Rhiannon Giddens is the Music Director for the 77th Ojai Music Festival, to be held June 8–11, 2023, the Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian announced today. The initial list of guest artists for the 2023 Festival includes frequent Giddens collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, Attacca Quartet, pipa player and frequent Kronos Quartet collaborator Wu Man, and kamancheh player/composer Kayhan Kalhor. Additional artists, projects, and programming for the 2023 Ojai Music Festival will be announced in the coming months.

“I am so excited to get to work with the Ojai Music Festival as Music Director for 2023,” Giddens says. “My experience as a performer there last year was one of the best festival experiences I’ve had—I was able to sit at the crossroads of all that I am artistically and feel fully supported by Ara and the staff and audience of Ojai each time. I look forward to building on that feeling with the artists that we’re bringing out next year; the future is in celebration of how we come together as humans—despite boxes, boundaries, and borders thrown up with the intent to keep us apart.”

“I am so thrilled that Rhiannon Giddens accepted my invitation to become Music Director of the 2023 Ojai Music Festival,” Guzelimian says. “I have boundless admiration for Rhiannon as both a compelling musician and as an extraordinary artistic catalyst bringing together musical worlds towards important philosophical, cultural, and social goals.

“The openness and flexibility of the Ojai Festival is an ideal forum for such an artist to have complete freedom to imagine and explore. Rhiannon created a special bond with Ojai and our audiences when she made her debut at the 2021 Festival. She and the Attacca Quartet found an immediate connection when they first met last year in Ojai, and she invited the quartet to join her for Ojai 2023, to grow and explore that partnership. Francesco Turrisi brings such boundless musical fluencies, from early music to jazz, from the traditional music of multiple cultures to new music by emerging composers. We have spoken about Rhiannon’s extraordinary embrace of so many musical languages as a thread in the 2023 Ojai Festival, with particular focus in the deep traditions of a classical music in non-Western cultures and the encounter of like-instruments from very different cultures. We are so happy that the Persian kamancheh player/composer Kayhan Kalhor and the great pipa player Wu Man will join us next June in these explorations. These plans are a work-in-progress at this early stage, and we look forward to being joined by a number of great collaborators and composers, who will be announced in the coming months.”

The Festival shares this news just ahead of the 76th Festival, which takes place June 9–12, 2022, with the discipline-colliding collective AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), of which Julia Bullock is a founding member, as Music Director.

Francesco Turrisi and Attacca Quartet previously joined Rhiannon Giddens in Ojai during the 2021 Festival in September with Music Director John Adams. Other Nonesuch artists to have served as Ojai Music Festival Artist Directors are Jeremy Denk and Dawn Upshaw. 

For more information and ticket details for 2022 and 2023, visit OjaiFestival.org.