On a recent Saturday morning in Ojai, California, a venerable bohemian enclave northwest of Los Angeles, the clarinettist Anthony McGill stood beneath a sycamore tree and played “Abyss of the Birds,” the third movement of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” McGill, the flutist Rose Lombardo, and the accordionist Hanzhi Wang were giving a free concert at the Ojai Meadows Preserve, a restored wetlands area. More than four hundred people had assembled for the occasion, some seated on folding chairs and some reclining on blankets. McGill’s superbly nuanced calls, runs, and trills elicited commentary from a second audience, perched in the trees above—a colloquium of finches, towhees, titmice, kingbirds, juncos, and Eurasian collared doves. (A bird-watcher was seated behind me.) This pre-summer idyll could not have been more different from the setting in which the Quartet was first heard. Messiaen completed the score while he was being held at a German prisoner-of-war camp, and it had its première there on an icy winter night in 1941. Perhaps the composer dreamed of a future performance like the one in Ojai; his music rejects the nightmare of history and goes in search of ultimate serenity.

Once again, the Ojai Music Festival was summoning sonic bliss, as it has been doing for the past eighty years. No gathering of its kind is mellower in mood or keener in attitude. The general rule is that programs should focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers, although musicians won’t be reprimanded if they leap back to the twelfth century, as the violinist Geneva Lewis and the cellist Jay Campbell did at another crowded morning event this year, when they played an arrangement of Hildegard of Bingen’s chant “O Virtus Sapientie.” The Ojai audience, having been molded over the decades by the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Mitsuko Uchida, is not easily fazed. No one blinked an eye when, during a concert at the Ojai Valley School, the percussionist Jonathan Hepfer filtered a Beatles tune through an amplified teapot, in a rendition of Alvin Lucier’s “Nothing Is Real.” In 2015, Steven Schick scheduled Morton Feldman’s five-hour-long “For Philip Guston” for the mad time of 5 A.M., and about a hundred hardy souls showed up.

Each year, Ojai has a different music director. When I first visited, in 1999, the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, then forty, brought in a gang of avant-garde Finns, the Toimii Ensemble, and unleashed Magnus Lindberg’s anarchic masterpiece “Kraft,” from 1985. While the Los Angeles Philharmonic thundered apocalyptically, members of Toimii ran up and down the aisles of the Libbey Bowl, Ojai’s main venue, to bang on car parts and strike gongs that were hanging from trees. Salonen was back this year, a bit less rambunctious than before, secure in his status as one of the major musical figures of our time. He is now old enough to have seen many mentors and colleagues fall away: Messiaen, György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Franco Donatoni, Oliver Knussen, Witold Lutosławski, Steven Stucky, Kaija Saariaho. All were present in Salonen’s programs, in sound and spirit. To some extent, the 2026 festival was a retrospective of the late twentieth century, when modernist strictures were loosening and a more expansive, pluralistic mentality was taking hold.

Nostalgia isn’t an Ojai virtue, however, and younger composers kept things current. Messiaen’s nature-consciousness found a counterpart in Gabriella Smith’s “Anthozoa,” for violin, cello, piano, and percussion, which evoked the microscopic bustle of coral reefs, with clicks and rustlings giving way to oceanic hymnal chords. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ró” (“tranquillity,” in Icelandic) unfurled a not dissimilar soundscape of organic tendrils growing from sustained drones. Meanwhile, the pianist Conor Hanick played two new pieces by John Adams, the most boyish of near-octogenarians; one of them, “song without words,” offered a transfixing instance of Adamsian endless melody, at once radiant and bittersweet.

Of the half-dozen Ojai festivals I’ve attended, this one was perhaps the most perfectly executed. The excellence of the programming and music-making testified not only to Salonen’s magnetism but also to the behind-the-scenes dexterity of the veteran arts administrator Ara Guzelimian, who has been associated with Ojai for decades and has led its operations since 2020. The ovation that erupted when Guzelimian walked out to introduce the festival’s closing concert was a fitting acknowledgment that golden-age concerts do not happen by themselves.

That final concert, featuring the student orchestra of the Colburn School, in L.A., at once exemplified Ojai’s ethos and jolted its laid-back atmosphere. Salonen led a buoyant, mercurial ninetieth-birthday tribute that he wrote for the late Frank O. Gehry, titled “Fog.” He also presented Stravinsky’s ironic-bucolic ballet “Pulcinella,” a bracing prelude to summer. In between came Ligeti’s towering, terrifying Violin Concerto, written between 1989 and 1993. Leila Josefowicz, for whom both Salonen and Adams have written concertos, essayed the solo part for the first time in her career, and she delivered it with such sublime fury that afterward the customarily reserved Salonen did something quite uncharacteristic: he slapped his forehead with his palm and gestured at Josefowicz in happy disbelief.

I had been waiting more than thirty years to hear this concerto done so intensely. In 1993, when I was a neophyte critic, I went to Boston to report on a Ligeti festival at the New England Conservatory. The composer was in attendance, holding forth in lectures and discussions, his arachnid mind spinning webs across music history. At one point, he gave a virtuosic disquisition on motifs of lament, citing Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Bach, Schubert, and Purcell (he sang an excruciating version of “Dido’s Lament”), not to mention flamenco, Roma music, and funeral songs he’d heard in Transylvania as a child. He also discussed the Violin Concerto, which he was still revising. He related the piece to his attempt to develop a new kind of tonality, one that would absorb tradition without becoming trapped by it. He said, “I am in a prison—one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” Only Ligeti could find himself in an Escher-like prison with just two walls.

The concerto is less than half an hour long, yet it contains a universe of possibilities. Folkish ditties dance through fractal textures; standard equal-tempered tuning is juxtaposed with the archaic practice of just intonation; rhythms ricochet against one another; influences of Central African forager music and Indonesian gamelan are audible; the ancient lament resounds. Because of its extreme complexity, the work is seldom programmed, and when it is the realization can fall short of the conception. In 2000, I heard it at Carnegie Hall, with Christian Tetzlaff, Pierre Boulez, and the London Symphony. The notes glittered in place, but the piece came across more as a cerebral design than as a living thing.

Salonen has dug deeper. He esteemed Ligeti from an early age and worked closely with the composer from the nineteen-eighties onward. When the Sony Classical label launched a recorded survey of Ligeti’s music, in the nineties, Salonen was chosen to oversee the project. Alas, Ligeti proved to be an extraordinarily difficult collaborator, his manic perfectionism colliding with practical reality and leading to unpleasant scenes. One day, Salonen received a fax from him that read, “I promise to be relatively nice tomorrow.” Nonetheless, Salonen never stopped admiring the music, and he bore in mind the psychic pressures that weighed on the man himself. Messiaenic serenity was not within Ligeti’s reach. When I spoke with Salonen at Ojai, he told me, “Here was a man who lost almost all of his family in the Holocaust, and then fled from Hungary to Austria in 1956, in the middle of the night, with dogs chasing him at the border. When that is your starting point, it creates a very bleak world view.” What fascinates Salonen now, however, is not the darkness of Ligeti’s art but its aliveness and freshness: “The vitality of a piece like the Violin Concerto reminds me of the ‘Symphonie Fantastique’—it will always surprise you.”

Josefowicz, in her decathlon of a performance, brought Ligeti’s savage discontinuities to the surface. She applied a thick, bristling tone and dispatched swirls of notation with meticulous abandon. At the same time, she attended to the primeval lyricism that shimmers through the work’s kaleidoscopic visions. The second movement, “Aria, Hoquetus, Choral,” begins with a seventy-four-bar melody that is played entirely on the G string. Josefowicz lent it a desperate warmth, as if she were the last survivor of a destroyed village. Most stupendous of all was her cadenza in the fifth movement—a tour de force of disciplined chaos that she composed herself, responding to an invitation that Ligeti extends to the soloist. “It should be hectic throughout,” he writes, and so it was. Salonen guided the Colburn Orchestra with flexible authority, imposing order or inciting wildness as the moment required. The youthful musicians chattered away like creatures of the Transylvanian night.

The Violin Concerto ends with an elegant shock. The orchestra delivers a rapid-fire series of thwacks, grunts, yelps, and honks, marked “ffffff” and “ffffffff.” The flutes follow with flutter-tongued E’s that fade to silence—a quivering, alarm-like effect that Ligeti derived from Shostakovich’s doom-laden Fourth Symphony. Salonen told me, “There are elements of a triumphant finish, but it kind of falls apart. With Ligeti, you often don’t know if it’s playful, or tragic, or, most likely, both. It makes me think of the final scene of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’—‘All the world is a jest.’ ” In some ways, Ligeti’s ending doesn’t even sound like an ending. The buzzing of the flutes could be a signal to wake up and keep going. In the twilight of the twentieth century, with the shadows of history all around, Ligeti cleared the stage for an infinite musical future. ♦