George Benjamin's Ojai Career 
Wednesday, June 2, 2010, 01:13 PM
Posted by Administrator
What exactly defines an Ojai Music Festival experience? What ties together the music and people featured at Ojai? It's lineage, says Tom Morris. This might be the first year composer George Benjamin is the festival's music director, but he has ties to it that go back through his entire career. As recounted in last weekend's LA Times:

Olivier Messiaen, a composer whose work has been a staple at Ojai since 1969 and who visited the festival in 1985, was Benjamin's composition teacher. Benjamin had a close relationship with the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti, another oft-performed composer at Ojai. Pierre Boulez, one of Benjamin's most stalwart mentors, has served as the festival's music director seven times. Several other Ojai music directors in recent years — including the British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen, the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard;and the American conductor David Robertson — also share longstanding friendships with Benjamin.


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