Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to Ojai Music Festival for extraordinary 80th anniversary

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For 80 years the most magical music festival in America has taken place over a long early June weekend in a town that got its name from the Chumash word for moon, that likens itself to Shangri-la and that lets time stop for those sudden moments when the setting sun pinkens the Topatopa mountains.Ojai has long been home to Theosophists, avant-gardists, potters and naturalists joining other outsiders and mystics with a whim for wonder.

Here the enduring wisdom of Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai’s informal patron saint, serves even to hold a recent incursion of ultra-rich to account.But the Ojai Music Festival comfort zone goes no further than a blissful outdoor setting in Libbey Park and convivial audience.This is where you go to get over whatever musical defenses you stubbornly maintain, be they about new music (a festival mainstay) or very old music (a festival source of discovery).

If you want to understand how L.A.became uniquely optimistic toward new ways of thinking about music, you would do well to drive some 70 miles up the coast and turn right.In one of its many distinctions from other festivals, Ojai stays fresh by yearly changing music directors and for its 80th anniversary Esa-Pekka Salonen returned after a quarter-century absence.

He had served earlier, while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1999 (when he brought a band of feisty Finnish pals to raise merry and momentous Cain) and 2001.He has been sought after ever since and this year’s homecoming has layers of significance.Seventeen years after stepping down from the L.A.

Phil and at 67 having become one of the world’s most impressive conductors and composers, he is moving back to L.A., where he will become the L.A.Phil creative director and continue as the Colburn School’s director of conducting.

The 80th anniversary further served as a moment of transition, being t...