This week the Ojai Festival’s 2019 Music Director Barbara Hannigan and Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris shared initial programming for the 73rd Festival, June 6-9, 2019.
The Festival will look back in tribute to composers with deep historical relationships to Ojai – Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, and Olivier Messiaen – and will look forward to major voices of our time, including Gerard Grisey, Marc Anthony Turnage, and John Zorn.
The programming features Barbara in various facets: as a singer, conductor and mentor. She will conduct a semi-staged performance of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (complete), together with seven young professional singers in residence from Equilibrium.
She will sing Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil and Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (quartet to be announced), and be singing/conducting in selections from George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy Suite;
LUDWIG, the celebrated new music collective from Amsterdam, with whom Barbara works closely and collaborated with on the recent Grammy and Juno award-winning album Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha Classics), travels to Ojai, making their US debut at the 2019 Festival.
Barbara:
“I am buzzing with energy and excitement around the 2019 Ojai Music Festival. Together with Tom Morris, a longtime inspiration and friend, it has been a joy to imagine and explore beautiful collaborations and combinations of repertoire and musicians. As the 2019 Festival nears, these dreams are approaching reality! This Festival will be a synthesis of dark and light: chiaroscuro. The music we will present resonates deeply with me, and the dramatic storytelling is equally strong, as you’ll see and hear in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and other vocal works by Schoenberg, Grisey, Turnage, and Vivier. I am still pinching myself that this magical gathering exists and am thrilled to join the enormous energy that the Festival has generated for over 70 years”.