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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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.
Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Could Esa-Pekka Salonen return to the L.A. Phil? Recent appearances raise hope
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrated the centenary of Pierre Boulez's birth with an extravagance of sonic invention and dance. Eight clusters of Los Angeles Philharmonic players, ranging from a single oboe to groupings of winds and brass and strings seated onstage and around Walt Disney Concert Hall, set a ceremonial tone. Percussion was exotic. Six members of L.A. Dance Project performed as if ejected by each of the 14 sections of Boulez's resonant score. Over its 23-year history, Disney Hall has seemingly seen it all thanks to the L.A. Phil's eagerness to indulge exorbitant (and costly) fancies. It has done it again in an extraordinary tribute concert unlike any other. The question is: Now what? The extraordinary performance of Boulez's 'Rituel' on Sunday concluded Salonen's seasonal two-week appearances as L.A. Phil conductor laureate. It also was his first time back with his old orchestra after announcing last year that he would not renew his contract as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, acknowledging that he did not share its board's vision for the future. Speculation has grown over a Salonen return to the L.A. Phil. No one has yet been named to succeed Gustavo Dudamel, who leaves at the end of next season to take over the New York Philharmonic. When Kim Noltemy became president and CEO last summer, the hiring relieved worry that the L.A. Phil board might take it upon itself to appoint a music director. It is now likely that the L.A. Phil may be without a music director for a couple of years. And from the enthusiastic response of audiences and reportedly of the musicians, nothing would make many happier than having Salonen back to guide the orchestra through a transition period. We'll have to wait and see whether Salonen, who turns 67 next month, would accept such an offer. He has made it clear that — after a long career as music director in Stockholm, London, L.A. and San Francisco — he welcomes a reprieve from institutional demands. He is sought after as composer and conductor and can now do exactly what he wants. Even so, his 17 history-making years as music director of the L.A. Phil and his thus far 16 years as conductor laureate have allowed him to have realized his ambitions on a scale nowhere else imaginable. In L.A. he has a venue like no other in Disney Hall, which he opened. The L.A. Phil is an orchestra more flexible than any other, and in L.A. Salonen has benefited from daring administrations able to afford Salonen's effort to create an orchestra for a new era — a promise the San Francisco Symphony couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver. All of this was evident in Salonen's Boulez tribute with the L.A. Phil. Benjamin Millepied's choreography for 'Rituel,' featuring his L.A. Dance Project, had its premiere with Salonen conducting Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie in Paris on Boulez's 100th birthday in March. That program began with a small octet by Stravinsky and Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Even though that concert was in the Philharmonie's Grande salle Pierre Boulez and was arguably the city's most important tribute to a composer who had been a musical monarch in Paris, only that one half-hour Boulez piece was on the program. At Disney, the L.A. Phil's huge program began with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing two of Boulez's solo 'Notations' followed by the composer's massively expanded versions requiring a huge orchestra with large brass and wind sections, three harps and considerable percussion. Fifteen extra players were required for less than 10 minutes of music. When I asked Noltemy about that expense, she asked with a laugh, when has the L.A. Phil ever let budget get in the way of artistic ambition? Along with 'Notations,' Salonen conducted Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Aimard, and Debussy's 'La Mer,' works that he recorded with the L.A. Phil in the 1990s. Those recordings hold up for their crystalline sound and youthful spunk. Those qualities remain, but with a new richness and sense of overpowering fullness. Indeed, conductor, orchestra, repertoire and hall all were simply made for one another. Boulez's music is complexly detailed and has had a long history of putting off audiences. But in the right context, it can be heard as though a brilliant flowering of Debussy's colors and flavors. Aimard played the tiny piano fourth and seventh 'Notations' with rapt attention on tiny details, while Salonen saw to it that the orchestral explosions contained multitudes of colors within controlled chaos. Aimard added a couple more 'Notations' as an encore to his soulful, robust way with Bartok's concerto, especially in the beautiful middle movement. 'Rituel' was a memorial to the Italian composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, who died in 1973. They seemed very different personalities, the analytical Boulez and the sensual Maderna, but 'Rituel' profoundly reveals that they had much in common. Boulez's score, full of Asian and Indonesian percussion, is, in its own way, as sonically engulfing as anything by Maderna. It also makes an for an easy connection with the revolutionary influence of Japanese music on Debussy's 'La Mer,' which then went on to influence Boulez, who made conducting it a specialty. Each of the different groups in 'Rituel' has its own highly organized music. They come together, cued by the conductor, with a sense of nature's unpredictability. So was the case, as well, with Millepied's superb dancers, who went their own ways but collided and coagulated, ferociously and sexually. There has been little dance made to Boulez. Millepied shows that however formidable the rhythms, there could be more. For Salonen's previous week with the L.A. Phil, he began with Debussy's 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun' floating through the hall. Bryce Dessner's recent Violin Concerto was dominated by soloist Pekka Kuusisto's vivid bowing, creating astonishing acoustical effects with harmonics. Salonen ended with Beethoven's 'Eroica,' which he made sound like it could have been written after Dessner's concerto, not more than two centuries before. What's next for Salonen? His final San Francisco Symphony concerts are next month, assuming the orchestra doesn't go on strike. He has a busy summer that begins by touring the New York Philharmonic to Korea and China. There are appearances with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, a collaboration with director Peter Sellars in Salzburg, the world premieres of his Horn Concerto in Lucerne, a European tour with the Orchestre de Paris. Early fall, Salonen reprises 'Rituel' with the New York Philharmonic, which is a co-commisioner of the choreography along with L.A. and Paris. On it goes pretty much nonstop throughout the rest of the year. He's back in L.A. in January with more ambitious programming. None of this makes a Salonen return to L.A. sound necessary. But there remain opportunities here that can only be dreams elsewhere.
Los Angeles Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How did Gustavo Dudamel end his L.A. Phil season? By saving the best for last
Gustavo Dudamel's 16th and penultimate winter season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic has not been quite as ambitious as others. No big opera. Two full symphonies in his 'Mahler Grooves' festival, unlike his unprecedented full nine-symphony Mahler festival in 2012. Over the next five-plus months, Dudamel's only appearances here will be two weeks in August at the Hollywood Bowl. Has the grand exit from L.A. begun? On the surface, it might appear that way. Between now and the beginning of his final L.A. Phil season in late September, Dudamel has newsworthy gigs elsewhere. In his runup to becoming New York Philharmonic music director in 2026, he closes that orchestra's 2024-25 season next month in Lincoln Center, launches its summer series in Central Park and opens its new season in September. He has upcoming tours leading the London Symphony in Spain and the Berlin Philharmonic at the World's Fair, Expo 2025, in Osaka, Japan. This summer Dudamel conducts 'West Side Story' in Barcelona with a starry cast that includes Nadine Sierra, Juan Diego Flórez and Isabel Leonard. But not so fast. Dudamel made bigger and better news with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last weekend. Friday night he premiered Carlos Simon's stirring, gospel-inspired 'Good News Mass,' creating a near frenzy in Walt Disney Concert Hall. The next day the L.A. Phil hopped on a bus for the second of its trailblazing appearances with Dudamel at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where the week before its concert ended with thousands of fans chanting, 'L.A. Phil! L.A. Phil! L.A. Phil!' Dudamel's mission all along has been to leap genre boundaries. So he has. 'Maybe these have been the best weekends of our lives,' he told the Outdoor Theater crowd at Saturday night's Coachella love-fest. The top orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, New York, Munich and elsewhere play popular concerts in parks, often awaking new audiences to their wares. But this felt a historic reach, the L.A. Phil having become under Dudamel an essential part of L.A. culture in a broader sense. It will be difficult to top, however successful Dudamel becomes in his efforts to spread the word that some 300 years after Elector Karl Theodor hired 90 musicians to form an ensemble for his court in Mannheim, Germany, the orchestra still matters. Good news, however, remains seemingly in short supply at many struggling American orchestras, just as it does in many uncertain aspects of American life. Simon — who happens to be composer-in-residence at the newly troubled Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. — noted in a preconcert talk that his initial idea for a 'Good News Mass' came from his awareness during the pandemic of the essential need for community. The L.A. Phil told him that he could write anything he wanted and for any instrumental and vocal forces he wanted as long as he kept the length to 30 minutes. Telling composers that they can think big inevitably means they will think even bigger. 'Good News Mass' incorporates a very large orchestra, a jazz combo, a narrator, R&B and gospel soloists, a gospel choir and a film. It lasts nearly 50 minutes. It is all over the map. Simon partially follows the traditional Catholic mass liturgy with new texts by Courtney Ware Lett and Marc Bamuthi Joseph that work through doubt and oppression, ultimately celebrating life. Bamuthi Joseph leads the service as a ferocious prophetic preacher. The soloists, alto Samoht and tenor Zebulon Ellis, rock the room. Jason White and the Samples become the collective voices of affirmation. Stylistically, Simon smoothly moves from charismatic symphonic writing through a wide range of African American musical styles, leaving improvisational room for the vocal soloists. But the film by Melina Matsoukas, beautifully stark slow-motion street scenes in black-and-white, steals attention to little musical purpose and makes following the meaningful mass itself (no text is projected) needlessly difficult. 'Good News Mass,' which seems inspired by Leonard Bernstein's eclectic 'Mass,' written for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, could, like it, effectively expand its presentation theatrically and choreographically rather than cinematically. And the good news is that Simon's mass will, indeed, be performed at the Kennedy Center by the National Symphony, assuming there are no further attempts to undo programming by the center's new administration. The Boston Symphony and Chicago Symphony are additional co-commissioners. Dudamel, who joyfully held Simon's diverse musical styles together, began the program with Bernstein's 'Divertimento,' a collection of short, popular-styled bagatelles, including dances and blues numbers. It may be generally dismissed as trivial, but Bernstein conducted it with characterful nostalgia and Dudamel has found in it vibrant new spirit. He followed this with the first L.A. Phil performance of Florence Price's Violin Concerto No. 2, with Randall Goosby as the eloquent soloist. In this, her final score, written in 1951, she moves into a more impressionistic realm in the short, single-movement concerto. Here it felt more like a beginning than an ending. At Coachella, everything felt like a beginning. Dudamel led TikTok-sized bits of orchestral bonbons — 'The Ride of the Valkyries,' the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, John Williams' 'Imperial March' and the opening of Strauss' 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' — each generating excited whoops from the crowd. So did principal cellist Robert deMaine's solo offering from the prelude to Bach Cello Suite No. 1 and associate concertmaster Bing Wang's solo from the beginning of the Max Richter arrangement of 'Spring' from Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons.' Both weekends, as witnessed on the livestreams, featured Icelandic singer Laufey, who called herself an orchestra girl, and the spectacular Argentine hip-hop duo Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, who entered into a virtuoso dialogue with the orchestra. Maren Morris, Becky G and Zedd were on hand the first weekend along with LL Cool J, who closed out the set with an arresting medley. The festival's second weekend brought Natasha Bedingfield, Dave Grohl and Cynthia Erivo, who ended with 'Purple Rain.' It might seem as though this were but the next step for Dudamel, who regularly invites pop stars to join him and the L.A. Phil at Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. He's taken the L.A. Phil and YOLA to the Super Bowl. But in most cases, they have been more like orchestral accompaniment. Many a pop star, moreover, has turned to orchestral writing lately. Esa-Pekka Salonen, for instance, conducts a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner of the Nationals next week with the L.A. Phil. Coachella, on the other hand, not only put the L.A. Phil front and center in a pop arena but also made the orchestra an equal partner in exhilarating music that discounted differences. For an hour each weekend, the L.A. Phil became what few others in the arts or entertainment remain — conveyors of authentically good news.
Yahoo
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bernie Sanders surprises Coachella, warns fans against ignoring Trump: 'Turn away at your own peril'
The most consequential cameo of Coachella so far was an unbilled guest slot from Sen. Bernie Sanders. Fresh off a packed rally at Gloria Molina Grand Park in downtown L.A. that drew tens of thousands, Sanders (flanked by congressman Maxwell Frost, a Gen Z inheritor of his vision), spoke just ahead of Clairo's Outdoor Theater set at 8:15 p.m. "This country faces some very difficult challenges. The future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation," Sanders said. "You can turn away and ignore what goes on, but if you do, you do it at your own peril." Read more: Coachella Day 2: Bernie Sanders makes an appearance; Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil light up the desert Sanders advocated for the young Coachella crowds to not give in to despair at the current Trump administration, and to remember they're still in the fight for the environment, women's rights and peace in Gaza. The crowds heartily booed the first mention of President Trump ("I agree," Sanders said in response). "He thinks that climate change is a hoax. He is dangerously wrong, and you and I are going to have to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them to stop destroying this planet.' Recognizing the urgency of the moment for Clairo's fan base, he reminded them that 'in many states politicians [are] trying to take away women's rights to control their own body,' he continued. "We need you to stand up and fight for women's rights.' Then he played his equivalent of his greatest hits — railing against billionaires like Elon Musk. 'We have an economy today that's working very well for the billionaire class but not for working families. We have a healthcare system that's broken. Healthcare is a human right.' Then he brought out Clairo, who Sanders said has 'used her prominence to fight for women's rights and to try and end the terrible and brutal war in Gaza.' Most fans probably came to Coachella to escape the grimness of politics today. But as always, politics will follow them anyway, and Sanders made it feel hopeful for the faithful. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil tune up for their ‘dream' gig at Coachella
On Tuesday afternoon, the spring heat crackled over a near-empty Hollywood Bowl. The L.A. Phil had pulled down a sun visor over the stage for their rehearsals, where music and artistic director Gustavo Dudamel led the orchestra through a few heavy-hitter moments of their upcoming set this weekend. On Saturday evening, the Phil will trek out to new ground. They're finally playing the other verdant, globally recognized outdoor music venue that embodies the Southern California idyll — the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. For Dudamel, 44, who arrived in L.A. 17 years ago to lead the Phil, playing Coachella was 'a dream, ever since I started here' he said in an interview backstage at the Bowl. It's surprising that the two dominant music institutions of Southern California had never formally teamed up onstage before with an original set. But as Dudamel prepares to make his emotional exit to lead the New York Philharmonic next year, the timing was especially poignant. 'I think we were always waiting to see who would take the steps to say, 'Let's do this,'' he said about performing at Coachella. 'It's wonderful because of all the work that we have done at the Hollywood Bowl, playing every summer with so many artists with different styles. I think the road took us to this moment, to celebrate all of these years in such an iconic place where classical music is not usually part of the message.' The L.A. Phil is no stranger to pop music collaborations, and orchestras have appeared at Coachella before (film composer Hans Zimmer had an especially memorable set in 2017). But this first-time crossover continues a long tradition of the Phil's music directors sharing mutual curiosity with the city's other flagship music industries. 'It starts with Zubin Mehta decades ago. He left a piece of him with the L.A. Phil that we still embrace today. He performed with Frank Zappa, so he kind of broke that boundary,' said Meghan Umber, the L.A. Phil's chief programming officer. 'He started the first John Williams concert at the Hollywood Bowl. And then Esa-Pekka Salonen brought new music and all these composers and crazy ideas to the L.A. Phil. Then Gustavo just ripped the gates open.' 'Gustavo has been in this position for 17 years, and I think we started talking about Coachella 17 years ago,' added Johanna Rees, vice president of presentations. 'Frankly, I feel like we waited for the perfect time.' For Dudamel, a Venezuelan who famously came out of that country's vanguard El Sistema youth music program, and who opened his L.A. tenure with a free Bowl concert introducing the new Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, it fits with his lifelong value of bringing classical music to young audiences. This performance 'represents a journey of making music accessible to everybody, but also creating a culture where people don't feel that classical music is far away, not part of their lives,' he said. 'What we want is for that old music to embrace this moment.' After chaotic few post-COVID Coachella years at the pop headliner level — Kanye West and Travis Scott cancellations, Frank Ocean's divisive one-night return — there is something counterintuitively buzzy about seeing the city's flagship orchestra on the same stages. Coachella founder Paul Tollett 'obviously does such creative, unexpected things in the desert for this festival,' Rees said. 'You don't even know until you get there. So it was super exciting that people would only see this once, over two weekends. There's going to be people out there discovering an orchestra — what it looks like, sounds like, the emotional impact. I would say the majority probably are experiencing that for the first time.' Some pop-friendly guests, like the EDM composer Zedd and Icelandic jazz phenom Laufey, will join the Phil for one-off collaborations. While much of the program is under wraps, the rehearsals suggested a bombastic mix of festival-primed classical music and big swings across nearly every other genre at Coachella. 'It was a dream come true when Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic, arguably the best orchestra in the world, reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in performing 'Clarity' live with them on the piano, in the midst of some of the greatest compositions of all time,' Zedd told The Times in an e-mail. 'As many of you may know, classical music has been a huge part of my life. At my fifth Coachella, bringing this special song to life in such an epic, cinematic way is just surreal.' Dudamel sounded enthused as well about the sequencing challenge, how to grab and hold a festival crowd who might be passing the orchestra en route to the bass-soaked Sahara Tent. 'We made this amazing arrangement, which goes through Strauss' 'Also sprach Zarathustra,' Beethoven's '5th,' John Williams, Stravinsky's 'The Firebird,' it's all there,' he said. 'It's the desire to really connect and make a journey that is well balanced. The classical piece that we play is inside of the song that they're singing after.' The orchestra, sadly, won't have much time to stick around for the weekend's revelry (they've got Vivaldi sets at Disney Hall the nights before and after). But there might be a pang of melancholy in the crowd too, among fans seeing the eminently charismatic Dudamel conducting at Coachella just as he wraps up his era-defining tenure in L.A. While he'll be moving to take the music and artistic director job at the New York Philharmonic, he'll leave Los Angeles as a uniquely open-minded, accessible and ambitious global capital for orchestral music — a legacy that any Phil successor will surely have in front of mind. 'This will forever be my family, always,' Dudamel said. 'But it's a high point where we have arrived, working with so many artists and making that a part of our identity.' 'Gustavo will not have the same title with us anymore, but that doesn't mean that we're abandoning that,' Umber said. A spirit of collaboration is 'now built into our core in a way that we'll always embrace.' 'This is the tip of the iceberg,' Rees added. 'We're getting into another phase, but all of the artists who are participating, he's talking about all these ideas with them. I mean, some of the artists are ready to go on tour with him now.' This big-hearted set also arrives at a fraught moment for the arts in America, as stalwart institutions like the Kennedy Center have suddenly been bureaucratically gutted and stained by culture war rhetoric from the Trump administration. This Coachella gig will be a glamorous evening playing to 125,000 rowdy young fans. But it's also an argument for how immigration can invigorate and inspire creation, including from countries such as Venezuela that have come under fire from the American government. It's proof of the arts' resonance in all corners of American life, that new and diverse crowds can be moved by an orchestra, and vice-versa. 'You see that art, especially in difficult moments, plays a very important action in healing,' Dudamel said. 'People are trying to divide us. In complex situations, we speak what we believe through the music that we have the chance to play. Art is important because it heals, it educates, it gives a space of inspiration for people. In any context — difficult, good, happy, sad, terrible, wonderful — that's important.'
