‘Gracias Gustavo': Details of the L.A. Phil's plans for Dudamel's final season
The end of a golden era approaches as the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Thursday announced details of the final season at Walt Disney Concert Hall for Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, who after 17 years will move on to helm the New York Philharmonic.
The 2025-26 L.A. Phil season is being dubbed 'Gracias Gustavo.' Dudamel will conduct 14 programs from this September through June 2026, including the second Wagner Ring opera, 'Die Walküre,' with sets by friend and collaborator Frank Gehry. The season will also feature Dudamel's first time conducting one of Beethoven's most spectacular but lesser-known works, 'Missa Solemnis.'. Dudamel also will bring back — and add dance to — two ballet scores that he had previously premiered: Thomas Ades' 'Inferno' and Gabriela Ortiz's ''Revolución diamantina.'
The world premiere a work for orchestra and choir by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid is on the schedule, as well as a premiere of Angélica Negrón's Cello Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma; and new editions to Dudamel's Pan-American Music Initiative — now its fifth year — which is close to the conductor's heart. The L.A. Phil will also embark on a two-week tour through South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
'Together, we have reimagined what an orchestra can be, and how it can serve both the community around it and the world at large,' Dudamel said in the season announcement. 'In these remarkable players, I have found both a profound wellspring of generosity, and a visionary commitment to excellence in music-making.'
Dudamel first conducted the L.A. Phil almost 20 years ago at the Hollywood Bowl. In January 2007 he again conducted the orchestra, this time at Disney Hall. Three months later, the L.A. Phil announced he was to become its next music director, beginning with the 2009-2010 season. During his tenure, the charismatic conductor became a bona fide celebrity in the city and elevated the orchestra to wide recognition as the most important in the country.
The search for Dudamel's replacement is ongoing.
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Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
There's more to Korean music than K-Pop. Young composers show how in L.A. Phil's Seoul Festival
K-pop. Oscar-celebrated cinema. Samsung in the living room. Political urgency in the press. However prominent Korean culture seems to be, there is surprising lack of coverage of the classical scene at large. Already at 21, Yunchan Lim, winner of the 2018 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has reached superstar status. Myung-Whun Chung, whose conducting career began as an assistant to Carlo Maria Giulini at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1977, was just selected, over a veteran Italian conductor, to head La Scala in Milan with the blessing of Italy's nationalist president, Giorgia Meloni. And now the L.A. Phil has turned to the South Korean capital for an eight-day Seoul Festival as a follow-up to its revelatory Reykjavik and Mexico City festivals. Unsuk Chin, today's best-known Korean composer, is the curator. She is, in fact, today's only Korean composer who's well known internationally. Despite a seeming wealth of renowned performers, Korea remains a musically mysterious land. Most of what happens, even now, in Seoul's classical music scene doesn't roam far from Seoul. The mostly youngish composers and performers in the first L.A. Phil festival event, an exceptional Green Umbrella concert of new music at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, were all discoveries. Korean music is a discovery for much of the world. But California does have a head start. Chin, whose music has a visceral immediacy, has long fit in to L.A., championed by Kent Nagano at Los Angeles Opera and by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and Susanna Mälkki at the L.A. Phil. Moreover, ancient Korean court music and its instruments became an obsession with the echt-California composer Lou Harrison. Its noble gentility has been subtly adding to the DNA of the California sound. Only two Korean composers before Chin have made an indelible impression on the world stage, and both, as is Chin, became avant-gardist emigres. As outsiders, they have striking relevance. Isang Yun ((1917–1995) had a shocking career. A brilliant pioneering composer who melded traditional Asian music with contemporary techniques, Yun had been briefly arrested for his participation in the Korean independence movement of the early 1940s. He fled to West Germany, where he became a prominent composer before being kidnapped and returned to Korea. Imprisoned, tortured and threatened with a death sentence, he was eventually freed thanks to pressure from a consortium of internationally influential musicians (Igor Stravinsky, György Ligeti and Herbert von Karajan among them) and returned to West Berlin. And then there was Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Though famed for having been the first major video artist, Paik was a classically trained pianist and composer who began his career following in Schoenberg's footsteps by writing 12-tone music. His route to video was an erratic one that began when he fell under the spell of John Cage and became one of the more outrageous members of the anarchic Fluxus art and performance movement. I once asked Paik, who taught briefly at CalArts when it opened, about whether he always considered himself a composer. He said only a yuppie — 'you know, those people who work in a bank during the day and only go to concerts at night' — would think he wasn't. The Yun and Paik zeitgeist of going your own original and expressive sonic way while always being aware of tradition, whether embraced or rejected, pervades Chin, 63, and the generation of Korean composers who came after her and whom she has invited to the festival. Chin herself left Seoul to study with Ligeti in Europe. The Hungarian composer's music, thanks to Salonen's advocacy, is also in the L.A. blood. The orchestra has, of course, had a Ligeti festival. For the Green Umbrella concert, Chin revealed a great range of approaches among the four exceedingly interesting next-generation composers. She also invited a dazzling array of soloists specializing in Western and Korean instruments as well as the magnificent Ensemble TIMF, which joined the L.A. Phil New Music Group. All were making debuts alongside the luminous and poetic young conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi. In the four pieces (each about 15 minutes), Korean, European and American traditions can serve as sources for reinvention. Juri Seo's Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, given a dashing performance by pianist HieYon Choi, consists of short movements that include a jazz fughetta and Schumann-esque romanticism. Sun-Young Pahg's austerely formal 'L'autre moitié de Silence' for daegeum and ensemble featured Hong Yoo as soloist bending notes and bending time on the bamboo flute used in Korean folk and traditional music. In Yie-Eun Chun's spritely Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the L.A. Phil for the festival, scale-like passages got the Paganini treatment from soloist SooBeen Lee. Dongjin Bae's 'reflective — silky and rough' for standard western flute and spacey strings, another L.A. Phil commission, had an ancient feel with its silences and breathy solos played with enthralling focus by Yubeen Kim. Chin's 'Gougalon (Scenes From a Street Theater),' which ended the program, is a riotous evocation of Hong Kong. Rather than musically reproduce street sounds and people sounds, Chin transforms them into spectacular orchestral chatter. The effect is what their joy must sound like, what their meals must sound like, what their walking and talking and laughing and crying must sound like in a language you don't understand because exhilaration isn't language. All of this is music by distinct personalities, each striving for something sonically personal. Musically mixing East and West dispenses with regulations when crossing borders and becomes an an act of individuality and often resistance. Chun's do-re-me scales become cockeyed before you grasp what's happening. Bae's silky flute, when rough underneath, evoke the feeling you might get when taking a break from Bach an instant before the world's most compelling composer overtakes your own senses. The conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi favors transparency and sensuality at the same time with expressive gestures that seem to magically mold sound. Each piece had different instrumental combinations involving both L.A. Phil and TIMF players. Everything worked. The festival continues with weekend orchestra concerts featuring different mixes of four more new Korean scores commissioned by the L.A. Phil, Chin's 2014 Clarinet Concerto and a pair of Brahms concertos. A chamber music concert with works by Schumann and Brahms played by Korean musicians is the closing event Tuesday. Meanwhile, for a better idea of what Unsuk Chin is up to, last month in Hamburg Kent Nagano conducted the premiere of her new opera, 'The Dark Side of the Moon.' It is a philosophical reflection on the relationship between quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung that profoundly reflects how ideas and traditions interact. It can be watched on YouTube.
New York Times
30-05-2025
- New York Times
Waiting for Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic Is Doing Just Fine
The New York Philharmonic is flying free. Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler's Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn't officially start until fall 2026. Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones. That certainly hasn't been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall's acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened. The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok's fairy-tale ballet 'The Wooden Prince,' a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart's 'Turkish' Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili's sensual flair. But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart's overture to 'The Magic Flute,' a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed. The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn't how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion's share of attention and applause. It's how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that 'Magic Flute' overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
29-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Dr. Gustavo Dudamel leads the New York Philharmonic, with L.A. style
New York — After triumphantly bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Coachella, Gustavo Dudamel is taking his biggest bite so far out of the Big Apple. He is in town for a three-week New York Philharmonic residency. He has devised two ambitious programs to close the orchestra's season in David Geffen Hall and will then be the big attraction for thousands of New York picnickers at free New York Philharmonic parks concerts throughout the boroughs. In the meantime, Dr. Dudamel picked up an honorary doctorate Saturday from the Juilliard School. A welcome mat doesn't get more welcoming than that for a conductor, and this is someone who has yet no official title with the orchestra. The three main 'People of the New York Philharmonic' featured on the orchestra's website are pianist Yuja Wang (artist in residence), Matías Tarnopolsky (newly appointed president and chief executive) and Alec Baldwin (radio series host). In September, Dudamel becomes music and artistic director designate. A year later, having completed 17 seasons as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he takes charge of the country's oldest and most celebrated orchestra. But who's counting days, months or years? From the moment Dudamel walked on stage at Geffen Hall to begin the dress rehearsal of his first concert of the series last week, there could be no question that it's his show. The orchestra has become fully Dudamel-branded, his image plastered everywhere you look. The talk of the town is that a music-director-designate-to-be has already transformed one of the world's great orchestras, which is said to be playing at a new level and with a new sound. New Yorkers still take pride in not being easily hoodwinked. The press glorifies Dudamel as the next Leonard Bernstein one minute and looks for flaws anywhere it can find them the next. But there is something in the air that even an outsider could feel at the rehearsal, which was open to donors and press interlopers. Dudamel simply seemed, without ostensibly trying, to belong. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it. When he asked the players for something, an orchestra famed for being difficult responded instantly. But Dudamel was doubtlessly trying to belong. The program, composed of nothing he has performed elsewhere, was meant to be a tribute to the New York Philharmonic. He began by pairing the first work the 183-year-old orchestra had ever commissioned with a premiere of a startling new commission. After intermission, he introduced the largest and most robust of the recent symphonies by the city's best-known composer, a veritable icon — Philip Glass — to an orchestra that had done its best to ignore for half a century. With orchestra and audience in his hands, Dudamel had yet another triumph. The New York Times called this program a love letter to New York. If so, the love letter had a postmark from L.A. Stravinsky composed his Symphony in Three Movements, written during and reflecting World War II, while he lived in West Hollywood. Like Schoenberg before him, the Russian émigré composer tried but failed to get a lucrative contract scoring a Hollywood film. Instead, Stravinsky reused bits he had meant for the 1943 epic 'The Song of Bernadette' in his war symphony. The newly commissioned work that followed was Kate Soper's 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,' a sensationally witty and profound monodrama about the meaning of music for amplified soprano and large orchestra. Soper herself was the talented soloist, as she had been a few weeks earlier when she appeared at the L.A. Phil's Green Umbrella concert in a far riskier early work, 'Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say.' A favorite of operatic progressives, Soper has had three operas staged by Long Beach Opera, including the premiere of her astonishingly fanciful 'Romance of the Rose,' perhaps the most original American opera of the decade. When it came to breaking the New York Philharmonic's Glass ceiling, Dudamel brought an L.A. Phil hammer. The first concert work by Glass that the New York Philharmonic ever performed was Concerto for Two Pianos in 2017, conducted by Dudamel's predecessor, Jaap van Zweden. It was Dudamel, however, who had given the premiere of the concerto and the L.A. Phil that commissioned it. Dudamel's performance of Symphony No. 11 thus became the first New York Philharmonic attempt at a Glass symphony. (He's written 15, and the L.A. Phil commissioned the 12th.) The 11th has everything audiences and orchestra players are said to dread. It is long (40 minutes), orchestrally big-boned in the manner of Bruckner and echt-Glass in its repetitions and romantic effusions. But in an act of remarkable conductorial persuasion, Dudamel emphasized Glass' talent for orchestral go-with-the-flow magnificence to blow the audience away. The crowd stood en mass and cheered the frail 88-year-old composer seated on the first tier. For all that, the performances were nonetheless on the stiff side, the famously virtuosic orchestra effortfully coming to terms with the unfamiliar. But the needle has moved. What felt unfamiliar was a general feeling of acceptance in Geffen Hall. The audience-friendly renovation during the pandemic helps with a powerful acoustic that encourages openness. This is no longer the uptight atmosphere where John Adams was angrily booed and where people noisily walked out as Zubin Mehta premiered major new works by Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis. The New York Philharmonic, moreover, has many younger players. And Geffen Hall has found novel means of reaching new audiences, particularly with its large video screens in the lobby, where every concert is streamed for free for passersby or those who want to take in the whole event. The video work is the most creative I've encountered. The sound system is not high-end and there are plenty of distractions. But I watched a matinee and found the experience compelling and the sound good enough to tell that by the second performance of the program, the orchestra had already gotten tighter. All this bodes well for Dudamel, who now has the West Coast support team he wanted. Deborah Borda, who hired Dudamel at the L.A. Phil and poached him at the New York Philharmonic, remains as an adviser to the orchestra. When Tarnopolsky ran Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, he became close to Dudamel. Adam Crane, the orchestra's vice president of external affairs, worked under Borda in L.A. when Dudamel made his U.S. debut at the Hollywood Bowl and was hired by the L.A. Phil. It is too soon to tell where this may lead. By now New Yorkers should know that Dudamel will not be the next Bernstein. He may well change New York, but he is not likely to be a New Yorker. Bernstein lived in New York, walking distance from Carnegie Hall and, when it was built, Lincoln Center. Bernstein raised his family at the Dakota and was, day and night, at the center of New York cultural, intellectual and political life. Dudamel says he still thinks of L.A. as home and the L.A. Phil as family. The New York Philharmonic is a new family. But Dudamel, in fact, now lives in Madrid and has Spanish citizenship. Yet for whatever reason, an L.A. mindset does seem to have reached the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. The orchestra follows Dudamel's appearances with 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' in concert and then heads off on an Asian tour with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. L.A. opera directors Yuval Sharon and Peter Sellars, nowhere to be found in L.A. at the moment, are prominent at the Lincoln Center. Sharon's production of 'The Comet/Poppea' he created for the Industry in L.A. last year will have its New York premiere here in June. Sellars' collaboration with composer Matthew Aucoin, 'Music for New Bodies,' is in July.
