Friday’s Ojai Music Festival concerts delved into the world of loss and despair, beginning in the early afternoon with a program of the music by Russian composer Galina Utvolskaya, first with a two uncompromisingly harsh and spare pieces for violin and piano, followed by six sonatas for piano. Musical director PatKop and pianist Marcus Hinterhauser gave intense and riveting performances of these difficult to listen to works. The first part of the evening concerts was another time jumping mashup that went from William Byrd to Bach, Shostakovich and Bartok before going back in time again to Purcell, all fulfilling the director’s desire to draw connections between past and present. The old works, which were based on improvisation, by composers now treated with reverence who in their day were in the forefront of innovation and certainly would not be writing or playing the same things over and over. The second concert was given over to Michael Hersch’s wrenching opera about cancer, ” I hope we get a chance to visit soon.” Another challenge to an audience to put aside notions of a pleasing and comforting musical evening’s entertainment, this work is unrelentingly bleak but contains moments of a kind of beautiful truth. Two sopranos and a small orchestra conducted by Tito Munoz gave a precise, haunted and very emotional performance of this world premiere. The late night concert was a tribute to the Ojai Valley’s rebound from the Thomas Fire, John Luther Adam’s “Everything That Rises,” a slowly evolving repetition of rising patterns performed by the Jack Quartet. Standouts for the evening were harpsichordist/pianist Anthony Romaniuk and soprano Ah Young Hong.
