At Ojai, Peter Sellars Has a Personal Yet Global Playlist

June 16, 2016

The Ojai Music Festival is an annual event with a new appointed Music Director for each year. The Music Director is given the opportunity to organize a four day festival based on his or her own design. This year, renowned theater director and World Arts and Cultures/Dance professor, Peter Sellars, has been tapped to orchestrate the event.

OJAI, CALIF. — Peter Sellars hugs everyone: friends, strangers, people he’s seen just a few hours before, people he hasn’t seen in years.

Embrace is his ethos. As an artist — a stage director and multifaceted cultural curator — he seems to hug his collaborators and hug his audiences. The results can sometimes veer toward the sentimental, even the saccharine, but they always have wide-ranging warmth and inimitable gusto. To hear him talk, everything he touches is the best piece he’s ever heard, the most important project he’s ever worked on.

As the music director of this year’s Ojai Music Festival, which ended Sunday, June 12, he included both Carnatic singing from southern India and French Spectralism, voices from Cairo and from Mexico, a toy piano and a block party. While Mr. Sellars, 58, has been an impresario many times over — one devotee here this weekend wore a T-shirt from the raucous Los Angeles Festival he led in 1990 — the directorship at Ojai gave him perhaps the purest and most concentrated possible vessel for his dizzying range of enthusiasms. — Zachary Woolfe, Jun. 16, 2016

Read the full article at the New York Times website.