The 77th Ojai Music Festival 2023, June 8 to 11, welcomes acclaimed musician and composer Rhiannon Gidden as Music Director. Along with Festival Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian, Giddens shares additional details for the upcoming Festival which will include more than 20 music events in the beautiful setting of the Ojai Valley.

Ojai welcomes guest artists to the Ojai Music Festival 2023, including Wu Man (pipa), Kayhan Kalhor (kamancheh/composer), 2015 Ojai Music Director Steven Schick (conductor/percussion), Francesco Turrisi (multi-instrumentalist), Seckou Keita (kora), Gloria Cheng (piano), Emi Ferguson (flute), Justin Robinson (fiddle), Michi Wiancko (violin), and Leonard Hayes (piano); featured singers Cheryse McLeod Lewis (mezzo-soprano), Limmie Pulliam (tenor), and Michael Preacely (bass-baritone); guest ensembles Attacca Quartet, red fish blue fish (percussion), and members of the Silkroad Ensemble: Mazz Swift (violin), Mario Gotoh (violin/viola), Karen Ouzounian (cello), and Shawn Conley (double bass).

For seven decades, the Ojai Music Festival has been a laboratory for the special chemistry that results from combining insatiable curiosity with unbounded creativity. The formula is simple: Each year a music director is given the freedom and resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. Some have approached their task with caution, fearing that Ojai might be like other places. But, of course, it’s not. More often this unique blend of enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of conductors, performers, composers to push at boundaries and stretch limits.

At its inception in 1947, under the guidance of Festival founder John Bauer and conductor Thor Johnson, the Festival featured a balance of classics and more contemporary fare. By the time Lawrence Morton took over as Artistic Director in 1954 the emphasis had shifted to new music and Ojai soon became the showcase as well as a home-away-from-home for such 20^th century giants as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, and Olivier Messiaen, not to mention two Southern California “locals”: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. It was Morton who established the tradition of rotating Music Directors and with this innovation each year’s Festival became the reflection of a succession of larger-than-life personalities, including Robert Craft (joined in 1955 and 1956 by Stravinsky), Copland, Ingolf Dahl, the late Lukas Foss, Boulez, Peter Maxwell-Davies, as well as such rising stars as Michael Tilson Thomas, Calvin Simmons, Kent Nagano, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and David Robertson. Through the years Ojai’s Music Directors have invited distinguished soloists, first-rate chamber ensembles, and world-class orchestras to join them in exploring the intersection between new music and everything from jazz and improvisation to electronics and computers; dance, theater, and experimental staging to social and political issues, not to mention repertory that might go back to the Middle Ages or reach across the globe.