LOS ANGELES — This year's Ojai Festival began Thursday night with a tribute to Kaija Saariaho, the Finnish composer who died earlier this month. For Ojai, Steven Schick performed an ethereal percussion piece inspired by the moss garden at the Kyoto temple Saiho-ji, which is the greenest place I have ever visited. Saiho's overpowering mossy scent engenders a marvelous sense of peace, and Saariaho's miniature, the fifth movement of her "Six Japanese Gardens," magically captures it, even when experienced, as I did, via the festival's livestream.
At precisely the same moment, Saariaho's life-long friend, Esa-Pekka Salonen, happened to be leading the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of her war-themed second opera, "Adriana Mater." The premiere in Paris 17 years ago had been a shocker. "Adriana" examines the way war ravishes love and the sacrifices required to maintain equanimity. Saariaho tells us not what war is but what it means.
There has been an enormous outpouring of love for Saariaho on hearing of her death at 70 from glioblastoma. Composers are admired; they are revered; they get under our skin, leaving us with sounds that remain in our consciousness; the best can seem essential to our very being. But beloved? That's rare.
