With the great Ojai Musical Festival looming (June 8-11), our thought trains can naturally lean in that direction, and its effect on our direction in the Santa Barbara area. The committedly contemporary-geared and globally renowned festival has had a ripple effect and cross-reference points in our corner of the 805, beyond just appealing partly to a generous audience share from here.
Take this year’s Ojai roster. Rhiannon Giddens, the recent Pulitzer Prize winner serving as the festival’s musical director, has made memorable appearances in Santa Barbara, mostly through UCSB Arts & Lectures, including an inspiring streaming “House Calls” show under COVID lockdown. A&L links also apply to Wu Man, Kayhan Kalhor, and the Attacca Quartet, which made its local debut this spring.
In another intriguing Ojai/S.B. alliance, key solo piano performances in recent Ojai history have been repeated at Hahn Hall, allowing for ripe compare/contrast observations between the inherent distractions — and nature-loving highs — of outdoor concerts in Libbey Bowl versus the pristine indoor setting of a concert hall as refined as the Hahn. Last October, pianist Conor Hanick brought the entrancing Hans Otte classic The Book of Sounds up to Hahn Hall (hosted by the Music Academy, of which he is a faculty member), after performing the piece on a Sunday morning in Libbey Bowl last year.
Two weeks ago, a similar leap of faith and venues came to pass when Icelandic piano master Víkingur Ólafsson performed his A&L-sponsored “Mozart and His Contemporaries” program in Hahn Hall, after performing most of that project (also a fine album on Deutsche Grammophon) in Ojai in 2021. The evening also served as the official finale of the current music component of A&L’s inspired season.
Ólafsson’s projects, on record and live, have tended to be inventive and just slightly subversive, without being abrasive to sensitive ears — as is the case with his stellar latest album, From Afar, stitching Bach with modern material in a fresh way.
With his Mozart project, Ólafsson seeks to redress Mozart myths and showcase works not necessarily regularly programmed while stirring in music of other composers of the day (can you say Baldassare Galuppi and Domenico Cimarosa?). One of the high points of the recital came via the Sonata in B minor of Haydn, whose life and work synched up with and surpassed Mozart. Of the many Mozart pieces, the clear “greatest hit” was his Sonata in C, K. 546, one of those deceptively simple works which is considered “easy for children, difficult for artists.” The clear overall recital highlight — well, clear to these ears — was the brooding and potent Sonata in C minor, K. 457. As a ripe encore, he played a transcription of a Bach organ piece, connected to the strong influence of Bach on this later stage of Mozart’s work.
Ólafsson is a profound pianist, who also has an easy stage manner and no resistance to informative verbal program notes. His technical finesse and fortitude are a given, refined nuance a bonus.
And speaking of 805 connections, he waxed nostalgic in returning to the Music Academy, where he was a Fellow back in 2004, and studied under Jerome Lowenthal, an influential mentor for him. 2004 also happened to be the first of many years the Music Academy was led by NancyBell Coe, who was in the audience and had some catching up to do at the post-concert reception.
Classical News on the 2023-24 Horizon
