Steve Reich returns to the Ojai Music Festival as a veteran iconoclast.
OJAI -- Steve Reich, who came to Ojai in 1973 as a radical, returned over the weekend a sage. Same music. Same ambience. Some of the same people. Pretty much the same town. But very different times.
The 62nd Ojai Music Festival began Thursday -- a warm, soft evening air and supernal sunset pink enveloping the outdoor Libbey Bowl -- with raucous urban sounds. It ended at dusk Sunday, the moment not yet quite pink, with Psalm 150 -- drum and dance, strings and winds, sounding and clanging cymbals all in praise of the Eternal. Beginning and end belonged to Reich, this year's featured composer.
There was much in between. David Robertson was music director, and the context was impossibly rich -- war and peace, modern times and tradition, technology and divinity.
Ojai is a casual, easygoing festival without easygoing music and with a punishing schedule in an idyllic town center free of chain businesses. Shortly before Sunday's finale, Robertson stood in line at a nearby un-Starbucks, chatting. The theme of the festival, he said, was accompaniment, an avoidance of solo performances.
OJAI -- Steve Reich, who came to Ojai in 1973 as a radical, returned over the weekend a sage. Same music. Same ambience. Some of the same people. Pretty much the same town. But very different times.
The 62nd Ojai Music Festival began Thursday -- a warm, soft evening air and supernal sunset pink enveloping the outdoor Libbey Bowl -- with raucous urban sounds. It ended at dusk Sunday, the moment not yet quite pink, with Psalm 150 -- drum and dance, strings and winds, sounding and clanging cymbals all in praise of the Eternal. Beginning and end belonged to Reich, this year's featured composer.
There was much in between. David Robertson was music director, and the context was impossibly rich -- war and peace, modern times and tradition, technology and divinity.
Ojai is a casual, easygoing festival without easygoing music and with a punishing schedule in an idyllic town center free of chain businesses. Shortly before Sunday's finale, Robertson stood in line at a nearby un-Starbucks, chatting. The theme of the festival, he said, was accompaniment, an avoidance of solo performances.
