The audiences arrived and took their seats in Libby Bowl itself or set up chairs and blankets on the lawn above it, then settled in to enjoy the second day and night of the 73rd edition of the Ojai Music Festival. Friday’s 2 concerts began in a warm afternoon with a program entitled “Mysteries” – all works by John Zorn, whose successful forays into music of so many different kinds defies logic. JACK Quartet, pianist Stephen Gosling and cellists Alexa Ciciretti & Jay Campbell shed laser lights on some of the composer’s more esoteric and, well, mysterious works with intensity and passion. The balmy evening, which turned quite cool per Ojai usual, brought Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen (Stephen Gosling) and Schoenberg, ending with Claude Vivier’s “Lonely Child,” for a program titled “Give Me Your Joy… and the hope of time.” The impressionism of Debussy and Ravel moved to Messiaen’s unique approach to harmony and texture and thence to Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 2,” an early venture into atonality, performed by JACK Quartet and Music Director Barbara Hannigan wearing her singer’s hat. After a break, LUDWIG flutist Ingrid Geerlings performed Debussy’s 3 minute Syrinx from an area above and to the side of the bowl before Hannigan brilliantly conducted the Dutch chamber orchestra LUDWIG for Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” and the slowly building Vivier piece which employed a mix of a “soothing” French lullaby and lyrics in a language of the composer’s invention, beautifully sung by soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou. Transformation, mysticism and longing for love, all given precise, sensitive and intense musical realization.
