Ojai Music Festival
Libbey Bowl, and other venues
Ojai, California
June 6-9, 2019

In the storied and still-evolving story of the Ojai Music Festival, one of America's most important contemporary music-minded festivals, the roots system run deep into mid-century Modernism and late 20th century post-Modernist impulses and up to the current, pluralistic musical minute. The idyllic hideaway town of Ojai—an hour and a world away from Los Angeles—drew Krishnamurti here as a pilgrimage site-maker and lured subsequent waves of mystics, artists, urban escapees, bohemians, and, thanks to the now 73-year-old festival, a hallowed legacy of living classical musical giants for one week a year.

Stravinsky was here twice as musical director in the '60s, and his music continues to be a signature, as it was in June, when this year's inspired music director, conductor-soprano Barbara Hannigan opened the 2019 festival with her new take on Stavinsky's opera Rake's Progress and had his neo-classical charmer, Pulcinella Suite, on the closing night program. The list of composers who have directed and or been featured in Ojai includes Aaron Copland, John Adams, Lukas Foss, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gyorgy Kurtag,