Dawn Upshaw takes a bullet for Ojai Music Fest

That's what it looks like in this picture, from a preview last Friday from NPR:

The featured music at the Ojai Music festival this year, Winds of Destiny, came from American composer George Crumb, which NPR helpfully allows us to hear next to the preview.

It's stunning — in a festival sort of way. Mark Swed, of the LA Times, described it admiringly: 

Crumb summons up the deafening silence of the battlefield at night, conjures the ghosts of the dead and brandishes the nightmares of the living. In the process he also manages percussion writing of extravagant beauty, if arresting strangeness.

Yes. You can hear it yourself. It's festival music — harsh, austere, impressive. And not the sort of thing one wants or needs to hear often, despite the predictably great singing of Dawn Upshaw. Once is probably enough for nearly anyone for Winds of Destiny. Though with its serious themes and Peter Sellars stage antics — see above — it's as attractive to the press as honey to wasps.

By contrast a couple of days later, Dawn Upshaw sang another original piece for the festival, a setting of Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks by the new star Maria Schneider, that was adored by the crowd in Ojai. More than one person I spoke to wondered when a recorded version might become available. 

A couple of years ago Upshaw had a bout with breast cancer. She's fine now. A few years before, the former poet laureate Ted Kooser also had a bout with cancer. He survived, too, but to try and maintain his strength found himself taking walks just before dawn. A poet friend, Jim Harrison, convinced him to write down his morning walk in a haiku, and send it off on postcard. 

The result is all that Crumb's work strains to be, but without the laboring. Yet Swed admitted he didn't exactly like it, despite its undeniable emotionality, and the collaborative skill that went into it: 

The texts are flickering glimpses of nature on pre-dawn walks taken while the poet was undergoing chemotherapy. Upshaw’s depth of feeling and Schneider’s gift for lyricism helped chip away at one listener’s mawkish defense mechanisms. 

But that's an incorrect use of the word mawkish, isn't it? One might think the music was "sickly, sentimental" (even if it's not). But certainly its rejection – one's reaction to it — isn't mawkish. 

It's a confusion of an action with an adjective.

Strange that a critic as experienced as Swed should make such an elementary mistake.

No matter. For the local paper, Karen Lindell not only previewed the performance, and gathered some great quotes from composer Maria Schneider, she even included one of Kooser's achingly real poems. 

Perfectly still this solstice morning,
in bone-cracking cold. Nothing moving,
or so one might think, but as I walk the road,
the wind held in the heart of every tree 
flows to the end of each twig and forms a bud.

Good to see a newspaper writer dare to admire poetry so unabashedly.