AMOC runs amok at Ojai festival
Like most theater, only more deliriously so, opera is not the art of happy families.
But there is American Modern Opera Company — a.k.a., and for good reason, AMOC. And there is the Ojai Music Festival. Both present themselves as happy families. So much for the socalled Anna Karenina principle, based on Tolstoy’s famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There is nothing else like AMOC.
This Utopian collective of 17 extraordinary artists happily reinventing opera was the communal music director last weekend for the 75th anniversary of this everquixotic festival.
The weekend was far from untroubled, though. What family gathering dare be? Room had to be made for anger, as well as sweet humor and contagious exuberance. Conviviality was served in large portions — the idea of a shared dinner was an ongoing metaphor for how AMOC operates and also how it might present concerts — as was an inspirational sense of cooperation and support among the performers. But, of course, 17 stellar cooks are just as capable of ruining a dinner as they are of making an incomparable feast.
AMOC prides itself in being unclassifiably multidisciplinary. Summarizing the ambitious 18 programs that the collective produced between Thursday night and Sunday afternoon would miss the point. Works were by more than 50 composers, ranging over the past millennium. Music, dance and theater were hyphenated in all reasonably possible ways.
The collective was founded by the composerpoet-pianist-conductor-essayist and former Los Angeles Opera artist in residence Matthew Aucoin and director Zack Winokur in 2017 as an occasional refuge from the artistically anesthetizing commercial classical music business. Such stars as soprano Julia Bullock, bass-baritone Davóne Tines and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo signed on. Bassist Doug Balliett, who teaches a course on the Beatles at the Juilliard School and writes cantatas for Sunday church services, as well as wacky pop operas, is in a class of his own. Three dancer-choreographers mean dance will never be far away.
A gig family guarantees that stuff happens. Bullock