Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to Ojai Music Festival for extraordinary 80th anniversary

For 80 years the most magical music festival in America has taken place over a long early June weekend in a town that got its name from the Chumash word for moon, that likens itself to Shangri-la and that lets time stop for those sudden moments when the setting sun pinkens the Topatopa mountains. Ojai has long been home to Theosophists, avant-gardists, potters and naturalists joining other outsiders and mystics with a whim for wonder. Here the enduring wisdom of Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai’s informal patron saint, serves even to hold a recent incursion of ultra-rich to account.

But the Ojai Music Festival comfort zone goes no further than a blissful outdoor setting in Libbey Park and convivial audience. This is where you go to get over whatever musical defenses you stubbornly maintain, be they about new music (a festival mainstay) or very old music (a festival source of discovery). If you want to understand how L.A. became uniquely optimistic toward new ways of thinking about music, you would do well to drive some 70 miles up the coast and turn right.

In one of its many distinctions from other festivals, Ojai stays fresh by yearly changing music directors and for its 80th anniversary Esa-Pekka Salonen returned after a quarter-century absence. He had served earlier, while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1999 (when he brought a band of feisty Finnish pals to raise merry and momentous Cain) and 2001. He has been sought after ever since and this year’s homecoming has layers of significance.

Seventeen years after stepping down from the L.A. Phil and at 67 having become one of the world’s most impressive conductors and composers, he is moving back to L.A., where he will become the L.A. Phil creative director and continue as the Colburn School’s director of conducting. The 80th anniversary further served as a moment of transition, being the last summer for its artistic and executive director, Ara Guzelimian, who has had a half-century Ojai presence in one way or another, allowing him the rare ability to guide the festival in ever surprising new directions as a matter of tradition.

The 13 concerts from June 11 to 14 included morning and evening concerts in Libbey Bowl — accompanied by whatever birds happened to be around, ever-present crickets, occasional yacking wanders-by, the odd airplane flyover and nearby traffic Ojai miraculously turns into enchantment rather than annoyance. Elsewhere in town there were early-morning meditation concerts and afternoon events. Salonen added three favorite films to the programming at the Ojai Playhouse, which has lately become a classy cinematheque where you can enjoy an iced David Lynch cappuccino on a warm afternoon, made on what had been the director’s personal espresso machine and with coffee beans specially roasted to his preferences.

Salonen looked to composers who had influenced him, including two Italian avant-gardists, Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni, the latter of whom Salonen in a discussion with Guzelimian described as a kind of loveable, off-the-wall kleptomaniac — he got into trouble with the Carabinieri in Sienna for pocketing lingerie. Both have become neglected composers, making the former’s seductive “Dulce Rifrigerium: Six Spiritual Songs for Piano” and the latter’s startling “Ave” (for flute, celesta and percussion) rare finds.

There were selections, new and old, from close Salonen friends John Adams (himself twice an Ojai music director) and Magnus Lindberg, as well as the late Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky and Kaija Saariaho, all of whom sounded as if in priceless conversation with themselves and their times. Adams offered two incidental new piano pieces and one for string quartet containing his characteristic rhythmic excitement and melodic eloquence.

These composers were garlanded by three of the most important composers of the 20th century, all of whom Salonen collaborated with — Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, whose “Quartet for the End of Time” was a festival signifier. The younger generation included Gabriella Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Andrew Norman. Friday and Sunday evenings, Stravinsky, who reigned over the festival in the 1950s, and Schoenberg had pride of place as the two pillars of midcentury 20th century music in L.A.

The ensembles were the two that Salonen works with most closely in America, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the spectacular Colburn Orchestra (its first appearance at the festival). Among standout soloists and chamber music players were the brilliantly effusive violinist Leila Josefowicz, the magnificently unflappable cellist Jay Campbell, the resourceful pianist Conor Hanick, the unstoppable Attacca String Quartet (the name says it all) and the New York Philharmonic’s stellar principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill.

Geneva Lewis made her Ojai debut as a violinist with an eloquent, silvery sound as did accordionist Hanzhi Wang, who gave an arresting performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XII (Chanson)” in a special indoor program of four of the Italian composer’s solo works paired with dancers and choreographers from L.A. Dance Project.

Salonen’s own music, much of it new to L.A., was threaded throughout. His clarinet concerto, “kinema” (with McGill as soloist and members of the Colburn Orchestra), repurposes evocative bits of film music that went well with the films he selected for the Ojai Playhouse (“Wings of Desire,” “2001” and “Fallen Leaves”), while his new “Drommelogikk,” a violin and cello duo played by Lewis and Campbell, reflected a hallucinating dream about Rossini.

Salonen paid tribute to Knussen with “Arabesques for Olly,” a haunting duet for cellos. For the final show June 14, he began the early evening program with “Fog,” which had been his 90th birthday present to Frank Gehry. It is a riff on the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, the first music heard in the late architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall while still under construction. At Ojai, Lewis wistfully performed the solo prelude off in Libbey Park shrubbery as if a dallying forest spirit summoning ghosts of festivals past. In this case, that might perhaps have been composer and conductor Lukas Foss, a five-time festival director between 1961 and 1980 former festival music director who wrote his own sensation-making riff on the same Bach prelude in his 1967 “Baroque Variations.”

In 2018, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the festival’s music director that year, ended her festival with a performance of the Ligeti’s bizarre Violin Concerto in which she enticed the austere Mahler Chamber Orchestra into standing, singing and dancing in her uplifting performance. It was one of the defining Ojai moments.

Salonen brought back the concerto with Josefowicz and the Colburn Orchestra in a performance that has to be heard (and seen!) to be believed for its fantastic virtuosity, whimsical weirdness and Josefowicz’s absorption of music into her body. Some thought she went too far, especially in the wild closing cadenza she composed. You decide. The festival live-streams the events and archives them on its website and YouTube. You can see Salonen, who gave Josefowicz the support to be brazen, mouth to her astonished wows!

Finns may not be known for demonstrative cheerfulness, nor necessarily for being makers of excessively happy music. But Salonen’s homeland ranks No. 1 this year on the World Happiness Report, and his revelatory performance of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” with the Colburn Orchestra, with which he closed the festival, demonstrated why. In his 1920 neo-Classical ballet, Stravinsky’s remodeled the Baroque composer Pergolesi (as did Picasso with his candy-colored sets of Naples to go along with it), striving not for merriment but the simpler pleasure of finding new bottles for old wine you thought was surely spoiled but turned fruity instead.

Conductors love to play “Pulcinella” for goofy laughs, exaggerating trombone glissandi and the like, relishing guffaws from the audience. But Stravinsky wasn’t goofy, he was merely a modernizer, giving us new ears in which to hear unnoticed qualities in old music as Picasso did in gifting us new eyes with which to see our surrounding anew.

This, then, became the happiest of “Pulcinellas” for its existential sense of contentment. Salonen found renewal not from the desperation of rethinking but from freshening, illuminating the perception of exceptional young musicians first encountering greatness. In these uncertain times, that may be the most remarkable act of artistic optimism.

Next year the Ojai Music Festival will be in the hands of Teddy Abrams as the new artistic and executive director, and his first music director will be mandolinist Chris Thile.

For 80 years the most magical music festival in America has taken place over a long early June weekend in a town that got its name from the Chumash word for moon, that likens itself to Shangri-la and that lets time stop for those sudden moments when the setting sun pinkens the Topatopa mountains. Ojai has long been home to Theosophists, avant-gardists, potters and naturalists joining other outsiders and mystics with a whim for wonder. Here the enduring wisdom of Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai’s informal patron saint, serves even to hold a recent incursion of ultra-rich to account.

But the Ojai Music Festival comfort zone goes no further than a blissful outdoor setting in Libbey Park and convivial audience. This is where you go to get over whatever musical defenses you stubbornly maintain, be they about new music (a festival mainstay) or very old music (a festival source of discovery). If you want to understand how L.A. became uniquely optimistic toward new ways of thinking about music, you would do well to drive some 70 miles up the coast and turn right.

In one of its many distinctions from other festivals, Ojai stays fresh by yearly changing music directors and for its 80th anniversary Esa-Pekka Salonen returned after a quarter-century absence. He had served earlier, while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1999 (when he brought a band of feisty Finnish pals to raise merry and momentous Cain) and 2001. He has been sought after ever since and this year’s homecoming has layers of significance.

Seventeen years after stepping down from the L.A. Phil and at 67 having become one of the world’s most impressive conductors and composers, he is moving back to L.A., where he will become the L.A. Phil creative director and continue as the Colburn School’s director of conducting. The 80th anniversary further served as a moment of transition, being the last summer for its artistic and executive director, Ara Guzelimian, who has had a half-century Ojai presence in one way or another, allowing him the rare ability to guide the festival in ever surprising new directions as a matter of tradition.

The 13 concerts from June 11 to 14 included morning and evening concerts in Libbey Bowl — accompanied by whatever birds happened to be around, ever-present crickets, occasional yacking wanders-by, the odd airplane flyover and nearby traffic Ojai miraculously turns into enchantment rather than annoyance. Elsewhere in town there were early-morning meditation concerts and afternoon events. Salonen added three favorite films to the programming at the Ojai Playhouse, which has lately become a classy cinematheque where you can enjoy an iced David Lynch cappuccino on a warm afternoon, made on what had been the director’s personal espresso machine and with coffee beans specially roasted to his preferences.

Salonen looked to composers who had influenced him, including two Italian avant-gardists, Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni, the latter of whom Salonen in a discussion with Guzelimian described as a kind of loveable, off-the-wall kleptomaniac — he got into trouble with the Carabinieri in Sienna for pocketing lingerie. Both have become neglected composers, making the former’s seductive “Dulce Rifrigerium: Six Spiritual Songs for Piano” and the latter’s startling “Ave” (for flute, celesta and percussion) rare finds.

There were selections, new and old, from close Salonen friends John Adams (himself twice an Ojai music director) and Magnus Lindberg, as well as the late Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky and Kaija Saariaho, all of whom sounded as if in priceless conversation with themselves and their times. Adams offered two incidental new piano pieces and one for string quartet containing his characteristic rhythmic excitement and melodic eloquence.

These composers were garlanded by three of the most important composers of the 20th century, all of whom Salonen collaborated with — Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, whose “Quartet for the End of Time” was a festival signifier. The younger generation included Gabriella Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Andrew Norman. Friday and Sunday evenings, Stravinsky, who reigned over the festival in the 1950s, and Schoenberg had pride of place as the two pillars of midcentury 20th century music in L.A.

The ensembles were the two that Salonen works with most closely in America, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the spectacular Colburn Orchestra (its first appearance at the festival). Among standout soloists and chamber music players were the brilliantly effusive violinist Leila Josefowicz, the magnificently unflappable cellist Jay Campbell, the resourceful pianist Conor Hanick, the unstoppable Attacca String Quartet (the name says it all) and the New York Philharmonic’s stellar principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill.

Geneva Lewis made her Ojai debut as a violinist with an eloquent, silvery sound as did accordionist Hanzhi Wang, who gave an arresting performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XII (Chanson)” in a special indoor program of four of the Italian composer’s solo works paired with dancers and choreographers from L.A. Dance Project.

Salonen’s own music, much of it new to L.A., was threaded throughout. His clarinet concerto, “kinema” (with McGill as soloist and members of the Colburn Orchestra), repurposes evocative bits of film music that went well with the films he selected for the Ojai Playhouse (“Wings of Desire,” “2001” and “Fallen Leaves”), while his new “Drommelogikk,” a violin and cello duo played by Lewis and Campbell, reflected a hallucinating dream about Rossini.

Salonen paid tribute to Knussen with “Arabesques for Olly,” a haunting duet for cellos. For the final show June 14, he began the early evening program with “Fog,” which had been his 90th birthday present to Frank Gehry. It is a riff on the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, the first music heard in the late architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall while still under construction. At Ojai, Lewis wistfully performed the solo prelude off in Libbey Park shrubbery as if a dallying forest spirit summoning ghosts of festivals past. In this case, that might perhaps have been composer and conductor Lukas Foss, a five-time festival director between 1961 and 1980 former festival music director who wrote his own sensation-making riff on the same Bach prelude in his 1967 “Baroque Variations.”

In 2018, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the festival’s music director that year, ended her festival with a performance of the Ligeti’s bizarre Violin Concerto in which she enticed the austere Mahler Chamber Orchestra into standing, singing and dancing in her uplifting performance. It was one of the defining Ojai moments.

Salonen brought back the concerto with Josefowicz and the Colburn Orchestra in a performance that has to be heard (and seen!) to be believed for its fantastic virtuosity, whimsical weirdness and Josefowicz’s absorption of music into her body. Some thought she went too far, especially in the wild closing cadenza she composed. You decide. The festival live-streams the events and archives them on its website and YouTube. You can see Salonen, who gave Josefowicz the support to be brazen, mouth to her astonished wows!

Finns may not be known for demonstrative cheerfulness, nor necessarily for being makers of excessively happy music. But Salonen’s homeland ranks No. 1 this year on the World Happiness Report, and his revelatory performance of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” with the Colburn Orchestra, with which he closed the festival, demonstrated why. In his 1920 neo-Classical ballet, Stravinsky’s remodeled the Baroque composer Pergolesi (as did Picasso with his candy-colored sets of Naples to go along with it), striving not for merriment but the simpler pleasure of finding new bottles for old wine you thought was surely spoiled but turned fruity instead.

Conductors love to play “Pulcinella” for goofy laughs, exaggerating trombone glissandi and the like, relishing guffaws from the audience. But Stravinsky wasn’t goofy, he was merely a modernizer, giving us new ears in which to hear unnoticed qualities in old music as Picasso did in gifting us new eyes with which to see our surrounding anew.

This, then, became the happiest of “Pulcinellas” for its existential sense of contentment. Salonen found renewal not from the desperation of rethinking but from freshening, illuminating the perception of exceptional young musicians first encountering greatness. In these uncertain times, that may be the most remarkable act of artistic optimism.

Next year the Ojai Music Festival will be in the hands of Teddy Abrams as the new artistic and executive director, and his first music director will be mandolinist Chris Thile.

For 80 years the most magical music festival in America has taken place over a long early June weekend in a town that got its name from the Chumash word for moon, that likens itself to Shangri-la and that lets time stop for those sudden moments when the setting sun pinkens the Topatopa mountains. Ojai has long been home to Theosophists, avant-gardists, potters and naturalists joining other outsiders and mystics with a whim for wonder. Here the enduring wisdom of Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai’s informal patron saint, serves even to hold a recent incursion of ultra-rich to account.

But the Ojai Music Festival comfort zone goes no further than a blissful outdoor setting in Libbey Park and convivial audience. This is where you go to get over whatever musical defenses you stubbornly maintain, be they about new music (a festival mainstay) or very old music (a festival source of discovery). If you want to understand how L.A. became uniquely optimistic toward new ways of thinking about music, you would do well to drive some 70 miles up the coast and turn right.

In one of its many distinctions from other festivals, Ojai stays fresh by yearly changing music directors and for its 80th anniversary Esa-Pekka Salonen returned after a quarter-century absence. He had served earlier, while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1999 (when he brought a band of feisty Finnish pals to raise merry and momentous Cain) and 2001. He has been sought after ever since and this year’s homecoming has layers of significance.

Seventeen years after stepping down from the L.A. Phil and at 67 having become one of the world’s most impressive conductors and composers, he is moving back to L.A., where he will become the L.A. Phil creative director and continue as the Colburn School’s director of conducting. The 80th anniversary further served as a moment of transition, being the last summer for its artistic and executive director, Ara Guzelimian, who has had a half-century Ojai presence in one way or another, allowing him the rare ability to guide the festival in ever surprising new directions as a matter of tradition.

The 13 concerts from June 11 to 14 included morning and evening concerts in Libbey Bowl — accompanied by whatever birds happened to be around, ever-present crickets, occasional yacking wanders-by, the odd airplane flyover and nearby traffic Ojai miraculously turns into enchantment rather than annoyance. Elsewhere in town there were early-morning meditation concerts and afternoon events. Salonen added three favorite films to the programming at the Ojai Playhouse, which has lately become a classy cinematheque where you can enjoy an iced David Lynch cappuccino on a warm afternoon, made on what had been the director’s personal espresso machine and with coffee beans specially roasted to his preferences.

Salonen looked to composers who had influenced him, including two Italian avant-gardists, Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni, the latter of whom Salonen in a discussion with Guzelimian described as a kind of loveable, off-the-wall kleptomaniac — he got into trouble with the Carabinieri in Sienna for pocketing lingerie. Both have become neglected composers, making the former’s seductive “Dulce Rifrigerium: Six Spiritual Songs for Piano” and the latter’s startling “Ave” (for flute, celesta and percussion) rare finds.

There were selections, new and old, from close Salonen friends John Adams (himself twice an Ojai music director) and Magnus Lindberg, as well as the late Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky and Kaija Saariaho, all of whom sounded as if in priceless conversation with themselves and their times. Adams offered two incidental new piano pieces and one for string quartet containing his characteristic rhythmic excitement and melodic eloquence.

These composers were garlanded by three of the most important composers of the 20th century, all of whom Salonen collaborated with — Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, whose “Quartet for the End of Time” was a festival signifier. The younger generation included Gabriella Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Andrew Norman. Friday and Sunday evenings, Stravinsky, who reigned over the festival in the 1950s, and Schoenberg had pride of place as the two pillars of midcentury 20th century music in L.A.

The ensembles were the two that Salonen works with most closely in America, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the spectacular Colburn Orchestra (its first appearance at the festival). Among standout soloists and chamber music players were the brilliantly effusive violinist Leila Josefowicz, the magnificently unflappable cellist Jay Campbell, the resourceful pianist Conor Hanick, the unstoppable Attacca String Quartet (the name says it all) and the New York Philharmonic’s stellar principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill.

Geneva Lewis made her Ojai debut as a violinist with an eloquent, silvery sound as did accordionist Hanzhi Wang, who gave an arresting performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XII (Chanson)” in a special indoor program of four of the Italian composer’s solo works paired with dancers and choreographers from L.A. Dance Project.

Salonen’s own music, much of it new to L.A., was threaded throughout. His clarinet concerto, “kinema” (with McGill as soloist and members of the Colburn Orchestra), repurposes evocative bits of film music that went well with the films he selected for the Ojai Playhouse (“Wings of Desire,” “2001” and “Fallen Leaves”), while his new “Drommelogikk,” a violin and cello duo played by Lewis and Campbell, reflected a hallucinating dream about Rossini.

Salonen paid tribute to Knussen with “Arabesques for Olly,” a haunting duet for cellos. For the final show June 14, he began the early evening program with “Fog,” which had been his 90th birthday present to Frank Gehry. It is a riff on the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, the first music heard in the late architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall while still under construction. At Ojai, Lewis wistfully performed the solo prelude off in Libbey Park shrubbery as if a dallying forest spirit summoning ghosts of festivals past. In this case, that might perhaps have been composer and conductor Lukas Foss, a five-time festival director between 1961 and 1980 former festival music director who wrote his own sensation-making riff on the same Bach prelude in his 1967 “Baroque Variations.”

In 2018, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the festival’s music director that year, ended her festival with a performance of the Ligeti’s bizarre Violin Concerto in which she enticed the austere Mahler Chamber Orchestra into standing, singing and dancing in her uplifting performance. It was one of the defining Ojai moments.

Salonen brought back the concerto with Josefowicz and the Colburn Orchestra in a performance that has to be heard (and seen!) to be believed for its fantastic virtuosity, whimsical weirdness and Josefowicz’s absorption of music into her body. Some thought she went too far, especially in the wild closing cadenza she composed. You decide. The festival live-streams the events and archives them on its website and YouTube. You can see Salonen, who gave Josefowicz the support to be brazen, mouth to her astonished wows!

Finns may not be known for demonstrative cheerfulness, nor necessarily for being makers of excessively happy music. But Salonen’s homeland ranks No. 1 this year on the World Happiness Report, and his revelatory performance of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” with the Colburn Orchestra, with which he closed the festival, demonstrated why. In his 1920 neo-Classical ballet, Stravinsky’s remodeled the Baroque composer Pergolesi (as did Picasso with his candy-colored sets of Naples to go along with it), striving not for merriment but the simpler pleasure of finding new bottles for old wine you thought was surely spoiled but turned fruity instead.

Conductors love to play “Pulcinella” for goofy laughs, exaggerating trombone glissandi and the like, relishing guffaws from the audience. But Stravinsky wasn’t goofy, he was merely a modernizer, giving us new ears in which to hear unnoticed qualities in old music as Picasso did in gifting us new eyes with which to see our surrounding anew.

This, then, became the happiest of “Pulcinellas” for its existential sense of contentment. Salonen found renewal not from the desperation of rethinking but from freshening, illuminating the perception of exceptional young musicians first encountering greatness. In these uncertain times, that may be the most remarkable act of artistic optimism.

Next year the Ojai Music Festival will be in the hands of Teddy Abrams as the new artistic and executive director, and his first music director will be mandolinist Chris Thile.

For 80 years the most magical music festival in America has taken place over a long early June weekend in a town that got its name from the Chumash word for moon, that likens itself to Shangri-la and that lets time stop for those sudden moments when the setting sun pinkens the Topatopa mountains. Ojai has long been home to Theosophists, avant-gardists, potters and naturalists joining other outsiders and mystics with a whim for wonder. Here the enduring wisdom of Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai’s informal patron saint, serves even to hold a recent incursion of ultra-rich to account.

But the Ojai Music Festival comfort zone goes no further than a blissful outdoor setting in Libbey Park and convivial audience. This is where you go to get over whatever musical defenses you stubbornly maintain, be they about new music (a festival mainstay) or very old music (a festival source of discovery). If you want to understand how L.A. became uniquely optimistic toward new ways of thinking about music, you would do well to drive some 70 miles up the coast and turn right.

In one of its many distinctions from other festivals, Ojai stays fresh by yearly changing music directors and for its 80th anniversary Esa-Pekka Salonen returned after a quarter-century absence. He had served earlier, while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1999 (when he brought a band of feisty Finnish pals to raise merry and momentous Cain) and 2001. He has been sought after ever since and this year’s homecoming has layers of significance.

Seventeen years after stepping down from the L.A. Phil and at 67 having become one of the world’s most impressive conductors and composers, he is moving back to L.A., where he will become the L.A. Phil creative director and continue as the Colburn School’s director of conducting. The 80th anniversary further served as a moment of transition, being the last summer for its artistic and executive director, Ara Guzelimian, who has had a half-century Ojai presence in one way or another, allowing him the rare ability to guide the festival in ever surprising new directions as a matter of tradition.

The 13 concerts from June 11 to 14 included morning and evening concerts in Libbey Bowl — accompanied by whatever birds happened to be around, ever-present crickets, occasional yacking wanders-by, the odd airplane flyover and nearby traffic Ojai miraculously turns into enchantment rather than annoyance. Elsewhere in town there were early-morning meditation concerts and afternoon events. Salonen added three favorite films to the programming at the Ojai Playhouse, which has lately become a classy cinematheque where you can enjoy an iced David Lynch cappuccino on a warm afternoon, made on what had been the director’s personal espresso machine and with coffee beans specially roasted to his preferences.

Salonen looked to composers who had influenced him, including two Italian avant-gardists, Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni, the latter of whom Salonen in a discussion with Guzelimian described as a kind of loveable, off-the-wall kleptomaniac — he got into trouble with the Carabinieri in Sienna for pocketing lingerie. Both have become neglected composers, making the former’s seductive “Dulce Rifrigerium: Six Spiritual Songs for Piano” and the latter’s startling “Ave” (for flute, celesta and percussion) rare finds.

There were selections, new and old, from close Salonen friends John Adams (himself twice an Ojai music director) and Magnus Lindberg, as well as the late Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky and Kaija Saariaho, all of whom sounded as if in priceless conversation with themselves and their times. Adams offered two incidental new piano pieces and one for string quartet containing his characteristic rhythmic excitement and melodic eloquence.

These composers were garlanded by three of the most important composers of the 20th century, all of whom Salonen collaborated with — Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, whose “Quartet for the End of Time” was a festival signifier. The younger generation included Gabriella Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Andrew Norman. Friday and Sunday evenings, Stravinsky, who reigned over the festival in the 1950s, and Schoenberg had pride of place as the two pillars of midcentury 20th century music in L.A.

The ensembles were the two that Salonen works with most closely in America, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and the spectacular Colburn Orchestra (its first appearance at the festival). Among standout soloists and chamber music players were the brilliantly effusive violinist Leila Josefowicz, the magnificently unflappable cellist Jay Campbell, the resourceful pianist Conor Hanick, the unstoppable Attacca String Quartet (the name says it all) and the New York Philharmonic’s stellar principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill.

Geneva Lewis made her Ojai debut as a violinist with an eloquent, silvery sound as did accordionist Hanzhi Wang, who gave an arresting performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XII (Chanson)” in a special indoor program of four of the Italian composer’s solo works paired with dancers and choreographers from L.A. Dance Project.

Salonen’s own music, much of it new to L.A., was threaded throughout. His clarinet concerto, “kinema” (with McGill as soloist and members of the Colburn Orchestra), repurposes evocative bits of film music that went well with the films he selected for the Ojai Playhouse (“Wings of Desire,” “2001” and “Fallen Leaves”), while his new “Drommelogikk,” a violin and cello duo played by Lewis and Campbell, reflected a hallucinating dream about Rossini.

Salonen paid tribute to Knussen with “Arabesques for Olly,” a haunting duet for cellos. For the final show June 14, he began the early evening program with “Fog,” which had been his 90th birthday present to Frank Gehry. It is a riff on the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, the first music heard in the late architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall while still under construction. At Ojai, Lewis wistfully performed the solo prelude off in Libbey Park shrubbery as if a dallying forest spirit summoning ghosts of festivals past. In this case, that might perhaps have been composer and conductor Lukas Foss, a five-time festival director between 1961 and 1980 former festival music director who wrote his own sensation-making riff on the same Bach prelude in his 1967 “Baroque Variations.”

In 2018, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the festival’s music director that year, ended her festival with a performance of the Ligeti’s bizarre Violin Concerto in which she enticed the austere Mahler Chamber Orchestra into standing, singing and dancing in her uplifting performance. It was one of the defining Ojai moments.

Salonen brought back the concerto with Josefowicz and the Colburn Orchestra in a performance that has to be heard (and seen!) to be believed for its fantastic virtuosity, whimsical weirdness and Josefowicz’s absorption of music into her body. Some thought she went too far, especially in the wild closing cadenza she composed. You decide. The festival live-streams the events and archives them on its website and YouTube. You can see Salonen, who gave Josefowicz the support to be brazen, mouth to her astonished wows!

Finns may not be known for demonstrative cheerfulness, nor necessarily for being makers of excessively happy music. But Salonen’s homeland ranks No. 1 this year on the World Happiness Report, and his revelatory performance of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” with the Colburn Orchestra, with which he closed the festival, demonstrated why. In his 1920 neo-Classical ballet, Stravinsky’s remodeled the Baroque composer Pergolesi (as did Picasso with his candy-colored sets of Naples to go along with it), striving not for merriment but the simpler pleasure of finding new bottles for old wine you thought was surely spoiled but turned fruity instead.

Conductors love to play “Pulcinella” for goofy laughs, exaggerating trombone glissandi and the like, relishing guffaws from the audience. But Stravinsky wasn’t goofy, he was merely a modernizer, giving us new ears in which to hear unnoticed qualities in old music as Picasso did in gifting us new eyes with which to see our surrounding anew.

This, then, became the happiest of “Pulcinellas” for its existential sense of contentment. Salonen found renewal not from the desperation of rethinking but from freshening, illuminating the perception of exceptional young musicians first encountering greatness. In these uncertain times, that may be the most remarkable act of artistic optimism.

Next year the Ojai Music Festival will be in the hands of Teddy Abrams as the new artistic and executive director, and his first music director will be mandolinist Chris Thile.