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    ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

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    Justin Peck, who directs and choreographs a narrative dance musical to Sufjan Stevens’s concept album “Illinois,” resorts to his usual standby: community.“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.Ricky Ubeda, top, and Ahmad Simmons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life

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      Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances.Philip Glass wanted to become a better pianist.He didn’t study the instrument in earnest until he was 15. And by the time he was 30 and founding an ensemble — to perform his pathbreaking music of repetitive structures — he needed to be good enough to keep up with his colleagues.So Glass turned to Charles-Louis Hanon’s classic “The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises.” Eventually, he took a crack at writing some études himself. “They were totally about my own limitations, in pursuit of technique,” he told the public radio personality Ira Glass, his cousin, in an interview for a new collection, “Studies in Time: Essays on the Music of Philip Glass.”“I was not trying to compose like Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, who were demonstrating the techniques they already had,” Glass added, characteristically underselling himself. Those études, from the early 1990s, may be aspirational in technique, but they are assured in craft: portals into Glass’s world of whirling arpeggios, shocking rhythmic and harmonic turns, and meditative discipline.Once the conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies, the reigning interpreter of Glass’s symphonic music, heard about the études, he commissioned a set of six for his 50th birthday in 1994. Those turned into 10, each focused on a specific technical challenge. And then 10 turned into 20, completed in 2012 for another birthday: Glass’s 75th.Now a generation of artists has come of age with Glass’s études. Choreographers have used them for brief, charged dances. And pianists have interpreted them with a wide range of approaches, like the straightforward, crisp treatment by Maki Namekawa, Davies’s wife, who gave the first performance of the whole set a decade ago; or the soft-spoken, sensitive account that Vikingur Olafsson released in 2017.This month, audiences and artists alike have new ways to take in Glass’s études. At David Geffen Hall on Nov. 19, a group of 10 pianists will gather to perform the entire études for a densely kaleidoscopic program that will run about two and a half hours. Then, starting Nov. 28, the Joyce Theater will present “Dancing With Glass: The Piano Etudes,” a program of works from five choreographers, including Lucinda Childs and Justin Peck. And a handsome, informative new folio collection of the études — edited by the composer-performer Timo Andres and Cory Davis from Glass’s publisher, Dunvagen Music — has just been packaged with “Studies in Time” and published by Pomegranate Arts, producers long associated with Glass.A new folio edition of Glass’s études, based on his manuscripts, has been released by Pomegranate Arts.Stephen DoyleStephen DoyleIt’s an unexpected landing for a project that started as personal exercises. But today, the études are spoken of in the same breath as those by Chopin and Debussy. And their influence extends beyond the world of keyboard playing. “Studies in Time,” edited by Linda Brumbach and Alisa E. Regas of Pomegranate Arts, includes surprising contributions from, among others, the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the artist Maira Kalman and the chef Alice Waters.“What strikes me — aside from their extraordinary range of mood and feeling — is how they represent a life of practice,” Waters wrote. And practice not just for Glass. The first 10 études, more focused and less difficult than the comparatively rhapsodic and occasionally cosmic later set, can be played by the average amateur. And unlike the technical pieces in Hanon’s exercise book, they are rewarding from a purely musical perspective.The artist and musician Laurie Anderson wrote in “Studies in Time” that the études can sound to her like voices: “There’s the stumbling and the trembling of voices. There’s chatting, joking, brisk analysis, rambling, explaining, crooning, grumbling, shouting; there’s the confident attorney rolling out the arguments; there are rules and regulations being spelled out, prayers, announcements, shouts of joy.”That quality of Glass’s music — patterns and repetitive phrases infused with so much character — is in part what has made it a perennial draw for choreographers. (Movement of all kinds, really: Last year, Anderson D.J.’ed a party for his 85th birthday at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, and wrote that she can now “say with confidence that Philip Glass didn’t write anything you can’t skate to.”) It has become so common for dances to be set to his music, Peck said in an interview, that he had long found himself resisting it.“But,” he added, “I’ve always loved the music.” As a teenager, he saw Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” at New York City Ballet. It felt “like I’d experienced vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice creams,” he said, “and then someone discovered you can make ice cream with pistachios.” He ended up choreographing to Glass for “In Creases” at City Ballet in 2012, and created a new solo, set to the Sixth Etude, for the program coming to the Joyce.Lucinda Childs, the postmodern dance-maker who has had a relationship with Glass and movement going back to “Einstein on the Beach” in the mid-1970s, said his music has always felt like a “sounding board.” They later collaborated on “Dance” (1979), which she described as controversial at its premiere, with its repetitions prompting exasperated audience members to walk out. (That work was recently revived by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center; when she and Glass saw how it was received there, she said, it was “kind of a joke for us because it’s become a classic.”)Then and now, Childs said, she has felt “a tremendous freedom” within his carefully structured scores. For example, the Joyce’s program features a duet of hers set to the 18th Etude. “My first reaction is just to listen,” she said — to the Rachmaninoff-esque shading, the mellowness and alluring romanticism. “There’s passion in this music. I like the idea of that.” From there, she took her work into the studio, eventually bringing in dancers, for a process that she described as fundamentally intuitive.Peck similarly described his étude, the Sixth, in poetic rather than structural terms. “There’s this layer of anxiousness in it,” he said. “It made me feel something emotional, almost like being in a waiting room and not knowing what test results you’re going to get. And the amount of time the étude takes, it feels like an eternity.”Not everyone has such strong emotional reactions to the études. Some have found them downright unmusical. “There’s always been a cadre of people, specifically in the more entrenched classical music world, for whom Philip’s music does nothing,” said Andres, the composer and editor of the new folio set, who is performing in the Geffen Hall concert. “What Philip would say is, there’s plenty of other music in the world.”If there is any agreement on the études, it may be about their specific difficulties. Like works by Mozart, they sound easier than they are, and punish anything short of precision in players. They demand metronome-specific steadiness and crystalline articulation, without sacrificing expression or shape, sculpted over several bars or several slow lines of score.They teach pianists, Davies said, to “be relaxed when dealing with a technical problem, while also building up endurance.” Otherwise, playing the music becomes physically painful. He recalled the story of a musician running out of the orchestra pit during the premiere of Glass’s opera “Satyagraha” because his arm was hurting so much; the études, he added, also “expose weaknesses in anyone’s technique” that can lead to discomfort.Maki Namekawa was the first pianist to perform Glass’s études on a single program. She will play in performances of the pieces this month.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNamekawa, who is performing at both Geffen Hall and the Joyce, warms up for them by playing Bach. Before she brings the Fifth Etude onstage, she will try out a Bach invention in her dressing room, with an ear focused on “the really tiny changes” because in both cases, “the beauty is in tiny changes.”Glass has performed from only the first set of 10 études; he didn’t care as much about whether he could play the second half, which, Davies said, goes beyond “thinking about what’s possible.” By the 20th, Glass achieves a tone poem more like “a benediction,” Davies added. (But these are still exercises. Andres called the 20th “a really good technical étude for legato playing.”)Through all of them, Glass repeats not only short phrases but entire sections, like Schubert, with whom he shares a Jan. 31 birthday. Both composers, Namekawa said, are “always right, very correct” in their use of repetition. And unlike Baroque composers, they don’t use recursive gestures to welcome ornamentation: When something repeats, it returns in identical form.Yet it feels different, Andres said. “When I get to the end of No. 6, for example, when that melody comes back, it has a completely different meaning than it did at the beginning of the piece,” he added. “There’s a settling, a resignation.”In Andres and Davis’s new folio edition of the études, assembled from Glass’s manuscripts, it’s easier to track changes in the music, particularly in the rhythm. Glass wrote with a shorthand that flags shifts more clearly than the comparatively spelled-out version published in 2014. “It’s like reading a sentence,” Andres said. “You’re not reading one word at a time, or one letter at a time. When you’re reading music, the more you can break it down into chunks and the more it makes sense grammatically, the smoother and more pleasurable the reading experience.”With more than one edition now available to players, Glass’s études are starting to look more like classics. They also double as a kind of musical autobiography. “He composed the whole thing in 20 years,” Namekawa said. “It’s a diary. You can see his thoughts and his compositional technique.”In that sense, the études are also something of a guide to Glass. “The thing all the great étude sets have in common is that they’re not just technical études,” Andres said. “They’re études, in a way, for understanding the composer’s language. If you were to learn Philip’s études, you would have a very good overview of his music over his career. You could say the same of Chopin and Debussy and Ligeti études. They’re compendiums: The whole is greater than the parts.” More

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      Review: A Pianist’s Inheritance Inspires Little Masterpieces

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      Adam Tendler’s program of works that he commissioned from 16 composers after the death of his father is emotionally involving and musically rewarding.When the pianist Adam Tendler received an inheritance — really, a manila envelope stuffed with cash — it did not take him long to think of a smart way to put it to use.Weeks after his father’s death, and being handed that money, Tendler began to commission new piano solos around the theme of inheritance. As he recalled in an essay for The New York Times, he realized that by doing this, he could both process his grief as well as fashion a program that could live on in his creative practice.It’s a touching and sagacious concept — though hardly one guaranteed to be an artistic success. The classical world has seen a number of similar, small-scale commissioning initiatives since the beginning of the pandemic; even when they draw some of the brightest names in the field, as Tendler has done, the result has often seemed frustratingly diffuse.But Tendler’s project, “Inheritances,” registered as emotionally involving — a musically rewarding and tightly plotted 80-minute set when he performed the collection on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York. It was presented in collaboration with Liquid Music, the group that helped the pianist develop the show over multiple years.Nearly every one of the 16 composers on the bill responded to Tendler’s prompt with an A-game effort. Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” opens with nervy, high-register oscillations that give way to grave bass interjections, before making space for a more relaxed treatment of melody in its middle section. But the score isn’t a simplistic journey toward acceptance: Some of the initial mechanistic churning returns at the close.Other composers reveled in similar ambiguity: music that suggested some arc of understanding, while also observing the persistent notes of friction in a relationship. In its opening bars, Scott Wollschleger’s “Outsider Song” includes sustained-tone airs of mourning, stark prepared-piano pitches and bursts of extended technique. So far, so typical, you might think, at least when it comes to post-John Cage experimentalism.But before long, Wollschleger’s piece works a gorgeous changeup by allowing its more striated tones to flower into full motivic passages, beautiful on their own terms even as the overall harmonic world remains somber. Call it a small masterpiece — a term you might also apply to Timo Andres’s “An Open Book,” which moves between contrapuntal strictures and more free-associative lines with casual discipline.It was a joy to hear so much good music from so many contemporary artists — and in such quick succession; “Inheritances” moves fast, and without an intermission. Just as I was fully appreciating the dancing qualities of Angélica Negrón’s aesthetic in “You Were My Age,” the rug was pulled, giving way to the melodic gifts of John Glover’s “In the City of Shy Hunters.” When Christopher Cerrone’s hypnotic and meditative “Area of Refuge” ended abruptly, without the kind of closing, inventive flourishes I’ve come to treasure in his music, I glanced at the program notes and learned that it was written shortly after his own father’s unexpected death.If any piece appeared less distinct than what had come before, that was largely on account of the strong standard set by this cohort. Throughout, you could hear some artists plying familiar ground with assurance. That was the case with Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much,” which relied on her practice of looping, editing and phasing samples of someone’s recorded voice — here, Tendler’s — to create motifs.Some composers took risks, as Marcos Balter did when punctuating the more abstruse edges of his piece, “False Memories,” with select, dreamy sequences of jazz-chord harmony. His program note said that this idiom was not usual for him, but that’s no reason for him to stop pursuing the line of thought in future pieces; the result on Saturday was transporting.It would have been enough for Tendler to perform these discrete compositional languages persuasively and call it a night. But there was also a sense of true dramatic stakes. The piece “hushing,” by inti figgis-vizueta, played out over archival video of Tendler as a child; the intense chordal pounding of the piece had the feel of eerie, silent-film piano accompaniment. And I teared up when Tendler spoke directly about his father over Darian Donovan Thomas’s gently reflective work “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers.”Tendler’s concert, by the end, amounted not only to a display of contemporary compositional force, but also a true show. The 92nd Street Y date was a one-night affair, but I hope that additional audiences can experience the live version of “Inheritances” — and that Tendler chooses to close the book on it with a recorded album.Adam TendlerPerformed on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Manhattan. More

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      Ingram Marshall Built and Obscured Monoliths of Sound

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      The composer and pianist Timo Andres remembers his former teacher, who “gave the impression that all of music was at our feet.”I first came to know the composer Ingram Marshall, who died on May 31 at 80, as a campus personality. Benevolent and slightly spectral, he’d glide into Yale’s music library, where I had a work-study job as an undergraduate student, and I’d help him find scores and recordings. I already knew a few of his pieces, and was a bit awe-struck chatting with their creator. His musical and real-life personalities seemed directly related: unhurried, easygoing, more likely to follow a train of thought than pursue a rigorous argument, but unafraid to let the conversation become serious or philosophical.Our conversations broadened during my time learning with Marshall in graduate school. His teaching style was distinctly unrigorous but discursive and all-encompassing. In a lesson, we were as likely to discuss a Bergman film or the best way to cook wild mushrooms as we were to analyze whatever I was working on. Mostly, he was content to leave my music as I’d written it; on certain occasions, he’d point out a passage and say, “I like that part, it could last longer.” He encouraged me to take my time, focus on my ideas, and see them through.Marshall became a friend — simply a great hang, and endlessly interesting to talk with. We’d drive out to Sleeping Giant State Park north of New Haven, Conn., for hikes along the river, or further into the country to hunt for morels and chanterelles in his secret spots. He consorted easily with composition students; he treated us as colleagues, and as a result we weren’t afraid to speak openly around him.Around the same time, I started to find great pleasure in playing Marshall’s music, particularly the solo piano piece “Authentic Presence” (2002). A grand fantasia in the tradition of Schubert and Chopin, it is full of contradictions and unexplainable things. The rhythmic language vacillates widely between insistent pulse and total freedom. Sometimes, the phrases are like run-on sentences; elsewhere, they are poetic, rhetorical, filled with pauses and hesitations. The music looks simple on the page, spare on indications almost to the point of inscrutability — a challenge to interpreters to form their own ideas, but also a gesture of respect, entrusting the music to its performer’s care. “Authentic Presence” manages to feel weighty while also ephemeral, grand without grandiloquence, understated in its execution yet unafraid of dramatic gesture.These qualities, constants of Marshall’s style over his entire career, made his voice one of the most personal and distinctive of any composer in recent memory. With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elaborate textures out of canons, inversions, elongations and diminutions. His gamelan-inspired arpeggios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quotations and references give the music a sense of porousness and mutability. Everything coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and reverberant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstraction, an intellectual game of pitches and forms. It was also about expressing something sincerely.In much the same way, Marshall’s use of technology was never for its own sake. He valued gear only insofar as it allowed him to achieve a musical and expressive result. In the spacious “Gradual Requiem,” composed in the late 1970s, an idiosyncratic ensemble — of piano, mandolin, synthesizer, Balinese flute, prerecorded choirs and eight-channel tape delay — guides the listener through a gently epic musical journey of sound design as composition, with electronic and acoustic elements blending seamlessly, cushioning and enveloping one another. This requiem creates a sacred space without words, using layer upon layer of reverberation and delay to build an infinitely large cathedral around the music.Much of the music closest to Marshall’s heart was sacred: New England shape-note songs, Bruckner motets, the gamelan music of Java and Bali. Though he’d grown up a Methodist choir boy, his own beliefs were similarly varied and idiosyncratic, and a deep sense of spirituality runs through his work. Grief recurs, as does coming to terms with death, even finding a kind of ecstatic joy in its anticipation. “Bright Hour Delayed,” from “Hymnodic Delays” (1997), takes the boisterous Sacred Harp hymn “Northfield” as its theme: “How long, dear savior, O how long / shall this bright hour delay?” Marshall slows it down by a factor of four, splays the voices and leaves its melodies hanging plaintively in the air, echoing into the distance like a musical question mark.In “Kingdom Come” (1997), grieving becomes a kind of ritual, connecting the individual to the universal pool of human grief. The piece opens with a chain of A-minor chords, spiraling upward (a reference to Marshall’s beloved Sibelius) then slowly, painfully, drifts downward in an aching lament. We land in a deep, murky F-major stew, out of which bits of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” emerge. (Charles Ives, another composer who used that hymn tune, is a clear reference point; Marshall and I shared adoration for our fellow New Englander, particularly his ability to combine seemingly disparate elements into a potent emotional salmagundi.) As it gathers momentum, “Kingdom Come” becomes a procession in slow motion, a chorus of mourners gathering. Despite its troubled affect and a couple of jolting outbursts, it is not histrionic music; it always looks inward in its search for associations, allusions and meaning.Marshall’s eclectic approach to composition appealed to me. I felt I’d found a mentor who related to music the way I wanted to: with curiosity, open-mindedness and little regard for historical period or genre. He gave the impression that all of music was at our feet in an enormous pile, fodder for inspiration. That’s not to say he liked everything or was uncritical. He could be bluntly dismissive of composers he considered overly academic, technically flashy or too eager to please. But his default approach to life and music was one of generosity.People who knew him often observed that Marshall seemed to be egoless; he didn’t strive, network or self-promote the way artists of my generation have been trained to do. He did have an ego, of course, as one must to pursue an artistic craft so single-mindedly; he just managed to keep it admirably separate from his personal interactions. Though he didn’t strive for fame and fortune, he certainly wished for wider acclaim. On his blog, Old Man of the Woods, in 2013, he lamented the “minor little” commissions he was getting. “There has been nothing of substance, just a few chamber and solo pieces. Frankly, it’s kind of depressing not to have a major work under way on the drafting table.”The source of the frustration was not always external; he was a slow and painstaking writer, at times laboring over a piece for years before he molded it into a form that satisfied him. But once he had done this, he took great pleasure in hearing his own music and was justly proud of what he felt to be his most successful works. And in his own funny, quiet way, he relished attention and affirmation of his creative struggles. A few months ago, I was interviewed about his work on Joshua Weilerstein’s music podcast, and Marshall was thrilled. “I loved all that adulation,” he wrote to me in an email. (Weilerstein conducted my piano concerto “The Blind Banister,” in 2015.)In 2016, Marshall mentioned that he would like to write something for me — a concerto, perhaps. I immediately called up his old friend and steadfast champion, John Adams, who wrangled a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The next year, “Flow,” a chamber concerto, emerged, and seemed to capture a little bit of everything from Marshall’s voice. The piece begins in beatific, C-major stasis, as a jaunty hymn gathers momentum in canonic form. Then, a series of escalating ruminations on another hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?,” first on a solo viola, build up to a fiery orchestral tutti. Then, suddenly, we’re in Indonesia, piano and percussion leaping forward in music as puckish and energetic as anything Marshall ever wrote. Pentatonic arpeggios pile up in multiple keys; a polytonal roar escalates and evaporates. Marshall labored over the final page. When the last revision arrived, days before the premiere, I was moved to find that its closing notes were a quote of my own piano piece “At The River,” which I had dedicated to him in 2011.Of the many obscure, unpublished, unrecorded works from Marshall’s catalog, my favorite is a setting of Emily Dickinson’s “As Imperceptibly as Grief” — particularly because it feels almost secret. Marshall was never quite satisfied with the song, and never got around to revising it. The last line “Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful” is extended over five repetitions, gently rocking between C and F, the simplest chords imaginable. Over barely a minute, it conveys a sense of timelessness, and also of time drawing to a close. But the song doesn’t end with a fade-out. The final gesture comes as a surprise: a sudden, brilliant cascade from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the center, a carillon from the beyond. That “bright hour,” long delayed, has arrived at last. More

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      At 75, the Ojai Music Festival Stays Focused on the Future

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      This storied California haven of contemporary classical music returned, organized by the composer John Adams.OJAI, Calif. — Returning is a process. Rarely is it linear.The Ojai Music Festival, for instance, returned, Sept. 16-19, to celebrate its 75th year after a long pandemic absence. But there were setbacks among the comebacks. Compromises were made to accommodate its move from spring to the final days of summer. An artist was held up in Spain by travel restrictions. Diligently enforced safety measures slightly harshed the vibe of this storied event, a rigorous yet relaxing haven for contemporary music tucked in an idyllic valley of straight-faced mysticism and sweet Pixie tangerines.This edition of the festival is the first under the leadership of Ara Guzelimian, back at the helm after a run in the 1990s. Each year, the person in his position organizes the programming with a new music director; for Guzelimian’s debut, he chose the composer John Adams, the paterfamilias of American classical music, who happens to have been born the year of the first festival. Uninterested in a retrospective for the milestone anniversary, they billed their concerts as a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future.But in music, past, present and future are always informing one another. Bach and Beethoven haunted new and recent works; the pianist Vikingur Olafsson treated Mozart, as he likes to say, as if the ink had just dried on the score. There is no looking forward without looking back.The Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie led a storytelling hour on a misty field at Soule Park on Friday.Timothy TeagueGuzelimian and Adams looked back about far as possible in weaving the valley’s Indigenous history into the festival. The cover of its program book was the Cindy Pitou Burton photograph “Ghost Poppy” — the flower’s name given by the Chumash people, the first known inhabitants of this area, who after the arrival of Europeans were nearly annihilated by disease and violence, and who no longer have any land in Ojai.It’s a history that was shared, among more lighthearted tales, by the Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, who opened Friday’s programming with storytelling on a misty field at Soule Park; that evening, she began a concert with a blessing.Despite the best of intentions, these were among the more cringe-worthy moments of the festival. The predominantly white, moneyed audience responded to details of colonial brutality with an obliviously affirmative hum, not unlike the way it later cheered on Rhiannon Giddens’s “Build a House,” a searing and sweeping indictment of American history — as if these listeners weren’t implicated in its message.Members of the Attacca Quartet with Giddens and her partner, Francesco Turrisi.Timothy TeagueThe festival was at its best when the music spoke for itself. (Most of the concerts are streaming online.) It should be said, though, that the programming still had its limits; just as this review can’t possibly address the entire event, Ojai’s three days (and a brief prelude the evening before) represented only a sliver of the field, and excluded some of the thornier, more experimental work being done.Adams was nevertheless interested, it seemed, in artists who operate as if liberated from orthodoxy and genre — far from what he has called “the bad old days” of modernism’s grip.Beyond the composers, that translated to the performers, a roster that included the festival orchestra (no mere pickup group with the brilliant violinist Alexi Kenney as its concertmaster); members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. And soloists like the violinist — for one piece, also a violist — Miranda Cuckson, who summoned the force of a full ensemble in Anthony Cheung’s “Character Studies” and Dai Fujikura’s “Prism Spectra,” and nimbly followed Bach’s Second Partita with Kaija Saariaho’s “Frises” in place of the partita’s famous Chaconne finale.The violinist Miranda Cuckson in Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, conducted by his father, John Adams.Timothy TeagueOlafsson, whose recordings have demonstrated his brilliance as a programmer — with a sharp ear for connections within a single composer’s body of work, or across centuries and genres — persuasively moderated a conversation among Rameau, Debussy and Philip Glass, as well as another of Mozart and his contemporaries, with masterly voicing and enlightening clarity.Giddens was also at ease in a range of styles, her polymathic musicality and chameleonic voice deployed as affectingly in an Adams aria as in American folk. Performing with her own band (whose members include Francesco Turrisi, her partner) she was deadpan and charismatic; alongside the Attacca Quartet, she simply sat at a microphone with a laser-focus stare, commanding the stage with only her sound.Attacca’s appearance was all too brief, but could justify their own turn at directing the festival one day. Whether in works by Adams, Jessie Montgomery or Caroline Shaw, in Paul Wiancko’s vividly episodic “Benkei’s Standing Death” or Gabriella Smith’s jam-like “Carrot Revolution,” these open-eared and open-minded players don’t seem to bring a piece to the stage until it is etched into their bones, so fully is each score embodied.There was overlap of composer and performer in Timo Andres, whose works were well represented but who also served as the soloist — twinkling, patient and tender — in Ingram Marshall’s humbly gorgeous piano concerto “Flow.”Andres later gave a chilly Sunday morning recital that opened with selections from “I Still Play,” a set of miniatures written for Robert Hurwitz, the longtime and influential leader of Nonesuch Records. It continued with one of Samuel Adams’s Impromptus, a work of inspired keyboard writing designed to complement Schubert, with flashes of that composer along with warmth and subtle harmonic shading to match. And it ended with the first live performance of Smith’s “Imaginary Pancake,” which had a respectable debut online early in the pandemic but truly roared in person.In very Ojai fashion, there were so many living composers programmed that Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t even qualify as a headliner. If anything, he was a known quantity that unintentionally faded amid the novelty of other voices. Carlos Simon’s propulsive and galvanizing “Fate Now Conquers” nodded to Beethoven, but on his own brazen terms. And there continues to be nothing but promise in the emerging Inti Figgis-Vizueta, whose “To give you form and breath,” for three percussionists, slyly warped time in a juxtaposition of resonant and dull sounds of found objects like wood and planters.Much real estate was given to Gabriela Ortiz, who in addition to being performed — providing a blissfully rousing climax for the festival with an expanded version of her “La calaca” on Sunday evening — stepped in as a curator when a recital by Anna Margules was canceled because she couldn’t travel to the United States. That concert, a survey of Mexican composers, offered one of the festival’s great delights: the percussionist Lynn Vartan in Javier Álvarez’s “Temazcal,” a work for maracas and electronics that demands dance-like delivery in a revelation of acoustic possibilities from an instrument most people treat as a mere toy.From left, Emily Levin, Abby Savell and Julie Smith Phillips in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Río de la Mariposas.”Timothy TeagueOrtiz’s chamber works revealed a gift for surprising acoustic pairings, such as two harps and a steel plan in “Río de las Mariposas,” which opened a late morning concert on Sunday. It’s a sound that had a sibling in a premiere that ended that program: Dylan Mattingly’s “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum,” its title taken from the “Aeneid.”The work is also for two harps (Emily Levin and Julie Smith Phillips) — but also two pianos that, microtonally detuned, could at times be confused with a sound of steel pan. There is a slight dissonance, but not an unpleasant one; the effect is more like the distortion of memory. And there was nothing unpleasant about this cry for joy. Ecstasy emanated from the open pianos, played by Joanne Pearce Martin and Vicki Ray, as they were lightly hammered at their uppermost registers, joined by music-box twinkling in the harps.The mood turned more meditative in the comparatively subdued middle section, but the transporting thrill of the opening returned at the end: first in fragments, then full force. “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum” was the newest work at the festival, a piece that looked back on a year that was traumatic for all of us. But Mattingly met the moment with music that teemed with defiant, unflappable hope for the future. More