Steven Schick. Photo: Bill DeanUC San Diego percussionist and conductor Steven Schick has been a frequent performer at the Ojai Music Festival. This year, the celebrated outdoor festival at Libbey Park gave him the keys and told him to drive, and Schick is making the most of his one-year term as music director at Ojai.
The recently announced programming for the June 10-14 comprises 18 concerts (including two starting at 8 a.m.) and dozens of composers, with 17 of them new to Ojai: among them Alberto Ginastera, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Pauline Oliveros, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Schick's UC San Diego colleague Lei Liang.
Schick is including five concerts exploring the music of Pierre Boulez, who was frequent guest conductor at Ojai (most often with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), and offering the west coast premiere of 'A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez,' a production that is part of the Chicago Symphony's Beyond the Score program.
He'll also program the west coast premiere of John Luther Adams' 'Sila: The Breath of the World,' in a free concert that will incorporate the entire park. (The La Jolla Symphony & Chorus, which Schick conducts, has commissioned a new work from Adams to be performed in Balboa Park in 2015.)
Schick has invited his closest musical colleagues: ICE (the New York-based Contemporary Music Ensemble, which he frequently conducts), red fish blue fish (the UC San Diego-based percussion ensemble he founded) and Renga (the San Diego based string ensemble he recently formed with San Diego Symphony violinist Kate Hatmaker).
And he'll also be working with flutist (and ICE founder) Claire Chase, pipa artist Wu Man, cellist Maya Beiser, the Calder Quartet, pianists Gloria Cheng and Vicki Ray, and mezzo-soprano Peabody Southwell.
Schick will be primarily conducting, but he'll perform a concert of percussion classics, as well as the American premiere of Roland Auzet's staging of Kurt Schwitters' 'Ursonate.'
'As a percussionist I spend my days searching for new sounds and new places to experience them,' said Schick in a statement. 'I often think of myself as a traveler in the land of new noises. For me, then, the Ojai Festival is paradise: it's the perfect combination of provocative new sounds, great music and a magical place.'
Schick will offer a Ojai preview concert at UC San Diego on May 27, and will present several of the programs in Cal Performances' 'Ojai at Berkeley' on June 18-20.
The artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Schick will be inducted into the Percussive Arts Society's Hall of Fame this week, with Art Blakey and Glen Velez.
For the complete Ojai Festival schedule, visit ojaifestival.org
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Dream Valley Festival, in Brazil (PHOTO: RBS)
