A radiant outdoor extravaganza for Ojai North
The outdoor musical extravaganzas of composer John Luther Adams have become a welcome tradition for Ojai North, Cal Performances’ annual northward transplant of the venerable Southern California music festival.
Like its predecessors, “Inuksuit” and “Strange and Sacred Noise” (which opened the 2012 and 2013 festivals respectively), this hour-long event took place in the Faculty Glade on the UC Berkeley campus, just next to Hertz Hall where most of the more traditional indoor concerts will take place.
Up to a point, this was well within Adams’ established M.O., a spatial installation that progressed slowly across large spans of time, with nods to the geography and culture of the composer’s longtime adopted home of Alaska (the title is drawn from Inuit tradition).
[...] as in the past, the simple ability to walk around among a far-flung corps of musicians — listening to sounds that come from different angles and in different combinations depending on where you land — adds an exciting new dimension to the listener’s experience.
[...] “Sila” came off as an even richer and more organically integrated creation than either of the pieces that have inaugurated prior festivals — or indeed than many of Adams’ compositions, including his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral work “Become Ocean.”
In one of the piece’s most enthralling inventions, Adams also deploys a chamber chorus’ worth of vocalists, singing through rolled-up cardboard megaphones like a band of postmodern Rudy Vallées (ask your granddad).
A large complement of musicians dubbed the CalArts “Sila” Ensemble (in other words, an ad-hoc arrangement that included a number of locals) delivered the piece under the direction of Stephen Schick, the percussionist and conductor who’s serving as music director for this year’s festival.
Rapture was in considerably shorter supply a bit later, when the festival moved over to Zellerbach Hall to pay tribute to the composer, conductor and musical polymath Pierre Boulez, who turned 90 in March.
Produced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a modular stage set by Frank Gehry and creative direction by Gerald McBurney, this was a pointillist portrait of the man arranged through snippets of video clips across the decades, and equally bite-size nibbles from a host of his works.