Ojai North!

Peter Sellars  photo by Kenneth Higa

Based on what I've seen, tickets don't seem to be selling as well as one may have expected for the first Ojai North! mini-festival taking place at Zellerbach next week. This is surprising, since if there's one West Coast Festival with a solid reputation, it's Ojai. Add to that two of the programs feature local favorite Dawn Upshaw and it's even more puzzling. Plus, love it or hate it, if Peter Sellars is invloved it's at least guaranteed to be interesting (I always appreciate seeing something Sellars has a hand in).

Here's the schedule:

Monday, June 13: Maria Schneider and her 18-piece jazz orchestra.
Tuesday, June 14: Dawn Upshaw and Australian Chamber Orchestra including a new    work by Maria Schneider for Upshaw and the ACO.
Thursday & Saturday, June 16 & 18: Dawn Upshaw in Peter Sellars' staging of George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny; plus celebrated vocalist Ustad Farida Mahwash and other Afghan musicians. There's a video preview for the The Winds of Destiny here.

Prior to the show on the 18th, a symposium will take place at the Zellerback Playhouse at 5:00pm, free to the public, where journalist Mark Danner and Sellars will discuss "the civic consequences of the absence of the humanities in American public life and articulate a strengthened and re-purposed role for the humanities in the future of American public life."

Tickets are available on Goldstar, and they're seriously reduced for the first two programs (free!).