Summer offers myriad pleasures, but perhaps none as diverting as the music festival. The ubiquity and variety of these events only further their appeal, and the best-known of them—Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne in Europe, and Marlboro, Tanglewood, and Aspen in America—are venerable institutions with their own cachet and rituals. But even less familiar festivals have charms, arguably all the more so because of their novelty. The Ojai Festival in California is hardly young (this year marked its fifty-fourth anniversary) and far from unknown to music lovers in the Golden State. Yet there is a hidden quality to Ojai (pronounced OH-high), a sense that it is a well-kept secret best kept well. Partly it’s a question of geography. The city of Ojai, which fancies itself something of an arts-and-crafts center, lies in a valley about ninety miles northwest of Los Angeles and fifteen miles from the Pacific coast. This is the place that Frank Ca ...

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