds scintillate in a thinned environment that offers gongs new glories, the place animals able to nice ascension solely dwell, the place the thoughts is prepared for enlightenment. Ibarra wrote the rating for her Speaking Gong Trio (which incorporates Chase and pianist Alex Peh) together with added percussion and a string quartet, right here the Jack Quartet.
To the head-scratching shock of the music institution that has to this point paid little consideration to Ibarra, “Sky Islands” gained the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for music. A Filipino American from Anaheim who’s now based mostly in New York, Ibarra is finest generally known as a percussionist in experimental jazz and new music with a powerful curiosity in environmental sound installations and Indigenous music.
The pinnacle scratching stopped in Ojai. Within the three works by Ibarra on this system, she proved a capacious sonic visionary. She is an excellent mimic of nature’s aural realm — the sounds of animals, of a river, of timber within the wind, of rocks falling down a hillside. She stirs spirits with the hardly heard whooshes of drum brushes waved within the air. She connects with the underground as a resonant gong grasp. She stops to odor no matter there may be to odor. She’s typically humorous.
Primarily, although, she merely entrances, whether or not she unfold her percussive wares in “Kolubri” or writing for different musicians in “Sunbird” on a misty early morning at Ojai Meadows Protect. Her lovingly sly Haydn-esque wit got here out within the premiere of “Nest Box,” a duo for her and Wu Wei on sheng, the Chinese language mouth organ.
Steven Schick (percussion), from left, Wu Wei (sheng) and Susie Ibarra (percussion) carry out Annea Lockwood’s “bayou-borne” in Libbey Bowl on the 2025 Ojai Music Pageant.
(Timothy Teague / Ojai Pageant)
Gauging by the viewers response, “Sky Islands” was the clear favourite of greater than three dozen new or newish works. It’s a advanced piece that seems to set off on a well-apportioned journey led by Chase into the unknown. However at each flip, the music surprises with a melody that feels acquainted till it abruptly doesn’t.
Ibarra leaves room for improvisation as a approach for the performers to react to what they’re encountering. Chase and Ibarra could, as an example, start a dialogue as nervous chit-chat with staccato flute interjections with drummed responses that quickly flip to broad expressions of marvel. On the finish the musicians decide up percussion devices and depart the stage in a sluggish, winding procession of dance steps, as if marching into the unknown.
Chase introduced collectively different composers from throughout. And he or she introduced collectively excellent musicians from L.A. (notably members of Wild Up) and New York. The music was all of our time except for three small items of early music, however even that was modernized. There was long-winded indulgence and wonderful itty-bitty works, over in a flash however suggestive of a full and wonderful life, like that of an insect.
The spirit of the Ojai pageant needn’t be conveyed by a laundry listing of composers and works or by worth judgments. At its finest, the occasion is a musical wilderness, like no different pageant of its caliber. The viewers goes on a stroll within the woods, with nature calling for discovery.
Round each nook you encounter a special musical voice. Hawaiian composer and violist Leilehua Lanzilotti rocked. Cuban composer Tania León added dollops of thrilling modernism. Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir commanded lengthy stretches of empty panorama. Brazilian composer Marcos Balter conjured up the mythological Pan in a typically outrageous nine-part theatrical extravaganza for Chase.
New Zealander Annea Lockwood provided a 90-minute journey down the Housatonic River captured by loudspeakers in encompass sound. In distinction, Australian Liza Lim, in uncooked instrumental outbursts, revealed the much less agreeable potentialities of what forests might imagine (of us?).
After which there was, in the end for Ojai, the elephant within the minimalism room, the enduring California composer Terry Riley. His “In C” is the one piece Ojai has beforehand programmed. As Riley now approaches his ninetieth birthday (June 24), Chase unveiled three components of an epic cycle of uncategorized items Riley has been engaged on since shifting to the mountains of Japan 5 years in the past.
“Pulsing Lifters,” in an association for 2 pianos and harpsichord, is sort of a delicate dew. “The Holy Liftoff” realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher for flute and string quartet, opens with Chase on all 5 of her flutes, one performed dwell, the others prerecorded. The impact is that of being submerged in a lush wash of beauteous flute chords. Riley then softens the spectacularly rigorous Jack Quartet with Ravel-like melody.
In “Pulsefield” items numbered 1, 2 and three, Riley returns to the modular roots of “In C” a half century later. Right here repeated rhythms are overlayed by a big ensemble that includes all of the pageant performers in ecstatic embellishments.
If this, probably the greatest and truest Ojai festivals lately, is supposed not for explication however discovery, please achieve this. The pageant has been slowly evolving a system of outside amplification, and it captures wonderful audio on streams of the Libbey Bowl live shows. They continue to be archived on the OJai pageant YouTube web page.
Subsequent yr Esa-Pekka Salonen will return for the primary time in 1 / 4 century.
