Ojai, CA – September 10, 2025) – Ojai Music Festival Board Chairman Jerry Eberhardt announced today the appointment of conductor/composer/pianist Teddy Abrams as Ojai’s next Artistic and Executive Director effective September 1, 2026, with his first Festival being the 81st Festival in June 2027. He will join the ranks of such distinguished predecessors as Ara Guzelimian, who concludes his tenure with the 2026 Festival, Thomas W. Morris, Ernest Fleischmann, and Lawrence Morton. Mr. Abrams’ collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival will be concurrent with his post as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra….
And it begins! Ojai Music Festival launches its 79th edition today, 5 June, and will be streaming the concerts at Libbey Bowl on the OMF homepage at OjaiFestival.org and on the festival’s YouTube channel.
Writing the OMF program notes is always an immersive experience, but this year’s festival programming by Music Director Claire Chase has proved to be the most fulfilling since I began writing for the festival. The 2025 edition also carries a bittersweet resonance since Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian just announced that he will conclude his tenure with the 2026 OMF.
So many highlights to look forward to over this extended weekend, which showcases the incredible community of fellow artists with whom Claire Chase has chosen to collaborate. In the spotlight tonight are Marcos Balter and his epic Pan – a signature contribution to Chase’s ongoing Density 2036 project – and Annea Lockwood’s bayou-borne, an homage to the late Pauline Oliveros, her close friend, mentor to Chase, and a tutelary spirit watching over the music-making at Ojai.
With Mitsuko Uchida as Music Director, this year’s Ojai Music Festival from 6-9 June promises an intriguing mix of Mozart piano concertos, early Modernist masterpieces (with a focus on Arnold Schoenberg), and pieces by contemporary composers who hold special significance for her. I had the privilege once again of writing the program notes, which are available here.
Visit OMF’s homepage for livestreams and replays of the concerts here.
Thursday is opening day of the 2023 Ojai Music Festival. This year’s edition is curated by Music Director Rhiannon Giddens together with Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian. Links:complete lineup of performances and2023 program book, which include my notes and commentary, along with an introduction to the themes of the festival.
You can watch the Libbey Bowl concerts via livestream on the OMF homepage: To watch the 2023 Festival’s free Live Stream of Libbey Bowl concerts, please visit our homepage at concert time beginning on Thursday, June 8. The live stream video will appear at the top of the page for viewing.
The 76th edition of the Ojai Music Festival begins today and runs through Sunday. I was honored to write the notes for the inspiring, original, “discipline-colliding” program curated this year by AMOC* (the American Modern Opera Company) and featuring its unparalleled team of artists. That a collective is serving in the role of music director/curator is one of the unique features of this summer at Ojai.
There are many fascinating tangents to AMOC*’s program: a focus on the legacy of Julius Eastman, whose music begins and ends the festival; perspectives on Minimalism, especially from Eastman, Hans Otte, and the young generation of composers emerging today; adventurous juxtapositions of music, dance, and theater; and the exciting convergence of early music sensibilities (on the part of today’s performers, that is) and “new music.”
Also in the lineup are several anticipated premieres: AMOC* co-founder Matthew Aucoin’s new cycle of “mini-concertos,” Family Dinner; Bobbi Jene Smith and colleagues’ intriguing latest dance-theater projects, Open Rehearsal and The Cello Player; Carolyn Chen’s music-dance work How to Fall Apart; and Anthony Cheung’s poetry-song cycle, the echoing of tenses. Also part of this cornucopia of premieres was to have been a new staging by AMOC* co-founder Zack Winokur of Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi (part of his “Tristan trilogy”), but this will not be able to happen because Julia Bullock is unable to travel from her home in Germany due to Covid. Harawi has been a long-in-the-making collaboration between the soprano and Winokur — it’s a major loss not to be able to present it at the festival. But such is the extraordinary team ethic and resilience of this company that member Davóne Tines and colleagues agreed to step in at the last minute to offer an entirely different program for the Friday night slot: Tyshawn Sorey’s For James Primosch and Tines’s own curated program Recital No. 1: MASS.
UPDATE: Wiener Staatsoper will stream Olga Neuwirth’s new opera Orlando(conducted by Matthias Pintscher) on 23 June from its platform here. Apparently you will need to use a VPN set to a location in Europe to stream (inaccessible to USA), but that’s an easy work-around.
Ara Guzelimian hosts these fascinating conversations with this year’s Ojai Festival artists. I’ll post them as they become available. The first three are now live:
On Thursday through Sunday, 11-14 June, Ojai Festival presents a virtual edition of what was to have been its 74th festival. Artistic Director Chad Smith and Music Director Matthias Pintscher curated a splendid program, with Olga Neuwirth and Steve Reich as special featured guests. This also would have marked the Ojai debut of the Ensemble intercontemporain — of which Pintscher is current director and which was founded by his mentor Pierre Boulez, a longtime presence at Ojai.
This is my own first year of being associated with Ojai, so this cancellation has hit me especially hard. But you’ll have a chance to hear Ara Guzelimian, incoming Artistic Director, in some wonderful conversations with Pintscher, Neuwirth, Reich, and members of the Calder String Quartet.
You can read my program essay here. My program notes for each event are linked on the respective pages.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja is an ideal choice to be this year’s music director of the Ojai Festival. In advance of the festival’s northern edition, Ojai at Berkeley, here’s my profile of this incomparable artist for Cal Performances:
Matters of technical proficiency are well accounted for in the arsenal of words that critics have at their disposal to describe what sets a musician apart. What is sorely lacking is …
My feature for the Cal Performances/Ojai at Berkeley edition is now online:
Any portrait of Vijay Iyer is necessarily a group portrait. A composer, pianist, bandleader, teacher, and thinker, Iyer channels his insatiable curiosity into innovative acts of collaboration with like-minded artists—across genres and disciplines. So when the chance came to serve as music director of the 2017 Ojai Music Festival …
My feature on this year’s Ojai at Berkeley Festival curated by Peter Sellars has now been posted:
This year’s Ojai at Berkeley festival focuses on the artistry and impact of powerful, visionary women—not only as creators and performers but as the subjects of the artworks themselves.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 