Composer John Adams, the 2021 Music Director and conductor for the Ojai Music Festival, has announced the featured composers and performers for the 75th festival, to be held June 10–13, 2021, including composer/pianist Timo Andres and Attacca Quartet.

Andres returns to Ojai, having performed in the 2014 Festival, to give the first live public performance of I Still Play—new solo piano compositions by artists who have recorded for Nonesuch Records, written in honor of the label’s longtime President Bob Hurwitz on the occasion of his becoming Chairman Emeritus. The 2020 Nonesuch album includes works by Adams, Andres, Laurie Anderson, Louis Andriessen, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Brad Mehldau, Steve Reich, Pat Metheny, and Randy Newman.

Attacca Quartet makes its Ojai debut in a concert of music by composer Caroline Shaw and others. The group received a Grammy Award for its 2019 New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records album with Shaw, Orange, featuring six of her pieces for string quartet.

Additionally, Adams will conduct two concerts that will include works by Steve Reich, among others; Adams own work will be included on programs by both the LA Phil New Music Group and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.

"As we respond to these immensely challenging times both globally and here in the US," says Ojai Artistic & Executive Director Ara Guzelimian, "now, more than ever, we are placing our faith in the next generation to show us the way forward John Adams has been unwavering in his desire to focus the 75th Festival on some of today’s most vibrant and innovative composers and performers. We look forward to all that they represent—both for this treasure of a Festival and, more broadly, for our world. They give me great hope and it is an honor to launch a new era for Ojai alongside such remarkable artists and thinkers."

For more of the newly announced featured artists, visit ojaifestival.org, where additional artists and programs of the 2021 Festival will continue to be announced in the coming months.

For more than seven decades, the Ojai Music Festival has flourished as a creative laboratory by combining a boundless sense of adventure, an expansive musical curiosity, and an atmosphere of relaxed but focused informality. Each year a different Music Director is given the freedom and the resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. Ojai’s signature blend of an enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of musical innovators—from Boulez, Copland, and Stravinsky in its formative years to Jeremy Denk and Dawn Upshaw in more recent times, and Adams himself in 1993—to push artistic boundaries.