The Melodica Men — those crazy and talented guys that previously brought you “The Rite of Spring” on toy instruments — are back, this time with an impressive rendition of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony.  It truly has to be seen and heard to be believed.  (See the video below)

Playing on their own custom-designed model “MM37” melodicas, Tristan Clarke (Principal Trumpet of the Jacksonville Symphony) and Joe Buono (Peabody trained composer and teacher) manage to defy the expectations one might have of these air-powered mini-keyboards.  Given their viral success and the visibility of Jon Batiste playing melodica as frontman for Stay Human, house band for  The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, could we be seeing the beginnings of a global melodica awakening?

Probably not.  But it’d be fun if it happened.  Enjoy the video!

RELATED POSTS:

• 89 seconds of awesomeness: “The Rite of Spring” on melodicas (video)

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra recently announced the hiring of two new musicians:

• David Grossman (Principal Bass), currently a member of the New York Philharmonic.  The New York City native was still a student at Juilliard when he won the 1999 audition to join the NY Phil, and waited until the following year before joining them full-time.  In addition to his performances of both orchestral and chamber music, he is an accomplished jazz bassist, having been a member of the Marcus Roberts Trio and played with Wynton Marsalis and other jazz luminaries.  He has released two albums, both named “The Bass of Both Worlds” (one featuring classical repertoire, the other jazz).  He is also a composer.  Mr. Grossman takes over the LACO chair previously held by Nico Abondolo. 
• Michael Thornton (Principal Horn), Principal Horn with the Colorado Symphony since 1997.  Before that, he left studies at Juilliard with former Met Principal Horn Julie Landsman to become Principal with the Honolulu Symphony (he holds a Bachelor of Music from Temple University).  He has also performed, toured and recorded as a guest with the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, KBS Symphony and Toronto Symphony, among others.  In 1999, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Colorado and is an Associate Professor there.  In addition, he has taught and been a clinician at numerous other schools and festivals throughout the world.  He fills the LACO position formerly occupied by Richard Todd for over 30 years.

They both begin their roles immediately, though interestingly enough, both will also keep their respective positions in New York and Denver.

While some LACO musicians past and present are/were active members of other orchestras, this is the first time I can think of where the commute between LA and the “other” jobs required regular flights from other states and time zones, not just a drive up the 405 or down the 110.

That said, Scott Harrison, LACO’s Executive Director, made a point of assuaging potential concerns about the arrangement, stating, “Both musicians are exceptional talents who bring artistic depth and an enthusiasm for community in equal doses. . . . The two have also communicated to me their eagerness to get to know our audiences and become active members of the LACO family.”  Let’s hope that this translates to appearances by them in LACO’s many ancillary series — Baroque Conversations, in focus (fka “Westside Connections), à la carte, “Acoustic Caffeine,” etc. — and not just the regular orchestral concerts.

Both men had the chance to play concerts with LACO this past season.  Not only did those experiences provide critical information on the chemistry the new musicians had with the established LACO members, it also helped to convince them to make a go of it in Los Angeles despite their established positions in other cities.

“I was eager to play as a guest with LACO,” explains Mr. Grossman about playing with LACO last fall, “but I wasn’t anticipating falling in love with such a fine ensemble.  After such a richly artistically rewarding week, I learned there was an upcoming audition for principal bass. I thought of a dozen reasons why it was crazy to even consider a bi-coastal existence: maintaining my musical life in New York with the possibility of joining LACO.  However, the singular immortal message of Joseph Campbell – ‘follow your bliss’ – rang true. So I am very excited to embark on what I hope will be the first of many deeply rewarding seasons making music with my wonderful LACO colleagues, as well as being part of the West Coast musical fabric in general.”

Mr. Thornton had a similar experience:  “In March, I had the opportunity to play a concert series with LACO, and I knew then that I wanted to be a part of this wonderful group.  Every musician was so committed and so excellent, and the concerts were stellar.  I am thrilled to join this vibrant organization and look forward to many exciting performances in the future.”

The full press release of this announcement is available HERE.

One final question worth asking:  What kind of horn will Mr. Thornton play in Los Angeles?  Mind you, this is a non-trivial question.

The LACO horn section has traditionally played a Kruspe-style horn, the same as is favored by most of the Hollywood studio players (see this picture I took of Kristy McArthur Morrell, LACO’s 2nd horn and studio veteran, holding her Kruspe-style horn).  It gives a round, mellow, dark tone.  It is the style of horn Americans are probably most accustomed to hearing.  The Cleveland Orchestra is famous for having their entire horn section playing Conn 8D horns of this style.  The Los Angeles Philharmonic section also used to favor this kind of horn.

The primary alternative among American orchestras is a Geyer-style horn as is favored by, say, the current LA Phil horn section led by Andrew Bain (as pictured HERE), the Chicago Symphony, and others.  It produces a brighter, more pointed, and generally more “brassy” sound than Kruspe-style horns.

Now if you do a quick Google search for pictures of Mr. Thornton, you will find pictures of him playing both styles of horn.  And to make things even more complicated, the photo of him above (in the white dress shirt and jeans sitting on rocks) has him holding a triple horn, which is an entirely different beast.   That’s noteworthy enough in that horn players don’t usually go back and for between different kinds of horns (though Mr. Bain himself is an exception to that — a discussion for another day), but there’s something more important . . .

As I mention above, the LACO horn sound — and therefore the overall LACO sound — has been based on a specific horn type, and a major change in that sound would be a surprise, especially since LACO still is without a Music Director.  In fact, some hornists have been known to quit their orchestra jobs rather than deal with having to make a change in equipment.  I’d say the odds are low that Ms. Morrell would change horns and/or leave, and given her excellent playing, let’s hope I’m right.

So, again, what horn will Mr. Thornton play?  I guess we’ll know the answer in September.  LACO’s first concert of the 2017-18 season will be a live accompaniment to the movie, Amadeus, at the Valley Performing Arts Center on September 16.  Their first subscription concerts at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Royce Hall at UCLA will be Saturday and Sunday, September 30 and October 1st, in a program of Mozart, Bernstein, and Brahms; violinist Joshua Bell is the featured soloist, and Jaime Martin conducts.

If I hear anything before those concerts, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

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Photo credits:

• David Grossman:  photo by Henry Grossman
• Michael Thornton playing horn:  courtesy of the Colorado Symphony
• Michael Thornton sitting:  courtesy of Michael Thornton

The truism that “the rich get richer” has been once again proven accurate, both literally and figuratively.

First, the literal part:  yesterday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association (LA Phil) and American Federation of Musicians Local 47, AFL-CIO, jointly announced agreement on a new five-year labor contract, with base wages ultimately reaching $3,162 per week in 2022.  For the arithmetically challenged, that equals $164,736 annually, an average increase of roughly 1.3% per year above their current annual base of $154,336 (note that top principal players earn well over $300,00 per year).

That keeps them among the highest paid orchestral musicians in the country, though with the San Francisco Symphony’s most recent contract paying them $166,400 in 2018, it won’t be the highest.

The new LA Phil contract also includes a housing allowance and additional contributions to the musicians’ 403(b) retirement savings accounts, similar to their previous contract signed in 2013.

Perhaps just as important as the financial considerations are the less tangible elements represented in the agreement.   Chief among these is continuing the amicable relationship between the orchestra’s musicians and management, one unmatched among major US orchestras.  The LA Phil hasn’t had anything approaching labor strife, let alone a destructive strike, in about a half-century.  It’s even referenced in quotes from the two people overseeing negotiations (emphases mine):

• “This five-year agreement reflects the collective commitment of the musicians, Gustavo Dudamel, and the board and staff of the LA Phil to ensuring the bright future of this organization. It is a tribute to long relationships, mutual respect and trust. These are musicians of the highest caliber and I am always proud to call them colleagues,” said Gail Samuel, Acting President and Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association.
• “This new agreement builds upon the tradition of LA Phil contracts that sets the bar for pay, benefits, and respect for musicians in the United States,” said John Acosta, President of American Federation of Musicians Local 47, AFL-CIO.

Furthermore, the agreement reinforces the notion of the LA Phil being the most stable large classical music institution in the country, especially given the recent departure of former CEO Deborah Borda.  The longer-than-average 5-year term should help allay any concerns that the orchestra’s stature or stability is waning.  This would likely be important to musicians interested in auditioning for the orchestra for one of the many critical openings.

Bottomline:  the combination of top-notch pay and benefits, the financial, artistic, and administrative stability of the organization, and the pioneering artistic and musical spirit of its programming has made a seat in Los Angeles Philharmonic among the most coveted orchestral jobs in the world.  This latest agreement will help ensure that doesn’t change.

UPDATE (Aug 14, 2017):  But wait, there’s more . . . LA Phil new contract redux: upon further review, looks like they’re the best paid orchestra after all

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Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

My previous story on the Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians’ new 5-year contract has caused some buzz, even though the $164,726 annual base compensation the LA Phil players will receive in 2022 is not tops among US orchestras. (For a quick comparison, see this chart  of the eight highest-paid orchestras, care of Drew McManus on Adaptistration).

Well, with football season being just around the corner, let me paraphrase my least-favorite retired PAC-12 referee:   Upon further review, the original call has been reversed.

You see, there’s a provision in the LA Phil contract for a “housing allowance” that is unique among major US orchestras.  That allowance, first enacted in their 2013 contract, has been mentioned without giving the specific number attached to it in either 2013 or 2017 press release.

All is Yar has now learned that the housing allowance will be worth an additional $20,000+ in the final year of the contract.  There are specific reasons why the compensation was set up this way, but I will not go into them now.  Suffice it to say that a true apples-to-apples comparison should include this amount, pushing base LA Phil compensation above $185,000+.

Mind you, this does not include additional monetary compensation that musicians receive which isn’t necessarily unique to the LA Phil but is noteworthy nonetheless.  This includes contributions to their 403(b) retirement plan, doubling pay (i.e. additional $$$ given to, say, the piccolo player also playing 3rd flute for the same concert or a trombone player for having to “double” on bass trumpet for The Rite of Spring), recording/broadcast royalties (a rarity among 21st century orchestras enjoyed by the LA Phil), pay above scale for titled players, etc.

And that is just the money they receive from the orchestra.  Add to that, potential income derived from teaching at the local universities and/or colleges, private lessons, Hollywood studio work, outside gigs etc.  Taken together, I’m willing to bet that the average LA Phil musician is making somewhere in the ballpark of $250,000 per year when all is said and done.  That’s well above the average income in affluent L.A. neighborhoods like Beverly Hills 90210, Manhattan Beach, and Pasadena.

It isn’t exactly Jimmy Iovene or Dr. Dre money, but frankly, not much is.  (BTW If you haven’t seen The Defiant Ones, the HBO documentary miniseries about them, it’s well worth your time).

Besides, musicians get paid to play music, a demanding profession to be sure, one that requires a unique blend of talent, discipline, and perseverance, but nonetheless, a profession with  “play” built right into its description.  As far as I’m concerned, anytime you get to play for a living — “I play timpani” or “I play music on the radio” or “I play beach volleyball” or “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” — you’re way ahead of the game.  It is often a hard living, yet so is being an accountant, teacher, computer programmer, factory worker, entrepreneur et al, none of whom describe their work as “play.”  Take it for what it’s worth, and yes, I’m a little jealous.  But I digress . . .

Back to my point.  The class-leading pay at the Los Angeles Philharmonic help make it one of the best classical music jobs in the world.  What else does the LA Phil have going for it?  Well, there’s:

• Stable and healthy organizational finances
• A strong relationship between players and management that goes back a half-century
• A well-regarded Music Director in Gustavo Dudamel that will be around for a little while
• Two world-class performance venues (Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl) in which to do their thing
• A history of programming new music, world premieres, and 20th Century masters like Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich with a regularity usually reserved in other orchestra for 19th Century titans like Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Mendelssohn.
• A knowledgeable audience that will fill the seats even when the music being performed has been written by (gasp!) a living composer like Andrew Norman, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and many others.
• Many universities, colleges, conservatories, and academies in the area in which to teach
• Many opportunities outside the orchestra to perform solo works, chamber music, etc.

Nice work if you can get it, a combination that’s tough to match if you’re a classical musician.  It’s not perfect, of course, and it may not be for everyone, but it doesn’t suck.

RELATED POST:

• LA Phil players ink new 5-year contract

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Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

It’s time once again for your roundup on recent personnel movement (and lack thereof) at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  There is much to cover, so let’s get right to it, starting with the biggest news of the summer . . .

The stories behind the departures of Ariana Ghez and Carrie Dennis

The biggest buzz of the past few months happened immediately after the Walt Disney Concert Hall season ended when the orchestra roster no longer included two principal players:  Carrie Dennis (viola) and Ariana Ghez (oboe).

There was no official press release regarding their departure, but the news spread like wildfire nonetheless.  In fact, I’ve never received so many questions about LA Phil personnel as I have over the past few months.

Both were well-established in their positions.  Both have been solid to spectacular musicians on stage, and both have also been known to have polarizing personalities off of it.  Both of their departures caught LA Phil fans off guard.  Could their situations have been related in any way?

As it turns out:  no.

The story with Ms. Ghez, Principal Oboe since 2006, is relatively straightforward.  She had been on sabbatical from the orchestra during the 2016-17 season.  This past spring, she made her leave permanent, choosing to pursue interests outside of the orchestral world.  She and her family now reside in the Pacific Northwest.  It was not exactly expected, but to some insiders, it didn’t come entirely as a shock.

Ms. Dennis’s departure caught even fewer insiders off guard, with many being surprised that it didn’t happen sooner even while they had hoped that it wouldn’t happen it all. . . .  Given that there are a lot of rumors floating around, perhaps we should start at the beginning . . .

Her 2008 appointment as Principal Viola was noteworthy, not only because she came to Los Angeles after having originally turned down the job two years prior for the same position at the Berlin Philharmonic, but because she filled a chair that had been vacant for a number of years.  After the LA Phil and the previous Principal Viola, Evan Wilson, parted ways, many auditions were held and multiple musicians were “qualified” by the orchestra, but the position remained empty:  some candidates, like Ms. Dennis, chose to take positions with other orchestras; others chose to remain in their current positions; still others were never offered the position by then-Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen despite being approved by the orchestra’s audition committee.  All things considered, her hiring was a coup.

Quickly after taking her position in the LA Phil, Ms. Dennis was lauded for the high quality of her playing.  In a 2010 story about her for the Los Angeles Times, Donna Perlmutter wrote:

“Admiration for her virtuosity doesn’t stop at the music stand, though, according to many of the musicians:

‘She’s genuine.’ ‘There’s no star-turn here.’  ‘Her playing is from the heart.’  ‘A great musician, no matter how she achieves it.’ “

She was, by all rights, one of the orchestra’s stars, and I had included her on my 2014 list of “Top 10 favorite LA Phil hires of the past decade.”

At the same time, she also became known for two other things:

1. A highly demonstrative playing style where she swayed and twisted in her seat.  Ms. Perlmutter described it this way:  “She dives down on a given accent, thrusts into the heart of it with startling vigor, her head impelled to her knees, her elbow raised high as she strikes her bow across the strings. By the final cadence, her neatly arranged hair is flying loose. Whatever it takes.”  Some found it inspiring, a clear indication of her passion for the music.  Others found it distracting or self-indulgent.  In either case, she was definitely memorable, even to the most casual of concertgoers (and most people can count on one hand the number of times the words “memorable” and “violist” were so closely linked).
2. A self-admittedly awkward personality.  In the same Los Angeles Times interview, Ms. Dennis said of herself, “When you spend most of your time tunnel-visioned in your life work, learning social comfort is not easy.”  She could be very friendly, even well-meaning, but that didn’t always translate to smooth interpersonal interactions.  Andrew Bain, the LA Phil’s Principal Horn, tells a self-deprecating story where a particularly bad performance of his was punctuated by a rather aloof post-concert comment by Ms. Dennis that could have made a Sheldon Cooper highlight reel.

These challenges have become so well-known that some casual observers have hypothesized that either/both form the basis of Ms. Dennis’s departure; however, neither of them was actually a critical factor which led to her current absence from the LA Phil roster.  Instead, it stemmed from something more basic:  the ability to show up when she was supposed to.

Near the end of the 2016-17 Walt Disney Concert Hall season, Ms. Dennis was a no-show for a mid-weekend matinée concert; making matters worse was that the program she missed included viola solos which had to be played by the LA Phil’s Associate Principal Viola, Dale Hikawa Silverman, with no prior notice.

It apparently was not the first time she was absent at the beginning of a service.  Over the past few years, there had been independent reports from reliable sources that Ms. Dennis had run afoul of various orchestra rules on more than one occasion.  Some had mentioned that similar transgressions made by other musicians would have led to their outright dismissal from the LA Phil; however, Ms. Dennis’s supporters — chief among them being Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s Music & Artistic Director — came to her defense and were willing to give her leeway, preventing her from receiving the most severe consequences. Unfortunately, this latest miscue may have been the last straw.

What happened next is not 100% clear; those inside the orchestra are understandably reluctant to say anything about it, even off the record; however, her name was dropped from the roster soon afterwards.  Draw your own conclusions from there. . . .

While auditions to find a new Principal Viola have not yet been announced (and depending on the exact circumstances surrounding Ms. Dennis’s departure, it could take some time), auditions to fill the Principal Oboe chair will be held in early October.  The timing is particularly noteworthy since it will occur one month before the Chicago Symphony holds their own auditions for the same position; that vacancy was created when Alex Klein, longtime CSO Principal Oboe who had returned after having recovered from a debilitating injury, was denied tenure one year into his second stint with the orchestra.

It’s uncertain how easy or difficult it will be to find replacements for Ms. Ghez and Ms. Dennis.  Both were hired after prolonged attempts by the orchestra to fill their chairs.  On the other hand, the LA Phil has recently had more good fortune than bad in filling principal chairs, and the orchestra is even more attractive now than it was last decade.  I guess we’ll know more in six to eight weeks.

Thomas Hooten:  off to Chicago or not?

Somewhat lost amid the hubbub about Ms. Ghez and Ms. Dennis was equally important news of a third LA Phil principal:  trumpeter Tom Hooten.

With the Chicago Symphony losing its own Principal Trumpet, Chris Martin, to the New York Philharmonic in February, there was speculation/concern/fear among the LA Phil faithful that Mr. Hooten would pursue the open position in the Windy City and/or the Chicago Symphony would go after him.  After all, the 1st Chair in the CSO was his original dream job, he’d get to play with his mentor, CSO 2nd trumpeter John Hagstrom, and his wife, trumpeter Jennifer Marotta, is a Naperville, IL, native who still has family in the area.

Adding fuel to that fire was news a few weeks later that Mr. Hooten would appear as guest principal with the CSO for the two weeks Esa-Pekka Salonen was to guest conduct the orchestra.

That Mr. Hooten was impressive in those appearances would be of no surprise to Los Angeles audiences; much more telling was that even Chicagoans, who can be fickle about their trumpet players, were giddy about his performance.  Lawrence A. Johnson of the Chicago Classical Review was particularly effusive:

“Hooten’s playing of the prominent trumpet role [in Stravinsky’s Petrushka] was nothing short of spectacular– richly projected with gleaming tone and consistently stylish and attentive to the narrative.  If the past two weeks were an audition to fill the chair left vacant by the departed Christopher Martin, Hooten passed with flying colors.”

Then the CSO auditions came and went in June with no offers handed out, and rumors swirled that Mr. Hooten had chosen not to participate.  Could that be true?

“Yes, that’s correct,” Mr. Hooten confirmed to me during a recent conversation.

He stressed  how much he enjoyed playing as guest principal in Chicago, and what a great orchestra it is.  “But I had to ask myself, if I took that audition and was fortunate enough to be offered the position, in the end would I prefer to accept that job or stay in the Los Angeles Philharmonic?  And I realized that I would really rather stay here.”

“I love L.A.,” he reiterated.  “I love the LA Phil.  I’m excited at what we’re doing in the brass section here and where we’re going.  I’m very happy with everything, and I don’t have any reason to leave.”

So Southern California fans can rest easy if not rejoice outright, while Chicago’s search continues as they regroup and try again.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hooten and Ms. Marotta take over trumpet studies at the USC Thornton School of Music this fall semester.  He had joined the USC faculty in 2016 and she joined just a few months ago.  Going forward, the two will run a joint studio in a way similar to how legendary trumpet pedagogues Barbara Butler and Charlie Geyer currently teach together at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and for many years before that at Northwestern’s Bienen School and Rochester’s Eastman School.  “My first year at Thornton was great,” said Mr. Hooten, “and it’ll be awesome teaching with Jennifer at USC like we had at Kennesaw State previously.”

Three other musicians leaving LA Phil at end of 2017 Hollywood Bowl season 

Two LA Phil veterans will officially retire at the end of the summer:

• Elizabeth Baker:  the always-elegant first violin player has spent 30 years with the orchestra.  She was hired in 1987 by then-Music Director Andre Previn after ten years in the San Francisco Symphony.  She performed Janáček’s Violin Concerto with the LA Phil conducted by Sian Edwards in 1997, and also soloed with LA Phil colleagues twice:  in 1992 performing Tippett’s Triple Concerto with John Hayhurst (viola) and Barry Gold (cello), conducted by Andre Previn; and in 2006 performing Daveaux’s Sinfonia Concertante with Kristine Hedwall (viola) and conducted by Nicholas McGegan.  She writes, “Plans upon ‘retirement’ are to move to New Mexico with her husband of 24 years continuing to perform and teach as health and time allow.”

• Patricia Kindel:  the contrabassoonist was hired by former Music Director Carlo Maria Giulini in 1981, and has anchored the bassoons ever since.  The LA native earned her Bachelor of Music from Cal State, Long Beach, and her Master of Music from USC.  Prior to joining the LA Phil, Ms. Kindel played with the Long Beach Symphony, in the movie studios, and freelanced.  No word on her plans for retirement.

The third musician departing the orchestra at the end of the summer is third/utility trumpeter Stéphane Beaulac.

The Quebec native joined the LA Phil in 2014 after having been Solo Trumpet of Montreal’s Orchestre Metropolitain, and he will soon be returning to his previous position for purely personal reasons..  He has been a strong addition to the section and has been well-regarded by other brass players.

All three musicians will certainly be missed.

New string players and other news

As anticipated, bassists Ted Botsford and Jory Herman have joined the LA Phil and were added to the official roster last month.  Two new violinists have also joined the orchestra, with a third still on the way:

• Miika Gregg joined the first violins in July after having spent six seasons with the Dallas Symphony.  Born in Finland and raised in Boston, he did his undergraduate work at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University and his graduate studies with William Preucil, Concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Emanuel Borok at Southern Methodist University.   In addition to performing classical music, Mr. Gregg has also been active in the recording industry, appearing on albums for artists such as Flo Rida, Meghan Trainor, and Charlie Puth.
• Michelle Tseng joined the second violins in July.  The Southern California native earned a Bachelor of Music Magna Cum Laude under full scholarship from the USC Thornton School of Music studying with Alice Shoenfeld, and where she won the USC Concerto Competition as a freshman. She went on to get her Master of Music at the Juilliard School studying with Ida Kavafian, and most recently finished her Graduate Certificate at the USC Thornton School of Music studying with Glenn Dicterow.  She has served as Concertmaster of the USC Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, and with the inaugural Cambridge International String Academy (CISA) Orchestra in 2012 held at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she also won the “Outstanding Prize.”
• Rebecca Reale is expected to join the first violins soon.  She has been Associate Principal and acting Principal Second Violin with the Houston Symphony over the past season.  The previous year, she was a fellow at the New World Symphony where she won the concerto competition and performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (“Turkish”) with the orchestra on a subscription concert; the South Florida Classical Review called that performance “virtually flawless” and commended her for playing with “grace, style and accuracy” while displaying an “effortless manner with expert bow control and dead on intonation.”

Meanwhile, the brass section is still missing an Associate Principal Horn and a Second Trombone.  Marcel Sobol, solo horn of the WDR Funkhaus Orchestre, served as guest Associate Principal for the first three weeks at the Bowl and was the most noteworthy stand-in.  No word yet on exactly when auditions will be held; apparently, but priority has been given to finding a new Principal oboe and everything else will be pushed back to winter and spring.

RELATED POSTS:

• LA Phil new contract redux: upon further review, looks like they’re the best paid orchestra after all

• Checking in with the LA Phil (part 3 of 3): Comings and goings (Feb ’17 edition) — new basses, movement in the violins, and news from the brass

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Photo credits:

• Portraits of Ariana Ghez, Carrie Dennis, Elizabeth Baker, Patricia Kindel, and Stéphane Beaulac:  courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association (photos by Mathew Imaging)
• Carrie Dennis in orchestra:  photo by Kirk McKoy for the Los Angeles Times
• Thomas Hooten:  photo by Rob Shanahan

I am very happy and honored to announce that the good folks at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra have invited me to host the pre-game show, er, the pre-concert discussion with guest conductor Peter Oundjian this coming Sunday evening, October 15 at UCLA’s Royce Hall.  We’ll be on stage 6:00 to 6:30pm chatting about the concert and other such things, with some time at the end for questions and answers with the audience.   The performance itself starts at 7pm, and it looks awesome:

Peter Oundjian, conductor
Jennifer Koh, violin

Stravinsky:  Suite from Pulcinella (featuring David Washburn, trumpet)
Lutosławski:  Chain 2
Mozart:  Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K.550

I hope you’ll join us. If you can’t make it Sunday, please consider attending Saturday night’s concert at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.  The concert starts at 8pm, with the pre-concert discussion at 7pm hosted by Brian Lauritzen (classical radio demigod, Green Bay Packer fan, and friend of All is Yar).

BTW:  If you want to learn a bit more about Chain 2 before this weekend’s concerts, watch Jennifer Koh’s video below:

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Photo credits:

• Peter Oundjian:  photo by Sian Richards
• Jennifer Koh:  photo by Juergen Frank

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has made some rather impressive hires during the Gustavo Dudamel era, but perhaps none more intriguing than the three stellar principal woodwinds.  They’re tough to miss, both because they sit dead-center in the orchestra and, more importantly, because their playing is impeccable.  They also share a notable line-item on their curriculum vitae:

• First was Whitney Crockett in 2009, Principal Bassoon of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and former Principal of the Montreal Symphony before that.  The Floridian was Maestro Dudamel’s first orchestral hire as Music Director.
• Next was Denis Bouriakov, Principal Flute of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and former Principal of the Barcelona Symphony and Tampere Symphony (Finland).
• Most recently, Boris Allakhverdyan, Principal Clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and former Associate Principal of the Kansas City Symphony, joined the orchestra last year.

That’s right, three former Met first-chair players in a the same section hired within relatively short succession.  To paraphrase Auric Goldfinger, Ian Fleming’s iconic Bond baddy:  once is happenstance; twice is a coincidence; three times is a trend.

What might have been the reason for this?  With the orchestra in the midst of auditions for a new Principal Oboe, might this trend continue?

This past summer, I had the chance to chat with each of them individually over lunch and learn more about their backgrounds, why they chose to leave the opera pit in Manhattan to come to sunny Southern California, and what they think are the important factors in being a principal woodwind player in the LA Phil.

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The three musicians come from diverse backgrounds, but shared an early love of their respective  instruments.

Mr. Crockett immediately fell for the bassoon as a 13-year old, but he had to fight for the chance to play it.  “I saw it, and I knew I wanted to play it because it looked cool,” recalls the Miami native.  “But my band director didn’t let me play it to start because he thought it was too hard, so I played saxophone for three months.  I kept bugging him because I really didn’t want to play saxophone, so he let me take it home over Christmas.  I remember sitting there for like eight hours a day trying to figure the fingerings out with a chart.  I came back and played some stuff and he felt like I had it.”  His band teacher was right.  After graduating from Miami High School, Mr. Crockett went on to study at Juilliard before embarking on his professional career.

The other two musicians began playing their instruments even younger.  Mr. Bouriakov came from a non-musical family and began singing in the school choir of his Crimean hometown at eight-years old, but hated it so much that soon he asked to switch to a woodwind instrument within the next year.  “I wanted to play oboe but they didn’t actually have one, so I played flute instead and it felt natural.” Soon after, he was being hailed as a teenage prodigy, touring multiple continents and playing for  presidents, princes, and the Pope. At 18, he entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London to study with William Bennett.  He graduated in 2001 with a fistful of accolades, was named an Associate of the RAM in 2006, and a Fellow of the RAM in 2014.

Mr. Allakhverdyan was born in Azerbaijan of Armenian descent.  The family moved to Moscow when he was still a child, and soon after, he  began taking clarinet lessons at age 9 from his father, Valery.  “He was actually a rather prominent teacher in the area.”  The younger clarinetist eventually earned a Bachelor of Music in 2006 from the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory, an Artist Diploma from the Oberlin Conservatory, and a Master of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

All began their professional careers in symphony orchestras before eventually winning auditions at the Met.  For most musicians, and perhaps in a different decade, that would have been the last full-time job they’d ever want or need to have.  The Met offered prestige, a high salary, and a track-record of stability.

“The Met was clearly a step up,” remembers Mr. Bouriakov, “that when I won the audition, I quit my Spanish orchestra right away.  I didn’t even worry about asking for leave, not that they would have given it to me, but it didn’t matter.”  Mr. Crockett says, “As long as you were willing to work your ass off — like 50% more compared to some symphony orchestras — you’d get paid well.”  Mr. Allakhverdyan was more than content, and wasn’t necessarily looking to leave, at least initially:  “When I joined the Met in 2013, I had no expectation for how long I’d be there.”

So what led to the exodus from the red velvet confines of the opera house in Lincoln Center to the billowing wood interior and vividly patterned seats of Walt Disney Concert Hall?

It started with the workload.

“I never saw myself leaving at 40-something for another orchestra,” explains Mr. Crockett, the westward pioneer of the trio.  But he found himself weighing the benefits of being in a top-tier orchestra against the burdens the Met’s demanding schedule put on health and his personal life.  “I may be miserable, I may not be seeing my family, my children, but Thursday is going to come and there’d be a paycheck, and at the end of your career you’ll have a pension.  [Had I stayed,] I could stop at age 62 with a really good pension,” he continues.  “But I didn’t want to stop playing the bassoon at 62.  I love playing the bassoon, and I wanted to be physically capable of playing past that age.”

Mr. Bouriakov expressed similar sentiments.  “At the Met, we work like crazy from the second half of August until the season ends middle of May.  During that time, you have one week off and four personal days which you can take, but that’s also complicated.  You have to take a week in which you can be safely rotated off because there are four operas going on at a time, and if there’s a non-traditional opera, you have to commit to all the performances.”

Both he and his wife, Erin, a fellow flutist whom he met while they were students at RAM, discovered that the situation began to wear on them.  “The worst part is, if you have a family, coming back home at midnight or 1am on a regular basis.  At the Met, if you’d finish by 10:30, that’s a short opera.  Sometimes you get lucky and you play Strauss’s Elektra which is maybe two hours long, but if you have a Wagner opera then it’s six hours long.  My wife was alone taking care of our son all the time, and we both realized something had to change.”

Mr. Allakhverdyan put it most succinctly, repeating a quote he remembered:  “Life is short.  Operas are long.”

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If a challenging workload served as the initial spark to get them to consider leaving, the catalyst which accelerated the process was the 2004 retirement of Joseph Volpe as General Manager and the subsequent 2006 appointment of the controversial Peter Gelb to replace him.

“I never really had to think about stability in my first ten years at the Met,” recalls Mr. Crockett.  “The minute Gelb came in, everything became a little unsettled.  With Volpe, we knew what we had.  He had a track record of 20-something years.  I didn’t always agree with him, but he was fair, and the contracts were fair.”

The criticism of Mr. Gelb in the first few years of his reign was mainly focused on his artistic choices, but that, combined with a strong desire for more work-life balance, was enough to make Mr. Crockett (by then, a 12-year veteran of the Met) more open-minded to other opportunities.

“When the auditions [for LA Phil Principal Bassoon] came up, someone from the orchestra contacted me and asked, ‘Would you be interested?’  I hadn’t thought about it, but I thought about it and decided, ‘You know what?  I do!’  And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is scary.’  I hadn’t taken an audition in 12 years.  Thankfully, it worked out.”

Yes, it did, for both musician and orchestra.  By the time Mr. Crockett auditioned, the LA Phil had held both open and invite-only auditions, giving trial weeks to titled bassoonists from the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the San Diego Symphony.  None was the right fit.  Then Mr. Crockett played his audition and his trial week.  Soon after, he was offered the position, he accepted, and fans of the LA Phil have been grateful ever since.

The position he earned is one steeped in history and honor.  His immediate predecessor, David Breidenthal, was Principal Bassoon for over four decades, and before him was Frederick “Fritz” Moritz, former Principal Bassoon of the Berlin Philharmonic and 47-year veteran of the LA Phil.  “I’m very happy to be discussed among those two players and proud to be part of that lineage,” he affirms.

“I knew Moritz only by reputation, and he was always held in extremely high regard,” he states. He knew Mr. Breidenthal’s playing more directly, but not in the same way he was familiar with other great bassoonists of that generation.

“When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s in Florida, you didn’t hear as much as about the West Coast orchestras.  Call it an East Coast bias or chauvinism.  You heard about Philly, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and New York; you knew those players and had an opinion about them, but that’s pretty much it,” he confesses.

“But David I knew because he recorded the Mozart concerto on video with Zubin Mehta.  I heard that, and I thought, ‘Wow, that guy’s a serious player!’  I had a tremendous amount of respect for him for a long time even though I never met him.  A great player who everyone said only good things about.”

“Sometimes, you’d hear about other musicians in other places who stayed too long or let things get away from them.  You never would hear that talk about David.  He left playing at a very, very high level.”

Mr. Crockett’s decision to join the orchestra proved to be the first of many noteworthy and important additions to the orchestra:   Andrew Bain as Principal Horn; Thomas Hooten as Principal Trumpet, Nathan Cole as First Associate Concertmaster, Robert deMaine as Principal Cello, Burt Hara as Associate Principal Clarinet, Akiko Tarumoto’s return to the first violins (and eventual promotion to Assistant Concertmaster), and many others.  All of them, including Mr. Crockett, have brought a more expressive and individual quality to their playing, injecting more character and richness to the LA Phil’s sound.  Mr. Crockett has definitely noticed it too.

“The orchestra standards continue to get higher, and that’s primarily because it continues to hire amazing players.  That’s not meant to be an insult or a dig at people who’ve been here for a long time.  On the contrary, the orchestra was full of fantastic players before I got here.  Just one example: Carolyn Hove is one of the best English horn player on the planet, in my opinion.”

“But when you look at the people who’ve joined since I’ve been here – trumpet, horn, er, horns, cello, flutes, clarinets, trombones – their standards are all amazingly high.  It’s more fun when the standards and the pressure is higher.

We all want to be the best musicians possible.  It’s not just what we do – it’s who we are”

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The most notable smudge on an otherwise outstanding hiring track record was the revolving door that the Principal Flute chair had become between 2009 and 2015.  Before Mr. Crockett joined the orchestra, Mathieu Dufour came and went in the span of a few months.  After he joined, David Buck held the position for two years before he departed.  Julien Beaudiment moved from France to LA after making some difficult life choices, only to have to move back to France because of health issues.

The orchestra felt snakebit, the position seemed cursed, and some were wondering if Pedro Cerrano needed to offer rum and cigars to Jobu to help purge the evil spirits that had seemingly inhabited the chair.

Meanwhile, back at the Met, things had gone from bad to worse.  In 2014, Mr. Gelb had threatened to lock out most of the unionized workers, including musicians, unless they made concessions.  An agreement was eventually reached, but the damage was done. “How much of an impact did Peter Gelb have in my decision [to leave the Met]?  Quite a bit,” admits Mr. Allakhverdyan.  “We had to take a major pay cut,” recalls Mr. Bouriakov.  “Things were not good at all.”

By that time, the LA Phil  under then-President Deborah Borda had solidified its reputation for combining artistic daring, financial stability, and healthy relations with the musicians.  “[She] made this orchestra such a financially secure and successful organization so that people are even more attracted to this orchestra,” explains Mr. Bouriakov.  “Having security always helps,” Mr. Allakhverdyan concurred.  “That played quite a bit of a role, especially knowing the LA Phil is much more secure.”  Open auditions were more popular than ever.

Mr. Beaudiment’s sad farewell from Los Angeles  in 2015 led to an unexpected opportunity, though the brevity of his tenure and that of the other Principal Flutes  before him may have raised a concerns with some of the candidates.  This was not the case for Mr. Bouriakov. “It didn’t really effect my desire to audition.  I wanted this job.  I know Mathieu and Julien pretty well, and I talked to them.  I knew why they left and it was not for the same reason, so I was not worried.  It was just bad luck for the orchestra to lose people in rapid succession.  The reasons weren’t related.”

He won the audition outright without even being asked to do a trial week before receiving the job offer, and was granted tenure quickly.

Within another year, it was Mr. Allakhverdyan’s turn.  Michele Zukovsky retired after a legendary 54-year career and, to many people’s surprise, Burt Hara — the lauded former Principal Clarinet of both Minnesota Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra — decided not to pursue the 1st chair in the LA Phil.

“Boris joked with me, ‘Okay, here’s the plan:  you get the job there first, and then I’ll get the job,’ and then we laughed about it.  But then it actually worked out,” said a smiling Mr. Bouriakov before making sure to clarify that everything was on the up-and-up.  “Of course, I had nothing to do with his audition.  I was not on the committee yet — his audition was in October and I didn’t start until November of that year — but he didn’t need my help.”

What probably did help Mr. Allakhverdyan was that he was not completely unfamiliar with the orchestra.

“I played with the LA Phil for one week back when I was still with the Kansas City Symphony,” he says.  “It was for Where the Wild Things Are by Oliver Knussen.  Monica Kaenzig [the LA Phil 2nd/E-flat clarinet at the time] had called in sick, so they asked me to play the E-flat part.  I played in Walt Disney Concert Hall and Gustavo was conducting, so I had some idea of what it was like.  Of course, one week isn’t enough to make a judgement, but it was better than nothing.  Michele was playing first and David [Howard] was playing bass.  It was a lot of fun, I had a great time.  I’m so happy to have played with Michele — by the way:  I’ve seen her a few times; she’s doing great!.”

After the audition, he and another clarinetist were offered trial weeks, after which Mr. Allakhverdyan was offered the job.  He was awarded tenure soon after.

All three musicians cited two other L.A. traits as being a non-trivial part of their decision:  the food and the weather.  “You can’t beat the variety and quality of the food in this town,” says Mr. Crockett as we enjoy falafel and compare notes on our favorite spots in DTLA’s Grand Central Market.

Mr. Bouriakov compared his new job to a similar one at the Chicago Symphony, which had Principal Flute auditions just a few weeks after the LA Phil.  “Of course, I applied to both.  But this audition came first and this was the job I wanted more as well because of many reasons, weather being a big one.  You know about it, but you don’t truly appreciate it until you’ve been here. ”

“I remember when I came here for two weeks in August at the Bowl before my tenure officially started, and I woke up at 8am and it was sunny. It was crazy. I called my wife, and I said ‘Can you believe it’s 8 in the morning, and I’m wearing sunglasses?!’  That’s something you don’t do in New Jersey.  And after three or four mornings of that, she says, ‘OK, I get it, it’s sunny there.’  Now, after living here, it’s still amazing.  You’re in a different mood.  And the food is amazing.”

Mr. Allakhverdyan gives nearly identical praise.  “I like it a lot in LA.  I live Downtown, so I can walk to Disney Hall, and I can walk to all these other great places.  The weather is awesome and the food is amazing.”

Los Angeles’s rich ethnic diversity also made a difference.  “The fact that there is a large Armenian community also helped,” says Mr Allakhverdyan.  “The ability to eat Armenian food, go to an Armenian church – not as important, perhaps, as having the chance to play with Whitney and Denis or to have financial stability or live in LA in general, but it still made a difference.  Even in New York, it can be hard to find Armenian food.”  Mr. Bouriakov had a similar motivation, stating, “My wife is Korean, so the community here and their support made a difference.”

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Now that they’re all in one place, they’re like brothers.

“The fit that I have with Denis and Boris is not just because we all worked at the Met,” emphasizes Mr. Crockett.  “First of all, I never worked with Boris there but now we’re finishing each other’s sentences.  It’s uncanny.  And Denis too.  We only played together and overlapped for about two or three years at the Met, and he’s always perfectly lovely and a great, great player.”

“I think our woodwinds our tough to beat,” says Mr. Bouriakov confidently but not arrogantly, “and our brass too.  Our combined winds are the best of any orchestra I’ve played in.  Both Tom [Hooten] and Andrew [Bain] are amazing players.  I was blown away the first time I heard them live, and I’m so happy to play with them.”   He mentions that he and his follow principals are hoping/planning to eventually form an LA Phil wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) once the new Principal Oboe is hired.  “Andrew  is already booking us in Australia for 2019,” he says with a smile.

He goes on to give praise to the entire flute section:  Elise Shope Henry, Sarah Jackson, and in particular, Catherine Karoly. “I think it’s not fun for her if she only played concertos.  Cathy’s title is Associate Principal, so she should be able to play symphonies and big pieces too.  And she’s a great player.  We’re lucky to have her in the section.  She’ll even volunteer to play second flute sometimes so that Elise can have a week off.  She’s a great colleague that way.”

Mr. Allakhverdyan has similar thoughts.  “Knowing that Whitney and Denis were here made a big difference in me wanting to take this audition.  Because they’re great players and also great guys.  Burt is great — a fantastic player and a great colleague.  The entire section is great, and not just as musicians, but as people as well.”

I find it interesting that he frequently mentions being both a great player and a great colleague separately, and he responds that the two do not always go hand-in-hand. “Being a great colleague is as important as being a great musician.  You need the balance, because if you’re a great player but a horrible person, it rarely works out.”

Not surprisingly, the discussion with each of them eventually turns to the orchestra’s search for a new Principal Oboe.

“We are excited about it,” Mr. Bouriakov beams.  “We are anticipating to have lots of great players try out.  In an audition, you may have a sound in mind that you want, but you choose from what you hear.  Sometimes, you hear better things than you imagine.”

So what is their approach?  Looking for someone with whom they can have a strong rapport is to be expected.  Finding an able leader for the section to handle both on- and off-stage responsibilities is important.  Above all, of course, is choosing a player who is a stellar musician as manifested in both their technical ability and their artistry.

Mr. Bouriakov explains that what they’re looking for — what they’re listening for — is “more the particular player and their sound, their phrasing, how they use their vibrato, and things like that.”  In short, they’re looking for someone with personality in their musicianship.  “For me personally, that’s what I love,” he summarizes.

That said, great musicianship means different things to different people, and the casual listener would expect that a principal’s ability at playing solos and famous excerpts would be the most critical aspect of their skillset; that isn’t necessarily the case.  There are equally important, if less noticed and underappreciated, parts to someone’s playing that hinge on their ability to weave themselves into the broader tapestry of the orchestra’s sound.  Mr. Crockett makes a point in trying to describe it, using his two current colleagues and another prominent principal flute player as examples.

“What’s great about Denis and Boris is not only how great their solo playing is, which is obvious, but also how well they support other players in the orchestra,” he explains.  “Listen to or watch a recording of Berlin, and you’ll see Emmanuel Pahud just lay down a foundation while another player solos.  He’s right there,” holding his hands horizontally, one palm close to the other without actually touching.  “It’s not just about playing in tune or with the right dynamics, but finding the right tone and timbre so that it blends in a way that adds richness and color to the overall sound.  Your ears perk up and say, ‘Whoa, what was that?’  Subtle things, but important.”

Regardless of who gets the job, Mr. Allakhverdyan makes a prediction:  “The sound of the woodwinds is going to change from what we’ve had before.”

That’s perfectly natural, says Mr. Crockett, given both the evolution in principal woodwind players and the orchestra’s trend over the past few years to hire first chair players who are willing to assert their musical ideas more definitively perhaps than others in the past.  He juxtaposes his current situation at the LA Phil with his previous one in New York.

“The Met is a machine in motion, and when I was there, there were these long-time principals in place so there’s not as much talking about what we were going to do and how we approached things.  That’s stuff we need to do here.  We’re in the position of developing a culture as opposed to other places where you’re adhering to a culture.  In some ways it’s a very good thing, and in others it’s challenging.  It’s a lot like LA in that it is still discovering what it is and is evolving what it means to be a city.  It’s exciting.”

And as that evolution happens, classical music fans in Los Angeles will continue to enjoy seeing and hearing it happen.  And if the new Principal Oboe is of the same quality and personality as these three gentlemen, we’re all in for a treat.

RELATED POSTS:

• Comings and goings at the LA Phil (Summer 2017 edition): Details on Ghez, Dennis, Hooten, and others (UPDATED) (September 5, 2017)
• Boris Allakhverdyan will be the next Principal Clarinet of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (February 28, 2016)
• A chat with Michele Zukovsky (part 1 of 2): the LA Phil’s outgoing Principal Clarinet reflects on how her 54-year tenure began, the audition process, and more (December 19, 2015)
• LA Phil comings and goings (Summer 2015 edition): big news in the flutes and clarinets, plus a little more (UPDATED on July 8) (July 6, 2015)
• Julien Beaudiment sees his American Dream become a reality as Principal Flute of the LA Phil (August 3, 2014)
• My Top 10 favorite LA Phil hires of the past decade (2nd in the series: “Random thoughts on Disney Hall’s 10th birthday”) (March 21, 2014)

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Photo credits:

• Whitney Crockett, Boris Allakhverdyan, and Denis Bouriakov at the Hollywood Bowl:  CK Dexter Haven exclusively for All is Yar
• Portraits of Whitney Crockett and Boris Allakhverdyan:  Mathew Imaging/Los Angeles Philharmonic Association
• Denis Bouriakov:  courtesy of the artist’s webpage

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is celebrating its 50th Anniversary season, and normally, such occasions see Music Directors standing front and center to lead the festivities.  But not this year.  LACO has no Music Director, Jeffrey Kahane having stepped down last year after 20 years in the post.

During LACO’s season-opening weekend, it was Scott Harrison, the orchestra’s Executive Director, stepping on stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall to say a few words to commemorate the occasion and introducing  James Arkatov, one of the orchestra’s founders.

This is the third season the New York native has been at LACO’s helm.  He came to the orchestra in 2015 after five years as VP of Advancement and External Relations at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.  During that time, the DSO descended into a bitter orchestra strike, one of many orchestras across the country to endure labor troubles between its management and musicians.  Among those organizations, the DSO emerged as well as one could expect and quickly found itself back in a surprising degree of normalcy, even approaching health.  Mr. Harrison was in the middle of all of it.

Meanwhile, LACO entered 2015 knowing that Mr. Kahane would be leaving at the end of the 2016-17 season.  Less than three weeks later, they announced that they’d also lose Rachel Fine, their Executive Director at the time.  By March of 2015, they found themselves without an administrative head, an artistic head on the way out, and senior players  on the verge of retirement.  It wasn’t exactly a crisis, but it wasn’t exactly business as usual either.

In August of 2015, the LACO Board of Directors tapped Mr. Harrison to be their lead administrator.  In the two ensuing years, LACO has, by all accounts, thrived.  Sure, Mr. Kahane was still in the house, leading and inspiring the orchestra and organization while taking a musical victory lap.  But Mr. Harrison still deserves much credit.   Concert revenue is up, donations are up, and community engagement is up.

Perhaps the clearest vote of confidence on the future of LACO, even while the Music Director chair is vacant and Mr. Harrison serves as the sole head of the organization, was the announcement last month that philanthropists Carol and Warner Henry would donate $1.5 Million, the largest single gift in the orchestra’s history, to endow the Principal Oboe chair in honor of its former occupant, the legendary Allan Vogel.  Whoever becomes the next orchestra’s Music Director, he or she will be joining an institution that is thriving artistically, financially, and in its engagement with the community.

I had the chance to sit down with Mr. Harrison in his Downtown L.A. office.  He was jovial and easy to talk with, despite often talking rather quickly.  He managed to pack more information into an hour than many could say in half the time, but he was consistently thoughtful and insightful, never feeling rushed.

For the first half of my visit, we talked about his journey to the orchestra, how he approached his new job when he first arrived, and some of the initiatives he worked on in the early stages of his still-young tenure.  Most of that conversation is below.  (In Part 2, we discuss his relationship with LACO musicians and the orchestra’s approach to its search for a new Music Director.)

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CK Dexter Haven:  How familiar were you with LACO before you took the job?

Scott Harrison:  I had a good with passing familiarity with LACO.  I certainly knew Jeff and his reputation, which definitely preceded him.  I’d seen him perform, he came to the Detroit Symphony.  I knew that LACO had a particular skill in new music and had done a lot of premieres.  I also knew that  doing Baroque music on modern instruments was a real specialty of the band.  I hadn’t heard them live, but I had listened to the Hilary Hahn CD that was really fantastic and really popular.

But I can’t say that I was too aware in a larger extent to the scope of what LACO was or how it fit into the community or what the other parts of the organization were.

CKDH:  So what was the appeal of the job then?  Was it the opportunity to head the organization, was it that you wouldn’t have to live in snow, you’d just get to drive to it when you wanted to have fun on the weekends and then drive home?

SH:  [Laughs].  Well, there were a couple of things that made this a really appealing place to be.  As I said, I knew that artistically, it was a great institution.  It would be an exciting, fulfilling, meaningful place to work because the art of the music was being made at such a high level.  That was always a base requirement for anywhere I wanted to work.

As I dug a little further, the things that appealed to me:

• I learned about the versatility and flexibility of the organization, and with some of my past work and interests, that has always appealed to me:  an organization that reached different audiences, that could present itself in different ways, that can have a really expansive sense of how it can present its music and serve its constituents and wider community.
• L.A. as a whole and how this city was exploding from a music, culture, arts, and beyond standpoint. Knowing that so much was happening here, that great composers were relocating here, that organizations were collaborating in all sorts of new ways whether it was music or visual art or architecture or the food scene.  Whatever it might be, there was a lot going on in LA, so that sounded like a very fertile and exciting place to be running a major arts organization
• And then I realized, when I started to meet people in the organization as part of the interview process, about the commitment of the board, about the real strength of the relationships between the board and the orchestra and the staff, and about the real commitment people had with the institution and the specialness with which the audience held LACO and thought about the orchestra. All those things were really important because it seemed like a supportive place to do things that mattered.
• L.A. was just appealing to me and my wife personally. It’s such an amazing place to live.  You can be at the beach or the mountains or the city or a small town.  Whatever you want, you can have it in a 45-minute drive on the weekend.
• Then there was the timing of it: 50^th Anniversary, a new Music Director search, just this sort of sense that LACO was about to enter this new chapter of its future.  There were even some notable new musicians starting with longtime members – Allan Vogel, David Shostac, among others – retiring.  With new people and milestones and a changing landscape, it meant that the future was in front of us.  It’d be an exciting chance to continue the traditions and legacy that made LACO what it is today, but also to find the new things that could be part of, as we say, the next 50 years of LACO.

All of that was coming together to make it an exciting place to be.

CKDH:  Did you speak with Leonard Slatkin [DSO Music Director and native Angeleno] about the opportunity?

SH:  I did talk to Leonard about it a little bit, and he was very supportive of the opportunity and how great it was.  He has a lot of love for LA.  He feels a real connection to the city, not just from growing up here but also because of his relationship with the LA Phil.  He really reiterated that he thought something really amazing was going on in the overall arts scene of the city.

He of course knows LACO, knows the musicians.  He said it’s a fantastic band, the level of musicianship and the range and scope of what the musicians were capable of, were amazing.  He understood exactly why I’d want to be here.

CKDH:  Being a New Yorker, how much of the traditional Woody Allen stereotype of LA did you believe or assume was a lie before you came here?

SH: [Laughing] I thought there were going to be “barriers to entry,” so to speak.  Before my first interview, I spent maybe six days total in Southern California:  I went to a wedding in Pasadena, and a wedding in Dana Point.  I knew really nothing about L.A., and I had this Hollywood stereotype that it’d be hard to talk to people, they’d have barriers up, the metaphorical sunglasses keeping you out.  I was girding for that.

I actually found the exact opposite, at least in the arts and culture world and the folks I deal with.  It’s actually a warm, open, and inclusive mentality, and people were happy to welcome you and spend time with you.  At the same time, it can be a big city with lots of small town sensibility because people are in their neighborhoods, their networks, and constituencies.  That was a little surprising.

CKDH:  You talk a lot about all the opportunities, and it makes a lot of sense. On a fundamental level, there are two differences between your previous job and this one:  first, it was a move from being a high-level executive in Detroit to being the top guy here in L.A.; secondly, it was a change from the DSO, being the big traditional fish in a smaller arts pond of Detroit, to a chamber orchestra with a non-traditional approach, as you said, of finding creative ways to reach audiences but at the same time being founded in the shadow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Tell me about those two differences, especially how you’ve dealt with them since you’ve made the move from Detroit to here.

SH:  It was an interesting transition in a lot of ways.  In the one sense, I was going from an important but smaller city and market to the second largest market in the country and this huge city that exists on one of the biggest global stages.  So your sense of scope for how you were connecting to the environment, both in what the challenges could be and what the capabilities could be.

It’s interesting:  in the major Midwestern cities – Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati – they’re older cities and they have a deeply ingrained sense of philanthropic support that go back generations with family foundations.  L.A., on the other hand, really has significantly more wealth and capital as a city, but is a younger city in terms of its relationship with starting and funding its arts organizations.

The challenge is that you don’t have the built-in, “My family has been donating to the symphony for 50-, 75-, 100-years or whatever it may be.”  On the other hand, you have a real opportunity to creatively court and bring in new supporters and donors who aren’t locked into “This is how it always was or this is what I always did.”

The DSO, I believe, is the largest performing arts organization in the state of Michigan, and maybe the only other big arts organization besides them is the Detroit Institute of Arts.  So we had a very prominent perch over the cultural landscape of the state.  And then you come to LACO which is a really important organization but in a much more crowded marketplace.

You’re right, obviously there are the LA Phil, LACMA, LA Opera, the Master Chorale, and others here. It’s not that they’re competitors.  They aren’t.  It’s just that they are other organizations with a larger platform or bigger visibility than we have.

The funny thing is that there are some lessons that I learned in Detroit and took here that were already happening at LACO.  While Detroit had this visibility, this perch, and this size as the biggest arts organization in the state, it had to deal with the fact that priorities and focus were changing because of some of the larger socioeconomic issues with which Detroit was dealing.  The place of a traditional arts organization didn’t always seem as important.

So we had to think a lot of time, “How do we ensure that we’re a vital and important part of the community, and that it doesn’t just feel like a stuffy experience for small group of people inside a fancy concert hall?  How do you make sure that a lot of the community can engage with and connect with the institution?  How do you reach children or other communities that felt that they were excluded from the concert hall or didn’t have the same access to it?”  We were doing a lot of things in Detroit to get out of the concert hall and be more present in the community through education, through outreach, through chamber music – all sorts of things that hadn’t necessarily been part of the organization previously.

Translating that to LACO, they’ve been like that from the beginning by design and by necessity.  Because of all the small, medium, and large organizations in L.A. vying for attention and occupying different spaces, LACO’s always had to be creative and clever about how do we carve out our niche, reach people, and cut through the noise, so to speak.

So the organization is good at turning its challenges into assets.  Some people would say, “Oh, it’d be great for LACO to have its own concert hall,” and in some sense, it might be.  But it’s also great that we don’t have a concert hall because our flexibility is now our greatest asset.  We can go anywhere where there’s an opportunity where we can reach people with music.  So we can have orchestral, chamber, baroque, new music, and all sorts of concerts happening in different kinds of spaces.  Then you have the layer below where we can visit schools, do community outreach, do pop ups like we’re doing downtown in office buildings.  You lose the benefits that come with being at the top of the mountain, and you gain the flexibility of not being encumbered with the constraints of being at the top of the mountain.

CKDH:  When you first got here, there’s usually some transition for any leader from arriving, listening, and absorbing, to putting their stamp onto the organization.  What was the transition like for you?  How long was it before you said, “You know, we haven’t done this before” or, “Maybe we should do this differently,” when did that happen and what were those things?

SH:  That’s a great question, one that I struggled with to a degree and maybe something that every new leader struggles with.  The balance between listening and learning but also wanting to enact change – presumably, you were brought in because there was something the organization thought you could bring to them – and how to make the switch is challenging.  There’s part of me that wants to listen forever, and there’s part of me that wants to change on Day One.  You’ve gotta find a spot in the middle.

What happened with me is that you find some spots where you do listen and listen for a long time, and others where you make change quickly.  It’s not all or none, not just a one-size fits all approach.  For example, one of the changes we made immediately was our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, really making sure we were an organization that did a better job of connecting with the diverse communities of L.A. and starting to be more representative of the city we serve.

Now the good news was that some of that was already happening in the institution.  It was core in Jeffrey’s spirit and who he was, his sense of musical programming, and his sense of egalitarian spirit and how he wanted to share his music.  At the board level and the staff level, some of those conversations and connections were already going on, so it wasn’t like I was starting on Ground Zero.

But literally on my first day on the job, my first meeting outside the office was with Chuck Dickerson, the founder and conductor of the Inner-City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (ICYOLA).  It’s a nine-year old institution that works primarily with black and Latino youth.  There are 300 families participating.  Some of the first conversations I had were, as an institution that is looking to improve, how do we do a better job at listening and learning from the people in communities we’re trying to serve, and how do we do start to enact change that will be successful and embraced and not feel token, mismatched, or otherwise crash and burn because we just go too fast and too heavy into something that isn’t ripe yet.

Even in that realm, there were some things we did fast and some things we did slowly.  One of the things we did quickly was from Day One to invite the students of ICYOLA to all LACO concerts:  free tickets, access backstage to meet the musicians.  Small and simple thing to do, and it starts to build the relationship between the institutions.  We then started to have sectionals and visit their rehearsals.  We planned a side-by-side concert last season, and we have another one this coming November.  I actually refer to them as “reverse side-by-sides:”  usually you bring them to your home, and in this case, we’ve gone to their series, their venues, and reached their audience and community.  And there are other topics and possibilities that we’re exploring that I can tell you about in the not-too-distant future.

Even when you look at the scope of who we’re working with – particularly the conductors, composers, and guest artists – we’re trying to be more representative and reflective of the audiences in L.A. that we serve and hope to serve.  Not just diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, or gender, but also diversity in the kind of musical experience and musical background we can offer.

CKDH:  You mention the differences in development, outreach, and support between Detroit and L.A.  You have some great support with the other people on your staff, but that’s still probably the biggest part of your job.  I’d love to hear more about how you approach that, especially since most of the big corporations that Buffy Chandler hit up to build the Music Center are all gone.  All these big corporate giants in L.A. that tried to be the support have been bought out or moved, and even today, big corporations like Toyota are moving to Texas.  So please tell me more about that part of your role and how you go about achieving LACO’s needs.

SH:  Corporate fundraising is hard across the country these days because, in some sense, the mechanism of corporate fundraising has changed.  A lot of corporations that used to give through a foundation or had more of a generally philanthropic mindset have moved towards one of two models: either a corporate social responsibility group, pushing to more social causes or education and meaning that donations are more specific to those areas; or towards marketing and branding where the choices are made based on visibility and return, which means they gravitate towards the largest, most visible arts organizations so that they can get some of the same experiences and benefits of sponsoring a Rams game or something similar.

Corporations now have very well-defined philanthropic missions, which I think is a positive thing, but that’s also narrowed who they serve.  In the past, corporations would say, “Okay, a little bit for you, and for you, and for you.”  Now they’ll say, “Our mission philanthropically is that we support ‘X,’ and if what you do doesn’t come close to aligning with that, there just isn’t space for you here.”  L.A.’s particularly difficult because there just aren’t a lot of corporate headquarters here.  Even the studios, which people think of as being based here, are smaller as corporate entities than people realize, Disney being the exception of course.  San Francisco, on the other hand, has lots of corporate HQs, and their profile mirrors more of East Coast cities.  So it’s a tough environment here, but it’s down nationwide.

What that means is that individual donations are so much more critical now.  That’s why it’s so important that we build relationships with donors of all levels, putting them first, thinking about them, being responsive to them, and really making them feel ownership and connection to the institution. At the end of the day, they’re our investors, they’re the ones who make it possible.  The largest donations are absolutely critical, but the $10, $25, $100 gifts are really important too.  Those all can add up in a significant way . . . .

I think the one thing you’ll notice that’s particularly great about LACO is the personal connection, not just to our staff but to our musicians.  I think we’ve done a great job of connecting our musicians to our audience, making them available, and breaking down the fourth wall.  That’s really given audiences a love and affinity for our musicians.  People want to support them.  As they get to know Margaret Batjer, Andrew Shulman, Claire Brazeau or Allan Vogel before her, and various other people in the orchestra, it becomes not just a love for the institution and the music but an actual love for the people who make the music, and you just become more inclined to want to support them.

[To be continued . . . HERE]

RELATED POSTS:

• A chat with Scott Harrison (part 2 of 2): on his relationship with LACO musicians and the search for the next Music Director (October 15, 2017)

• The End of the Kahane Era: Five LACO musicians look back on the Music Director’s 20-year tenure and ahead to what comes next (May 18, 2017)

•  A chat with Jeffrey Kahane: with only 12 months left as LA Chamber Orchestra’s Music Director, we look back at an eventful 19 years (May 15, 2016)

  
  

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Photo credits:

• Scott Harrison portraits:  CK Dexter Haven exclusively for All is Yar
• Scott Harrison at the Austrian Consulate in Los Angeles:  Annie Lesser, courtesy of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

Yesterday, I shared part 1 of my conversation with Scott Harrison, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

In part 2 below, we discuss how he built a relationship with the LACO musicians, what makes them unique in the orchestra world, and they are all looking for as the search for their next Music Director.

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CK Dexter Haven:  You mention the musicians of LACO.  You were at the DSO when they went through labor strife and came out of it, arguably in a successful way at least relatively speaking with some of their newer initiatives like the online broadcasts that didn’t exist before.  Please talk to me about the relationship between “management” and the musicians and their union, and how you approach that dynamic.  Whenever a new boss comes in, that’s a question mark that goes through the musicians’ minds.

Scott Harrison:  Yeah, inevitably it is, and it goes in both directions.  No organization is ultimately going to be successful if it doesn’t have a healthy, transparent relationship between the three constituencies of the board, the management, and the musicians.  If it gets misaligned in any of those categories, you might amble along for a while and patch over some things here or there, but there’s something that’s not right at the core that’s going to catch up with you.  Therefore I’ve always put an exceptionally high premium on having good relationships with the orchestra and the musicians.

You know, it’s interesting, my first day in Detroit was the first day of the strike, so I know very well what that whole experience was and I know the whole trip out of that.  The strike was ugly, painful, and difficult, and I certainly wouldn’t wish that on anyone.  But as you mention, the trip out of that and all the initiatives were important, and the reason they were successful in Detroit  because we rebuilt the culture of how the relationships functions within the institutions, how management and the orchestra talked to each other and began trusting each other again, and how they rebuilt that ability to be a cohesive organization.

For me, then, it’s a lot about dialogue.  I don’t shy away from engaging with the orchestra.  I want to hear what people’s ideas and concerns are.  I want to share what we’re thinking and get their input and opinion early.  That doesn’t mean that it’s a democracy; in the end, decisions need to be made, and the organization has to decide if we’re doing X or doing Y.  You can learn a lot about if you should be doing X or Y, or if you’re doing X, how to do it in a way that’ll be successful, and you learn that by listening to your staff and especially your musicians.  They’re the face and heart of the orchestra, and in many cases, they’ve been here longer than anyone else, so they have a lot of wisdom to offer.

For me, it’s about letting them know that their voice is important, that it matters, and when good ideas come from the orchestra that you help them accomplish those.  I think one of the things that can really sour a relationship between orchestra and management is that you have people who suggest something and want to try it out, and the answer is, “No,” specifically because it came from the orchestra, or that it’s, “No,” because people are too busy and lame and don’t want to think about it.

If you open up and realize that good ideas come from everywhere, then it opens up a lot of possibilities. It’s a little tougher at LACO because we’re not a full-time orchestra and they’re not here every week rehearsing, so we don’t see each other as regularly.  It takes a little more work to get to know them and nurture those relationships, but we absolutely have to because it’s important.

You know, I was a musician.  I studied bassoon, and many of my classmates and friends play in professional orchestras, so I have a good sense and understand what it means to be a professional musician and what their needs and their pressures are.  We both have different pressures put on us on the orchestra side and the management side, and you sort of realize that that’s where people are coming from, then you can find the common ground.

CKDH:  You mention the unique relationship LACO has with its musicians.  “Unique” is such an overused word, but I think it legitimately applies here.  It would seem – and this is perhaps a softball of a question – that there are some great advantages of that too.  Because it’s not a traditional 52-week orchestra, you’ve got flexibility in the services so that when you give them ideas, perhaps you’re going to get a ready reaction than you would at a traditional symphony orchestra.  Is that true?

SH:  Definitely, our musicians are incredibly open, and their lives and careers are as varied as any orchestral musician in the country.  This is unique.

Now, I’m biased, but I’ve also been to a lot of places:  our musicians are among the best in the country, and I’ll put them up against anybody.  The reason is because their lives are so varied:  they’re orchestral musicians, chamber musicians, studio and session musicians, jazz musicians, they’re every sort of musician you can imagine.  You can put any chart in front of them from all over the world for any purpose, and they’ll get the style, read it, and sound fantastic.

I think that sort of musical creativity filters back into their openness to try new things, to be involved in different sort of projects and activities.  So, yeah, I think that LACO being uniquely structured, that we do different projects as an organization, and that our musicians do different kinds of projects in their life, creates an open-minded culture internally that’s tough to match at a big 52-week or even 45-week orchestra and the rigid schedule they have.

(L to R) Scott Harrison, Ruth Eliel (retired LACO Executive Director), and Jeffrey Kahane

CKDH:  So then when you started, what conversations did the musicians have with you knowing that Jeff was on his way out and that you were going to be spearheading the search for a new Music Director?

SH:  Obviously, the search was very much high on their minds and making sure that they could trust the new Executive Director would be a good steward of that process. The decision to choose a new Music Director lies with the board.  That, along with choosing the Executive Director, are their two most important priorities because those two people have to run the organization from the artistic and the business side.

But I think the musicians also wanted a sense of how LACO would be artistically during the transition period:  were we still going to move forward or would we stall?  So that was top of mind as well, rightfully so.  They wanted to know – with the milestones comings, the changes coming, and with some of their colleagues retiring – that there was a commitment to filling open positions, running great auditions, and to ensure that the best musicians were showing up to take those auditions.  A lot of them, rightfully so, had questions about what was going to be our future involvement in educational community work and how we were going to tap into those opportunities.  They obviously wanted to know where I thought there were opportunities for growth and what things weren’t working well that needed to be addressed.  They wanted to understand how I’d approach my relationship with them.  Those sorts of things.

At the end of the day, they have immense pride in the exceptionally high artistry of LACO.  Back to that overused word “unique:” there aren’t places that are this small – and I’m purposely using air quotes for “small” – in terms of budget size or the amount of weeks we play that manage to operate artistically at such a high level.  We’re a truly unique organization in that realm, and it’s a testament to the circumstance of L.A. and the life these musicians have artistically outside of LACO that isn’t available in most other cities of the world.   It’s a testament to the real pride and passion they put into LACO and the ownership they have of LACO.  They wanted to make sure the new Executive Director got that, that I knew that making art that mattered was critical, and that I was committed to making an impact and maintaining the vitality of LACO.

CKDH:  Let’s talk about what you’re looking for in the next Music Director.  Start with what are almost certainly the requirements of a Music Director:  they’ve gotta be an excellent musician; they have to have an understanding of the repertoire, in this case, particularly that of a chamber orchestra; that they’ll respect the traditions of the orchestra but push it into the future . . .

SH:  And they’ve gotta own a baton because we don’t provide that [laughing] . . .

CKDH: [laughs] Oh yes, I forgot to mention that one . . . So setting aside those things that every orchestra is going to say in every Music Director search.  What specifically, besides those truisms, is LACO looking for in your next Music Director?

SH:  And I’ll add one more truism:  chemistry has to exist between conductor, orchestra, and audience.  That’s the hardest thing to define, yet it’s the most important thing.  There’s no shortage of great conductors who come into a certain place and don’t have the right chemistry.  It doesn’t mean they’re not a great musician or conductor, it’s not a disrespectful thing, it just clicks or it doesn’t.  That’s the most important thing that we’re looking for and it’s the hardest to find, and I can’t describe it other than to say you know it when you see it.

I do think there are some other things we have in mind and it alludes to something we discussed earlier:  we want someone who is excited about what is happening in L.A. right now, whether that is the explosion of all the young new composers in this city or the opportunities for collaboration within the musical sphere and beyond – as theatre, opera, and dance companies at all levels and of all stripes are also growing in L.A. and doing new things, how can LACO think in that broad way and connect to that larger arts scene.  I think that’s something that really excites us that we hope excites candidates is that we can do projects that push us beyond our boundaries to connect us to new sorts of audiences, new sorts of experiences.

I think we want someone who really believes in the spirit of discovery.  That’s a real important part of LACO, that it’s not just about the music happening at a high level, but that you feel connected to it in ways that goes beyond that, you learn something, you engage in some way.  The spirit of discovery can include how the Music Director and/or the musicians get to know and connect with the audience, and that that continues to exist.  How we make music exist in relation to existing society.  There’s a lot of ways you can go with that, but having that spirit of discovery continue to be part of the institution is something we’re looking for and are interested in.

We want someone who is excited about the range of what LACO is capable of:  that this is a fantastic Baroque orchestra, that can excel in the early Romantic works, that it can do some of the great intimate works of the 20^th Century like the neo-classical era and Shostakovich’s smaller works, and that we do new music well.  Even the other stuff LACO is great at like the movie nights that we do.  We want someone who understand that range as who we are and what we can be.

I think we want someone – and, again, this is hard to define – who has a point of view and stands for something.  Maybe this sounds a little contrary to what I just said, but we want them to really have a musical aesthetic and personality and say, “This is the stamp I want to make.  I want to push LACO into this area.  I want to explore this repertoire and this type of sound.”  It’s not necessary that those things be expressly, it’s not even necessary that they’re always perceivable on a concert-to-concert or day-to-day basis.  But I think that the orchestra will continue to get more amazing and that concerts will continue to get that much more visceral and exciting if there’s a real point of view driving that Music Director’s approach to the institution and the ensemble.  Again, I can’t define it because there isn’t one particular point of view that’s required, it’s that you have a point of view that is compelling to us and gives us the confidence that you’re really going to be driving this orchestra to goals and markers.

CKDH:  The guess, the deduction perhaps, is that you’re bringing people back as guest conductors who were also guests in the recent past since Jeffrey announced he was stepping down.  I can say that none of the LACO musicians or staff members have said, on the record or off, any names.  But at least one of them have said on the record that you’re not going to hire someone who hasn’t at least conducted the orchestra twice.

Given that, and that people can do the math of who’d be on that list and I’ve previously done that math and written about who fits that profile, that’s still a pretty broad list.  You’ve got people who are, um, “experienced” – we’ll use that word – and you also have people who are on the younger side.  You’ve got people who have foundations in traditional 17^th– and 18^th– Century chamber music repertoire who are perhaps most comfortable in that area, and others with more obvious diversity in their repertoire.

They’re all great musicians, they seem to be able to cross over into all the areas of music you mentioned previously, but they all have different strengths.  Does that make it easier or harder?

SH:  I think it makes it easier in that you get much clearer choices.  If we had conductors who are more similar or who are cut from the same cloth, maybe it’d be impossible because then how would you decide between A and B?  I think because there are clearer choices, that there are more clearly delineated choices in who these people are and what their strengths, aesthetics, experiences, and backgrounds will make it a bit easier.

As you said, they’re all amazing musicians who’ve had amazing careers and will continue to have amazing careers.  We’ll see which profile really locks in with LACO.

CKDH:  How much time do you want the new Music Director to spend in L.A.?  You talk about the importance of being excited about L.A.; Jeffrey didn’t live here, but he was a native Angeleno and lived much of the time in Northern California, so he had an understanding of the region.  There are organizations that contractually obligate their Music Director to spend a minimum amount of time in their city beyond the concert weeks.  Is that something that’s important to the LACO board and you?

SH:  I think what’s important is the quality of time they spend in L.A.  I’m much more focused on that than in the quantity of time.  I think it’s about how do we as an institution deploy the Music Director when they’re here to really make the most of that time.  In addition to the concerts, they’ll be connecting with the audience, the community, their board, and their donor base, and they’re helping to push the institution forward.

Someone could be here 25 weeks per year and just stay in their apartment and not accomplish anything.  Someone could be here ten weeks per year and make the most of every moment that they’re here and really have a presence.  Again, it’s about the quality of time they’re in town, not the time in town.

We also have to be realistic.  Like we said earlier, LACO has a shorter season.  We have eight orchestral weeks, we generally have three Baroque orchestral weeks, and we have some special events here and there, and the Music Director doesn’t conduct everything.  So you can do the math and realize that there’s a natural cap to how long they’d be here anyway, and they’re going to be then building their career and doing everything else they do.  We can’t say we expect them to be here 20 weeks per year when there’s only X weeks in the year for them to do stuff with LACO.

I am actually less concerned about it.  If we choose the right person, if we have really good conversation and clarity about what the role is, why they’re taking it, and how they’re going to approach it, and then if we as an organization are working with them to maximize their time in town, it becomes a moot point whether they’re here X weeks or X+1 weeks.

CKDH:  When can people expect a new Music Director for LACO?

SH:  As soon as we find the right person!

[We both laugh]

SH:  What I’ve been saying all along is, “With all deliberate urgency.”

We don’t want to drag.  We want to move to make this decision, but we don’t want to make the wrong decision or rush into it.  This person is going to be our leader, our next visionary, and will set the tone for the next era.  So if it means taking a little more time now to get it right, I’d rather do that than make the wrong decision.

Again, we’re not going to drag because you can do that too.  You can say, “Let’s talk about one more person, let’s see one more person, let’s have one more guest.”  You’ve gotta feel confident and make the decision.

The other thing is there is so much this orchestra is capable of and so much we’re achieving in the interim.  I’m very excited I am about the 2017-18 season, about the line-up we have, and what we’re accomplishing.  It’s not like the organization stops growing, stops having impact, stops reaching our audiences because we’re in the midst of the transition.  It actually opens up some opportunities to work with different partners that you wouldn’t have in the schedule when you have your Music Director there.

Then once that person comes, we’ll be really excited to have them lead us into the future.

RELATED POSTS:

• A chat with Scott Harrison (part 1 of 2): LACO’s top exec describes transition from Detroit to LA, challenges and opportunities once here (October 14, 2017)

• The End of the Kahane Era: Five LACO musicians look back on the Music Director’s 20-year tenure and ahead to what comes next (May 18, 2017)

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Photo Credits:

• portraits of Scott Harrison:  photos by CK Dexter Haven exclusively for All is Yar
• Scott Harrison, Ruth Eliel, and Jeffrey Kahane:  photo by Jamie Pham

With the 2017 World Series starting tonight, please enjoy this video of Michael Thornton, new Principal Horn of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, supporting the local team’s appearance in the Fall Classic with his four-part arrangement of “Take Me out to the Ballgame.” (h/t to LACO’s Facebook page)

Go Dodgers!

Spanish oboist Ramón Ortega Quero — aka Ramon Ortega — will be the next Principal Oboe of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He will take over the position vacated by Ariana Ghez earlier this year.

The native of Granada is currently Principal Oboe of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Mariss Jansons, Principal Conductor) and a member of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (Daniel Barenboim, founder and conductor).  He has regularly appeared as a soloist and chamber musician in concerts throughout Europe, including performances of the Strauss Oboe Concerto, Marceau de Salon by Johan Wenzel Kalliwoda, and the world premiere of Legacy, an oboe concerto by Oscar Navarro in both symphony orchestra version and wind band arrangement.

His discography includes music by J. S. Bach (the Concerto for Violin and Oboe, BWV 1060, with Janine Jansen), Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and many others.  His most recent release features music by J. S. Bach that was originally written for other instruments and arranged for oboe by Mr. Ortega himself.

He is undoubtedly well qualified, yet his hiring will likely raise at least a few eyebrows.  While top-tier American orchestras have been hiring international musicians in most other positions, oboe chairs have remained a bastion of musicians steeped in the “American school” of oboe playing that traces its lineage back to Marcel Tabuteau, longtime pedagogue at the Curtis Institute of Music and Principal Oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra under both Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy.  When prominent foreign-born oboists have been hired, such as Liang Wang of the New York Philharmonic, they still have studied in that system.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, however, decided to eschew that institutionalized rigidity, opting for a more open-minded approach.  Back in early summer, the orchestra’s three other woodwind principals — Denis Bouriakov (flute), Boris Allakhverdyan (clarinet), and Whitney Crockett (bassoon) — talked about their approach to the Principal Oboe auditions which were, at the time, still a few months away.

“Traditionally, American orchestras don’t invite European oboe players, but we felt that was wrong,” said Mr. Bouriakov.  “Every other instrument audition we have pretty much has a world-wide population coming to take the audition.  So we took the step, unusual for an American orchestra, to invite some European players as well.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re looking for a European,” he emphasized. “We just thought to have the choice and to hear them back-to-back and to see what we feel would be the right style for the orchestra.  There are many great American players too.  To me, the “school” by itself is not so important, it’s more the particular player and their sound, their phrasing, how they use their vibrato, and things like that.  It’s more important than how they cut reeds.”

Mr. Allakhverdyan concurred.  “Yes, European school playing and American school playing can be very different – apples and oranges.  We want to see as broad a spectrum of styles and players as possible.  Maybe we’ll go with a Japanese player, who knows?  But we want the option regardless of where they come from.”

Mr. Crockett compared their approach to what most American orchestras have typically looked for, particularly given the Chicago Symphony is once again holding auditions for the same position just a few weeks after the LA Phil did.  “I don’t think there’s going to be just one person that both orchestras have to have.  I’d like to think that if the best player happens to be not right-down-the-pipe American-style oboe playing, we’d be more open to it than Chicago.  And I don’t mean to dis American-style oboe playing; I’ve only ever played full-time with American oboe players.  But there’s a possibility that we could hear something [that we like] that another orchestra would say, ‘That’s just way too unorthodox.’ ”

According to reliable sources outside the LA Phil, Mr. Ortega was one of four “super-finalists” still being considered at the last round of the auditions, with the other three coming from the American oboe tradition and playing in American orchestras.  After the auditions were completed, Mr. Ortega was the only musician invited back for additional rehearsals with the LA Phil.  After that,  the orchestra was obviously confident enough that his style would fit with the orchestra to offer him the position.

No word yet on when he will officially join the orchestra.  When he arrives, Mr. Ortega will be the second Spaniard to take a principal chair in the LA Phil after having held the same position in a German orchestra, the first being Principal Trombone David Rejano.

RELATED POSTS:

• Chatting with the LA Phil woodwind principals Whitney Crockett, Denis Bouriakov, and Boris Allakhverdyan

• Comings and goings at the LA Phil (Summer 2017 edition): Details on Ghez, Dennis, Hooten, and others (UPDATED)

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Photo credits:

• Portraits of Ramón Ortega Quero:  Steven Haberland
• CD cover:  courtesy of Berlin Classics

It started with Michael Thornton, Principal Horn of the LA Chamber Orchestra, doing his one-man, four-part rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”  The social media folks at LACO tweeted it out with a cheeky  question directed at Houston’s River Oaks Chamber Orchestra:  “You got anything?”

Um, Game On, ladies and gentlemen.  Game.  On.

Soon after, ROCO tweeted this retort, featuring Matthew McClung, their principal percussionist:

@MatthewMcClung1 says come get some… pic.twitter.com/1uTC5P1jt2

— ROCOHouston (@ROCOHouston) October 25, 2017

That has led to a veritable panoply of responses from both sides.  Many are included below for you to enjoy in between innings of Game 7 tonight. (My personal favorite is the ROCO win(e)d quartet)

Go Dodgers!

Enjoy your home game @ROCOHouston and the sounds of our LACO staff! #LACOvsROCO #WorldSeriesChallenge pic.twitter.com/cG2J88wYBc

— LA Chamber Orchestra (@LACOtweets) October 28, 2017

The gauntlet has been thrown! @LACOtweets #ROCOvLACO #WorldSeriesChallenge pic.twitter.com/2skx0sKpez

— ROCOHouston (@ROCOHouston) October 25, 2017

Malik Taylor from @uscthornton and @icyola, LACO horn Kristy Morrell and cellist Armen Ksajikian spit #ROCOvLACO #WorldSeriesChallenge fire. pic.twitter.com/ADzLnESNLU

— LA Chamber Orchestra (@LACOtweets) October 30, 2017

Concertmaster Margaret Batjer and her #Strad are now in the #ROCOvLACO #WorldSeriesChallenge video mix. Hope this moves you to tears, @roco pic.twitter.com/ak9Lm7VOju

— LA Chamber Orchestra (@LACOtweets) November 1, 2017

In preparation for Game 7 tonight, here’s our final #ROCOvLACO #WorldSeriesChallenge video, featuring the world-renowned ROCO Win(e)d Quintet…and they say no good ideas come after 6 bottles of vino! #blowingyourmind #shesover21weswear

See you on the field, @LACOtweets pic.twitter.com/TxZbJ8hFgO

— ROCOHouston (@ROCOHouston) November 1, 2017

Sad news yesterday from the Los Angeles Philharmonic that Mitchell Peters, member of the orchestra from 1969 until his retirement in 2006, has passed away at the age of 82.

Mr. Peters was named Co-Principal Percussionist in 1972 and took over the Principal Timpani in 1982.  He was also well-known as a composer, arranger, and pedagogue.  His instructional books for percussionists have become standards in the field.

Pianist Emanuel Ax had the opportunity to play timpani for a Toronto Symphony performance of the Overture to Fidelio,  Beethoven’s lone opera, and he began his preparations by studying with Mr. Peters.  He described the experience:

“I worked with Mitch several years ago, preparing and performing the piano version of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, so we are, in effect, old chamber-music colleagues. He is extraordinarily kind, and he meets me several times before rehearsals and concerts, instructing me in the basic grip and giving me exercises for achieving some kind of evenness. I immediately discover that I am just as inept as I thought I would be, but you have to start somewhere.

At the end of my week with the orchestra, Mitch surprises me. He arrives for the last concert with a gift, a pair of sticks and a rubber practice pad, which he suggests I carry with me and work on when the kettledrums are not available. The pad is an immediate success with my wife, who breaks into uncontrollable laughter every time I start practicing. Not a tremendous boost to my confidence, but I shall persevere.”

— Emanuel Ax, “CLASSICAL MUSIC; Striking a Few Blows For the Mitty in Everyone,” The New York Times (July 5, 1998)

The full press release — including a quote by Pearl Jam drummer, Matt Cameron —  from the LA Phil is below.

Mitchell Peters 1935-2017

The Los Angeles Philharmonic announced yesterday that Simon Woods will be their new Chief Executive Officer effective January 22, 2018. The  54-year old native of London has been President and CEO of the Seattle Symphony since 2011.

Overall, I think this is good news.  Some thoughts and observations on the announcement:

• News of his appointment comes mere days after the LA Phil held a splashy  press conference previewing their 100th season as well as ambitious new community initiatives, and at which no announcements regarding management changes were made despite much speculation and anticipation to the contrary.  If I were a betting man (and I am), I’d say the odds are high that the plan/hope was to make the announcement at the event, but that some contracting wrinkles had not been ironed out in time.
• The LA Phil’s commitment to adventurous programming, community outreach and education, and ambitious projects inside and outside the concert hall will almost certainly be unwavering under Mr. Woods’ administration.  According to the Seattle Times:

“Woods’ philosophy about programming both mirrors and has been influenced by L.A. Phil’s efforts to promote individual concert programs as singular events attractive to unique, if overlapping, populations. . . . ‘For me, it’s not just thinking about how you sell tickets, but how you build relationships, how you mix programs and take the symphony to people in their community,’ Woods said.”

• Of course, given that orchestras plan seasons two or three years ahead of time, Mr. Woods’ influence on programming the centennial season is likely to be negligible, and his influence will probably not be felt for a number of years hence.  That said, his two most immediate predecessors — Willem Wijnbergen and Deborah Borda — made their presence felt rather quickly in other ways, particularly in the tone in which they operated and how they handled business and administrative issues.  With that in mind, there will be much interest in how and when Mr. Woods chooses to make his own impact.
• Another area to watch will be how he develops a relationship with the players in the orchestra, particularly when it comes to labor contracts and personnel issues.
  • In addition to their well-earned reputation for expanding traditional expectations of a symphony orchestra, the LA Phil has a legendary record of nurturing the relationship between management and musicians.  In an era where strikes and lockouts (or the threat thereof) have become all too common at orchestras throughout the country, the LA Phil has not only avoided labor strife for 50 years, it has also raised pay and benefits for its players and it is now the best paid orchestra in the country.
  • Mr. Woods’ track record on this issue looks promising.  In August 2012, shortly after he joined the Seattle Symphony, the orchestra’s musicians voted to strike over a proposed 15% pay cut to coming on the heels of previous cuts in prior contracts complete with their own strike threats; however, the threatened 2012 strike was averted when three months later, a temporary agreement was reached.  A permanent agreement came the following year.  No concerts were ever cancelled, and the Seattle Symphony musicians have not threatened to strike since then.
• Gail Samuel, the LA Phil’s well-regarded Executive Director, has served as Interim CEO since Ms. Borda left for the New York Philharmonic in March 2017.  Ms. Samuel, widely considered to be a candidate for the permanent position herself, will remain with the orchestra and return to her previous position.  Chad Smith, the LA Phil’s Chief Operating Officer who oversees artistic matters within the executive team, was also thought by many to be a candidate for promotion.  No announcements were made regarding any changes to his role.  How long either of them continue with the LA Phil will be the topic of much speculation, and I’m sure I speak for boatloads of people in saying that the orchestra benefits greatly by having both of them remain in their respective positions.

—–

Prior to Mr. Woods’ tenure in Seattle, he served as Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), one of the United Kingdom’s leading symphony orchestras; as President & CEO of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra; and Vice President of Artistic Planning and Operations at The Philadelphia Orchestra.  He also worked as a music producer for EMI Classics for a decade.

He holds a degree in Music from Cambridge and a post-graduate diploma in conducting from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Some quotes from other stories are below, followed by the full press release from the Los Angeles Philharmonic:

• “L.A. Phil shares with the Woods-era Seattle Symphony a broad, creative emphasis on innovation and community engagement. . . . The difference is L.A. Phil’s more epic scale, with almost 300 concerts a year (compared to 200 at SSO) and annual revenues of $125 million ($32 million here). Yearlong concert scheduling between two venues brings in more patrons than L.A. Phil says it can count, while Seattle Symphony says it reaches 500,000 people through various activities.”  (Keough, Tom:  “Seattle Symphony CEO Simon Woods going to Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Seattle Times, November 16, 2017)
• ““Everybody in our business has watched over the past 15 or 20 years as the L.A. Phil has gone from strength to strength,” Woods said. “It has grown into this extraordinary artistic entity that’s redefining how orchestras think and behave in their communities. And the prospect of being part of that was an exciting one.” “  (Vankin, Deborah:  L.A. Phil finds its new CEO in Seattle, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2017)

—————

SIMON WOODS NAMED AS

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

OF THE  

LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC

Los Angeles, November 16, 2017 – Los Angeles Philharmonic Board Chair Jay Rasulo announced today, on behalf of the Board of Directors and Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, that Simon Woods has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, David C. Bohnett Chief Executive Officer Chair, of the Association, to begin on January 22, 2018.

Woods has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra since May 2011. At the LA Phil he succeeds Deborah Borda, President and CEO, who led the organization through 17 years of transformation. Gail Samuel, Acting President and Chief Executive Officer of the LA Phil since March 2017, will resume her position as Executive Director for the Association upon Simon Woods’ formal arrival in January 2018.

Woods has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra since May 2011. At the LA Phil he succeeds Deborah Borda, President and CEO, who led the organization through 17 years of transformation. Gail Samuel, Acting President and Chief Executive Officer of the LA Phil since March 2017, will resume her position as Executive Director for the Association upon Simon Woods’ formal arrival in January 2018.

“Simon comes to the Los Angeles Philharmonic with an impeccable reputation in the orchestral world,” Rasulo said. “He has a proven record of innovative and collaborative leadership, a deep knowledge of and commitment to music, and a passion for music education and social action. He has been instrumental in establishing the Seattle Symphony as a dynamic, forward-looking and community-focused organization, re-positioning the orchestra as one with artistic, financial and reputational success. He is a great choice for the future of the LA Phil. I would like to thank the search committee for its work and Gail Samuel for her wonderful leadership during this process. We look forward to welcoming Simon to the LA Phil family.”

“Simon has a wonderful reputation, a great knowledge of music, a passion for music education, and understands the intricacies of an organization as complex and unique as the LA Phil. I am very much looking forward to working with him as we head into our second century,” said Gustavo Dudamel, Music & Artistic Director of the LA Phil.

“It is the very greatest honor to have been chosen for this position,” said Simon Woods. “The Los Angeles Philharmonic demonstrates persuasively and passionately in every aspect of its work what a contemporary and forward-looking orchestra can be in one of the world’s great global cities. The chance to work closely with Gustavo Dudamel, the remarkable musicians, a great board, and the tremendously creative staff team is a completely inspiring prospect. I join the LA Phil with the greatest humility and admiration, and look forward to helping to lead it through the Centennial and into its next century.”

Simon Woods joined the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in May 2011. He previously served as Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), one of the United Kingdom’s leading symphony orchestras; as President & CEO of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra; and Vice President of Artistic Planning and Operations at The Philadelphia Orchestra. For almost a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, he worked as a record producer with EMI Classics in London, where he initiated and produced recordings with many of the world’s foremost classical artists and ensembles. Born in London, Simon Woods earned a degree in Music from Cambridge University, and a post-graduate diploma in conducting from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He is a Board member of Cultural Access Washington and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. He was a Board member of the League of American Orchestras and Chair of the Group 1 Orchestra CEO group from 2015 to 2017. He is a long-standing contributor to the League’s professional development programs, including being a core faculty member for Essentials of Orchestra Management in 2016 and 2017.

###

About the Los Angeles Philharmonic

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, under the vibrant leadership of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, presents an inspiring array of music from all genres – orchestral, chamber and Baroque music, organ and celebrity recitals, new music, jazz, world music and pop – at two of L.A.’s iconic venues, Walt Disney Concert Hall (www.laphil.com ) and the Hollywood Bowl (www.hollywoodbowl.com). The LA Phil’s season at Walt Disney Concert Hall extends from September through May, and throughout the summer at the Hollywood Bowl. With the preeminent Los Angeles Philharmonic at the foundation of its offerings, the LA Phil aims to enrich and transform lives through music, with a robust mix of artistic, education and community programs. In the last decade,the LA Phil made ambitious, forward-looking advances in its artistic and social objectives. The orchestra maintains the most active commissioning program in the country and has garnered international acclaim for its interdisciplinary productions and work with new technologies. In the community, the orchestra has become a valued resource, offering such programs as YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles), which has become a model for effecting social change through music on a national stage.

—————

Photo credit:  Brandon Patoc

Los Angeles Opera and Plácido Domingo, their General Director, issued a press release last week announcing details of their 2018/19 (full details are below).  In short, here’s what we’ve got to look forward to:

Mainstage (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
Six performances each of:

• 1. Don Carlo (Verdi):  September 22 through October 14, 2018; revival.
     James Conlon conducts. Ramón Vargas (Don Carlo), Ana María Martínez (Elisabeth de Valois), Anna Smirnova (Princess Eboli), Ferruccio Furlanetto (King Philip II, Sep 22 & 29 only), and Plácido Domingo (Rodrigo).
  2. Satyagraha (Glass):  October 20 through November 11, 2018; company premiere.
     Grant Gershon conducts.  Sean Panikkar (Gandhi), J’Nai Bridges (Kasturbai).  Phelim McDermott (director).
  3. Hansel and Gretel (Humperdinck):  November 17 through December 15, 2018; revival.
     James Conlon conducts. Sasha Cooke (Hansel), Liv Redpath (Gretel), Susan Graham (The Witch).  Doug Fitch (director).
  4. La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) (Mozart):  March 2 through 24, 2019; company premiere; new production.
     James Conlon conducts. Russell Thomas (Titus), Guanqun Yu (Vitellia), Elizabeth DeShong (Sextus), Janai Brugger (Servilia), James Creswell (Publius).  Thaddeus Strassberger (director).
  5. El Gato Montés: The Wildcat (Penella):  April 27 through May 19, 2019; production new to Los Angeles.
     Jordi Bernàcer conducts.  Ana María Martínez (Solea), Arturo Chacón-Cruz (Rafael Ruiz), Plácido Domingo (Juanillo, the Wildcat). José Carlos Plaza (director).
  6. La Traviata (Giuseppe Verdi):  June 1 through 22, 2019; revival.
     James Conlon conducts.  Adela Zaharai (Violetta), Rame Lahaj (Alfredo: June 1, 9, & 13), Charles Castronovo (Alfredo:  June 16, 19, & 22), Igor Golovatenko (Germont: June 16, 19, & 22).

My first reaction? I’m “whelmed” — neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed — so I’ll grade it as a “C” on an absolute scale, and a “C+/B-” if I’m grading on a curve (compared to LA Opera’s recent history).  At a minimum, it’s definitely an improvement over the current 2017/18 season, thank goodness.

There are many things to like when you get up close.    I’m happy to see that a long-ignored Mozart opera is finally getting performed and that a work by a living composer makes it to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  They’re presenting interesting works in their Off Grand series.  Cast lists are more compelling in general, and Mr. Domingo himself is appearing in two different productions. Bravi for all that.

And yet, at a 30,000 foot view, it still looks like an opera company that is painfully cautious. It’s worthwhile to recall that back in 2011, the Los Angeles Times described a conversation with Mr. Domingo where he mentioned that “the company ‘has to be careful’ financially going forward but added that he would like to see a return to as many as eight productions by the 2012-13 season.” . . . Yeah, not so much.

Instead, Mr. Domingo et al are seemingly content with an “if the minimum weren’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum” kind of status quo, and satisfied with smaller achievements when others around them — from the juggernaut of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, to the nimble Los Angeles Master Chorale, the always adventurous Long Beach Opera, and the creative and convention-defying work by The Industry —  have turned boldness into the new normal.

Yes, LA Opera is taking steps forward.  It’s just that everyone else is moving leaps and bounds ahead in both quantity and quality, and making LA Opera seem more pedestrian every year by comparison.

Still, it can be worse — it has been worse.  We’ll take what we can get for now and pray that the company keeps moving in the right direction.

Here’s an analysis of the season:

The Numbers

• 36 = mainstage performances (six operas, each performed six times), same as last year.  Six performances per opera has become normal around these parts, even for warhorses.
• 26 = total performances conducted by James Conlon, LA Opera’s Music Director.  Regardless of what’s happening on stage or what music is sitting on the orchestra’s stands, you can rest assured that the sounds coming out of the pit will be reliably top-notch whenever Maestro Conlon is on the podium.
• 12 = times Plácido Domingo appears on stage as part of the cast (six each  in Don Carlo and El Gato Montés).  Say what you will about his artistic choices or the fact that his vocal chops aren’t quite what they used to be, the legendary tenor-cum-baritone still sings better at 77 years old than most folks out there do in their prime AND he reliably puts butts in seats.
• 8 = Off Grand performances.  The company likes to take their biggest risks away from the Dorothy Chandler, and this series has been interesting.
• 5 = LA Opera seasons — going back to 2013/14 — since they’ve presented more than six mainstage productions, and that’s counting the short runs that season for Einstein on the Beach and A Streetcar Named Desire.
• 3 = world premieres. Two as part of the Off Grand series, one as part of their ongoing Outreach and Family Performance efforts:
  • Vampyr:  two performances at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel of the 1932 Carl Theodor Dreyer film with new music by Joby Talbot
  • Prism: four performances at REDCAT of a new work by the up-and-coming Ellen Reid (yes, a woman, for those who track such things) in a partnership with Beth Morrison Projects
  • Moses: a new opera composed by Henry Mollicone and librettist Shishir Kurup, “created for audiences of all ages, and featuring more than 400 professional, amateur and student performers.”  James Conlon conducts two performances at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
• 2 = number of mainstage operas NOT sung in Italian:  Satyagraha is in Sanskrit; Hansel & Gretel is in . . . well, um . . . neither LA Opera’s press release nor its website specify whether Hansel & Gretel will be sung in the original German or the commonly-performed English translation, but we can be pretty confident that it won’t be done in Italian.
• 0 = number of operas by Wagner or Puccini.  That’s either a good or bad thing, depending on one’s point of view.  It’s also the number of times LA Opera has ever presented The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky — someday, maybe.  Someday, hopefully.

Other Observations

• Favorite parts of the season:
  • Finally FINALLY getting La Clemenza di Tito onto the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage.  Throughout its history, despite all the down years and setbacks, LA Opera has always done a very nice job with Mozart operas.  Last season’s Abduction from the Seraglio was loads of fun, the 2D expressionistic Magic Flute of the recent past has rightly become a fan and critical favorite, and even the tongue-in-cheek  ¡Figaro 90210! from the 2014-15 Off Grand season was a delight.  Perhaps Idomeneo will make it back in the near future too.
  • Satyagraha:  I’m ambivalent about Glass’s music in general, but positive impressions of Einstein on the Beachv still resonate with me many years later, and although I didn’t see LA Opera’s 2016 Akhnaten, I heard consistently excellent things from those whose opinion I trust.  Moreover, for as little as this company does 20th or 21st Century opera in recent years, they’ve had many compelling productions (Bluebeard’s Castle and The Ghosts of Versailles were particularly strong).  Finally, putting Grant Gershon on the podium for any contemporary music work virtually guarantees that the music will be presented in the best possible light, regardless of how thorny the score may be.
  • La Traviata:  As operatic warhorses go, this one’s my favorite.  The Prohibition-era updating is certainly quirky, but I am not turned off by it as many others are.  The cast is respectable, and whenever a soprano (in this case, Adela Zaharai) makes her company debut as Violetta, it becomes a great opportunity to take measure of her skills.
• Guest singers we’re especially happy to have back (roughly in order of appearance):  Ramón Vargas,  Ana María Martínez,  Ferruccio Furlanetto,  Susan Graham,  Russell Thomas,  Elizabeth DeShong,  Janai Brugger,  Charles Castronovo, and  Rod Gilfry (in the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s the loser, the third production in the Off Grand series, with two performances at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel on Feb 22 & 23, 2019)
• Singer who we’re most looking forward to seeing in her LA Opera debut:   Sasha Cooke
• Singer who isn’t on any cast lists for the 2018/19 season whom I’m hoping finds her way back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion soon:  the incomparable Sondra Radvanovsky
• If you go to LA Opera’s website specifically to look at the cast and crew for any individual production, you’re likely to find that some of the names have various symbolic suffixes, specifically:  *, +, and ++.  Yet if you look for a key describing the meaning of those symbols, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one.  With that in mind, dear readers, let me add some extra value to your life by helping decipher this code:
  • * = company debut
  • + = a member of the company’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program
  • ++ = an alumnus of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program
• Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight makes an amusing and pointed observation regarding the production art for Don Carlo.

RELATED POSTS

• My $0.02 on the (sad) 2017/18 LA Opera season, plus some straight talk from James Conlon

• My $0.02 on LA Opera’s 2016/2017 Season

LA Opera Announces
2018/19 Season

(Los Angeles) January 18, 2018 –  Eli and Edythe Broad General Director Plácido Domingo has announced the repertory and artist roster for the company’s 2018/19 season, planned by Mr. Domingo in collaboration with Richard Seaver Music Director James Conlon and Sebastian Paul and Marybelle Musco President and CEO Christopher Koelsch. The season will include six mainstage productions presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with additional performances presented elsewhere through the company’s Off Grand initiative. The season opens with a revival of Verdi’s Don Carlo, conducted by James Conlon and starring Mr. Domingo as Rodrigo. This is followed by the company premiere of Satyagraha by Philip Glass, conducted by Grant Gershon; a revival of Hansel and Gretel, conducted by Mr. Conlon and featuring Susan Graham as the Witch; the company premiere of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) in a new production conducted by Mr. Conlon and directed by Thaddeus Strassberger; a production (new to Los Angeles) of Penella’s El Gato Montés: The Wildcat starring Mr. Domingo in the title role and conducted by Jordi Bernàcer; and a revival of La Traviata conducted by Mr. Conlon and starring 2017 Operalia winner Adela Zaharia. Complete casting and additional information can be found at LAOpera.org. “The 2018/19 season will be a wonderful adventure for our community,” said Mr. Domingo. “It is so exciting to be a part of this journey, because opera is an art form that never fails to astonish me. For example, the two mainstage works that are completely new to our repertoire—Satyagraha and The Clemency of Titus, written nearly two centuries apart—could not be more different from each other aesthetically, but their powerful themes of justice and humanity resonate in the present day. Indeed, all of the season’s repertory offers opportunities for audiences to experience opera’s unique ability to access and express the otherwise inexpressible range of human emotion. Personally, I am particularly looking forward to my first Los Angeles performances of Rodrigo in Don Carlo, my sixth Verdi baritone role here with James Conlon, as well as reintroducing our audiences to El Gato Montés: The Wildcat, a work that has long held a special place in my heart. The combination of large-scale operas on our main stage along with a particularly exciting range of Off Grand presentations means that there is something for everyone this season, regardless of their experience of opera.” “As I look ahead to the coming season, I relish the opportunity to introduce the company premiere of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus),” said Mr. Conlon. “LA Opera has never produced this unquestionable masterpiece, which was composed virtually simultaneously with The Magic Flute in the last months of Mozart’s short life. It will be a great and important experience for our audiences. Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel has entranced audiences of all ages for its entire 125-year history. It is a work of enormous charm and accessibility, speaking from its deep roots in our fairy tale tradition. It features a Wagnerian-scaled score that is especially gratifying for the orchestra and conductor. Finally, I am of course particularly looking forward to revisiting two essential Verdi masterpieces—La Traviata and Don Carlo—that I conducted on successive nights of the first weekend of my debut season in Los Angeles. Bookending the coming season, they will provide two excellent occasions to celebrated the extraordinary strides the orchestra and chorus have made over the past 12 years. I’m also extremely proud to offer the second world premiere in our Cathedral Project series, with Moses by Henry Mollicone and Shishir Kurup, a project that annually brings together hundreds of members of the community for a deeply immersive experience of the transformative power of opera. Together with the exceptionally talented musicians of the LA Opera Orchestra and Chorus and the magnificent casts we have assembled, I anticipate that our audiences are in for a season of extraordinary performances.”   MAINSTAGE PRODUCTIONS (presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion) Don Carlo (Giuseppe Verdi) September 22 through October 14, 2018; revival James Conlon conducts a cast led by Ramón Vargas in the title role, with Ana María Martínez as Elisabeth de Valois, Anna Smirnova as Princess Eboli, Ferruccio Furlanetto as King Philip II, and Plácido Domingo as Rodrigo. The production by Ian Judge returns to Los Angeles for the first time since 2006. Satyagraha (Philip Glass) October 20 through November 11, 2018; company premiere Following the extraordinary success of Einstein on the Beach (2013) and Akhnaten (2016), LA Opera completes the Philip Glass operatic trilogy about great thinkers who changed the world. Satyagraha (Sanskrit for “truth force”) is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, where he developed the radical new idea of nonviolent political resistance. Grant Gershon conducts a production created by Phelim McDermott (director of Akhnaten) for the Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera, starring Sean Panikkar as Gandhi. Hansel and Gretel (Engelbert Humperdinck) November 17 through December 15, 2018; revival James Conlon conducts a revival of Doug Fitch’s dreamlike production, full of fantastical sets and elaborate special effects. Sasha Cooke and Liv Redpath sing the title roles, with diva extraordinaire Susan Graham as the uproariously wicked witch, eager to lure her young victims into a delicious trap. La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) March 2 through 24, 2019; company premiere; new production James Conlon conducts La Clemenza di Tito,  Mozart’s final opera seria, written simultaneously with The Magic Flute in the last months of the composer’s life. The new production is directed and designed by Thaddeus Strassberger, who previously staged LA Opera productions of The Two Foscari (2012) and Nabucco (2017). Russell Thomas stars as the imperiled emperor whose generosity and compassion point the way to a brighter future. El Gato Montés: The Wildcat (Manuel Penella) April 27 through May 19, 2019; production new to Los Angeles In one of the greatest masterpieces of the Spanish lyrical theater, a beautiful gypsy (Ana María Martínez) unwittingly inspires a fatal rivalry between a renowned bullfighter (Arturo Chacón-Cruz) and a bandit on the run (Plácido Domingo). The quintessentially Spanish tale unfolds with passionate melodies, dazzling choreography and an atmospheric staging. Spanish conductor Jordi Bernàcer leads a production created by director José Carlos Plaza for Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela. La Traviata (Giuseppe Verdi) June 1 through 22, 2019; revival James Conlon conducts a revival of Marta Domingo’s popular Art Deco-inspired update of the Verdi classic. In the face of certain death, a beautiful courtesan dedicates her remaining time to decadent pleasures, dazzling parties and wealthy admirers. But she is transformed when a devoted suitor declares his true love, and demonstrates her great humanity with a heart-breaking sacrifice before her premature passing. Romanian soprano Adela Zaharai, the 2017 winner of Operalia, makes her company debut as the glamorous Violetta, with Rame Lahaj (a 2016 Operalia winner) and Charles Castronovo sharing the role of Alfredo.   OFF GRAND PRESENTATIONS (presented in various venues)   Vampyr (Joby Talbot) October 27 through 31, 2018; world premiere Our annual Halloween mash-up of opera and cinema returns to the spectacular Theatre at Ace Hotel with filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s surreal 1932 masterwork, underestimated for decades but now regarded as an important landmark of the horror genre. Composer Joby Talbot creates a compelling new score for chamber orchestra and singers, performed live with a rare screening of this cinematic gem, and conducted by Matthew Aucoin, LA Opera’s Artist in Residence. Presented at the Theatre at Ace Hotel (929 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, 90015) Prism (Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins) November 29 through December 2, 2018; world premiere A mother and daughter lock themselves away from the world to protect themselves from the dangers lurking outside. Prism explores the viscosity of memory after trauma, and the lengths one will go to feel better—no matter the cost. Marking LA Opera’s fifth season of collaborations with Beth Morrison Projects, the Los Angeles world premiere presentation of Prism will be followed by performances at the Prototype Festival in New York. Presented at REDCAT (631 W. Second Street, Los Angeles, 90012) the loser (David Lang) February 22 and 23, 2019; West Coast premiere Two piano prodigies at a master class encounter an even greater talent: the virtuoso Glenn Gould, on the cusp of superstardom. The devastating realization that they will never approach their new rival’s level of artistry changes their lives forever. A painful meditation on dreams forsaken and hopes unrealized unfolds, with Rod Gilfry starring in an intimate staging that incorporates multiple levels of the spectacular Theatre at Ace Hotel. Presented at the Theatre at Ace Hotel (929 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, 90015) For more information about LA Opera’s Off Grand initiative, visit LAOpera.org/OffGrand.   AFTER HOURS: A MUSICAL NOCTURNE (presented in the Founders Room of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion) Hosted and curated by Artist in Residence Matthew Aucoin, LA Opera’s post-show concert series is back for a third season. Presented free of charge immediately following selected performances, After Hours  gives audience members and the public the opportunity to mingle with cast and crew members while enjoying special performances by LA Opera artists in the intimate setting of the Founders Room. Musical selections include everything from Schubert, Mahler and Poulenc to Bruce Springsteen, Nick Drake and Radiohead. After Hours  concerts will take place on November 11, 2018; November 25, 2018; March 16, 2019; and March 24, 2019. For more information, visit LAOpera.org/AfterHours.   OUTREACH AND FAMILY PROGRAMS (presented in various venues) LA Opera performances are experienced by vast numbers of Angelenos throughout the year, and not just through the musical events mentioned above. In its longstanding belief that the arts are essential to building our community, the company strives to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to experience or participate in opera. To that end, LA Opera presents a robust variety of outreach and family offerings, experienced by more than 135,000 people of all ages each season. Highlights of these initiatives include (to mention just a few): Saturday Mornings at the Opera (Feb 2 and May 4, 2019) LA Opera presents two Saturday morning, hour-long, interactive performances, preceded by fun and creative workshops for children that prepare the audience with art and music-making activities. On February 2, 2019, The Magic Dream a  wildly imaginative celebration of Mozart’s beloved The Magic Flute. On May 4, German Opera Tales is a high-energy show featuring musical moments from operas like Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio and Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Presented in the Eva and Marc Stern Grand Hall at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (135 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, 90012) Moses (Henry Mollicone and Shishir Kurup) March 22 and 23, 2019; world premiere James Conlon conducts a new work by two distinguished California artists: composer Henry Mollicone and librettist Shishir Kurup. The opera traces the incredible journey of Moses, who stands up to his Egyptian oppressors and ultimately leads his people to freedom. Created for audiences of all ages, and featuring more than 400 professional, amateur and student performers, the opera is presented free of charge as a gift to the community. Presented at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (555 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles, 90012) Community Circle  (ongoing through the season) The Community Circle seating program enables LA Opera to increase service to students, low-income senior centers, nonprofit service organizations and underserved community groups. Carefully selected groups can experience opera at a significantly reduced price (and even, at times, no cost). Over 150 tickets are set aside in the orchestra section for every mainstage performance to accommodate these special groups, who can apply online to be considered for the program. These tickets are not available for sale to the public. For information about Community Circle, please visit LAOpera.org/CommunityCircle.   Subscription Ticket Information Season subscription tickets for the 2018/19 season are now available, starting at $106 for all six mainstage operas. Tickets for Prism, Vampyr and the loser are currently for sale only with subscription packages. For further information, please visit LA Opera’s website at LAOpera.org or call LA Opera’s box office at 213.972.8001. Unless otherwise specified, performances take place at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (135 North Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, 90012). Please visit LAOpera.org for updated casting information and performance dates. Artist headshots and production photographs are available on the LA Opera Press Gallery: LAOpera.org/press/Press-Photos All programs, artists and dates are subject to change.   Additional Quotes “The depth of our commitment to the operas and composers of our time is unique among the major American opera houses and is reflective of a moment of potent creativity in the artistic community,” said Christopher Koelsch, LA Opera’s Sebastian Paul and Marybelle Musco President and Chief Executive Officer. “I am excited about the dialogue that is created by the contrasts and commonalities between contemporary pieces and the canonical works that have influenced them, and I am proud that LA Opera is leading the way in giving our audiences so many different ways to experience the incredible power and artistic diversity of what opera can be.” “As a non-profit organization, LA Opera relies on the generosity, dedication and commitment of thousands of donors who make it possible for us to present world-class performances here in Los Angeles” said Marc Stern, chairman of the company’s board of directors. “I am grateful to all of these supporters, with special thanks to our incredibly devoted board of directors, whose guidance and leadership has proven essential as we continue to move LA Opera forward.” About LA Opera In just over three decades of existence, LA Opera has become one of America’s most exciting and ambitious opera companies, dedicated to staging imaginative new productions, world premiere commissions and inventive stagings of the classics that preserve the foundational works while making them feel fresh and compelling. The company also explores unusual repertoire and new works through the Off Grand initiative, performed in a variety of venues throughout Los Angeles. As a non-profit organization, LA Opera depends on philanthropic support to ensure that opera thrives in Los Angeles for generations to come. Sharing the arts is part of the company’s civic responsibility, and LA Opera deepens community involvement with this rich art form through many wide-ranging initiatives. LA Opera recently honored two of its most important supporters by renaming the title held by Christopher Koelsch as “Sebastian Paul and Marybelle Musco President and CEO.” This new title recognizes the extraordinary leadership, inspiring generosity and tireless commitment of Mr. and Mrs. Musco, who have been crucial to LA Opera’s artistic success for many years. Through their extraordinary leadership and generosity, they have been powerful advocates for the arts for a broad range of audiences throughout Southern California. Paul Musco was elected to the LA Opera board of directors in 2004 and currently serves as a vice chairman. LA Opera is a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the greater Los Angeles community. Yamaha is the Official Piano of LA Opera. LAOpera.org

LA Opera Press Office 213.972.7554

Expectations have been rather high for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2018/19 season.  After all, they’ve had some rather impressive seasons leading up to it, and you’d guess that they’d make an even bigger splash for their 100th Anniversary season.  The full season announcement was to have been made this morning

Alas, we’ll have to wait a couple of days more before we learn all of the details.  Word is that technical glitches have delayed the announcement, and that the announcement will now be made on Wednesday, Feb 7, instead.

It’s worth remembering that the LA Phil already held a large press event in November which teased the Centennial Season quite a bit.  Among the reveals, they:  

• Hinted at the new season, including:  14 weeks by current Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, two-week visits by prior Music Directors Esa-Pekka Salonen (a Stravinsky series) and Zubin Mehta (A Brahms cycle featuring soloists Yefim Bronfman and Pinchas Zukerman), current Principal Guest Conductor Susanna Mälkki (including full productions of The Tempest in partnership with Barry Edelstein, Artistic Director of San Diego’s The Old Globe), and former Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.  Former Music Director André Previn is too old to travel to L.A. from his home in Europe, but he is writing a new piece for the orchestra to be played in Fall of 2019
• Announced that 50 commissions (!!) by the likes of John Adams (LA Phil Creative Chair), Julia Adolphe, Billy Childs, Unsuk Chin, Natacha Diels, Ashley Fure, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Andrew Norman, and Steve Reich, among others, will be performed over the course of the season
• Mentioned that the entire Green Umbrella series is said to be made up entirely of world premieres commissioned by the orchestra, with Herbie Hancock (LA Phil Creative Chair for Jazz) leading his first Green Umbrella concert featuring works by Billy Childs and Vijay Iyer, and Mr.  Adams leading a “Noon to Midnight” potpourri concert
• Made some announcements about new community and education initiatives, most notably one by John Lofton, the orchestra’s bass trombone, of a new Resident Fellows Program
• Played some music, including a world premiere of a trumpet fanfare by Andrew Norman, cheekily titled, NEW WORK, and played with astonishing yet unsurprising virtuosity by Principal Trumpet Thomas Hooten, and the whole brass section assembling for Witold Lutosławski’s Fanfare for Los Angeles Philharmonic
• Revealed an ambitious $500 Million centennial fundraising campaign, of which roughly $300 Million has already been raised.  Not only will this fund help pay for the current and future ambitions of the orchestra, it is intended to fully endow all the musician’s chairs
• Said that the actual 100th Birthday gala concert on October 24, 2019, would be jointly conducted by Messrs. Dudamel, Mehta, and Salonen

That amount of hype raises expectations high, excitingly and potentially dangerously so.  How will the full season seem in comparison?

Barring any more unexpected hiccups, we’ll find out on Wednesday.

(L to R) Thomas Dausgaard, Peter Oundjian, Matthias Pintscher, and Jaime Martín

While everyone in the classical music space has been holding its collective breath waiting for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, that benevolent 800-lb. gorilla of the Southern California artistic landscape,  to release details of the rest of its 2018/19 season, we should pause and examine next year’s season recently announced by the smaller yet artistically worthy neighbor, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Overall, I’d give it a solid “A.”

It’s an admirable season in its own right, one that many other orchestras in the country would be proud to announce, loaded with an array of interesting works (including three world premieres and one West Coast premiere), noteworthy soloists, and solid guest conductors.  It’s doubly impressive given that the orchestra is still without a Music Director three years after Jeffrey Kahane announced that he’d step down from the post and a full season after his 20-year tenure came to an end.

Orchestra leaders (both staff and orchestra members) have previously stated that potential new Music Directors would need to conduct the orchestra at least twice before being offered the position.  With that in mind, four potential candidates return in the 2018/19 season:  

• A leading contender for the job, Thomas Dausgaard, recently accepted the open music directorship at the Seattle Symphony, and as such, is thought to be off the market.  But his appearance at LACO this past weekend in a rather straightforward program of Brahms and Mozart was a triumph, with enthusiastic applause coming from the audience and veritably all the musicians from Concertmaster Margaret Batjer on down had broad smiles on their faces while giving Mr. Dausgaard loud and sustained ovations of their own.  Might LACO still try to pursue him?  After all, the orchestra’s requirements of its Music Director is relatively minimal compared to larger symphony orchestras.  It’s not completely out of the question to hold both jobs.  In any case, he returns in October 2018 leading music by Grieg, Nielsen, Pärt, and Sibelius.  Anthony McGill, Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, is the guest soloist.
• Peter Oundjian makes his third appearance with the orchestra in as many seasons.  The outgoing music director of both the Toronto Symphony and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and former member of the Tokyo String Quartet returns in January 2019 to conduct the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 (Jonathan Biss, soloist), Seeger’s Andante for Strings, and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.  Also on that program is the world premiere of a new work by Sarah Gibson, this year’s “Sound Investment” composition where the individuals donate as little as $300 towards the commission and get unprecedented access to the composer during the creative process.
• Composer/Conductor Matthias Pintscher arrives in March 2019 to conduct Transir, his own work for flute and orchestra featuring Joachim Becerra Thomsen, LACO’s impressive young Principal Flute.  Also on the program is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in a 2006 re-orchestration for smaller ensemble by Glen Cortese; Michelle deYoung (mezzo-soprano) and Tuomas Katajala (tenor) make their LACO debut as soloists.  Mr. Pintscher also curates one of LACO’s SESSION concerts, a new series of cutting edge music held at Downtown LA’s Angel City Brewery.  Other SESSION curators this season include Andrew Norman (LACO Creative Advisor), Derrick Spiva Jr., and Christopher Rountree (Founder and Director, wild Up).
• Jaime Martín has become a dark horse contender.  The Spanish conductor (Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Gävle Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of Orquestra de Cadaqués) is not as familiar a name as the other three candidates, but his debut with the orchestra this past fall was very well received, leaving many musicians and audience members buzzing.  Does he have enough support in the orchestra to lead them full-time? We’ll know more after his April 2019 concerts featuring the Mozart Requiem and the West Coast premiere of Voy a Dormir by Bryce Dessner, better known as a member of alt-rock band, The National.

The remaining conductors represent an interesting mix:

• The season opening concerts will be conducted by Gemma New, a former LA Phil Dudamel Conducting Fellow.  Violinist Hilary Hahn plays concertos by Bach (joined by Ms. Batjer), with Andrew Norman’s Try, Franco Donatoni Eco, and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, “Italian,” rounding out the program
• Austiran native David Danzmayr, Chief Conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic, makes his LACO debut conducting a program of Korngold’s Straussina, the Violin Concerto of Ligeti (Jennifer Koh, soloist), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral.”
• Mr. Kahane makes his first appearance in his new capacity LACO’s Conductor Laureate in March 2019, leading Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 from the keyboard before taking the podium to lead the world premiere of James Newton Howard’s Cello Concerto featuring LACO Principal Cello, Andrew Shulman, Gabriela Smith’s Riprap for marimba and strings with Wade Culbreath, LACO’s Principal Percussionist, as solost, and the Mozart Symphony No. 36, “Linz.”
• The final orchestral program of the season will be conducted by new period music specialist Bernard Labadie in a program of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Haydn; soprano Lydia Teuscher is the featured soloist.

In addition to the orchestral season and the new SESSION series, LACO’s other well-regarded offerings — Baroque Conversations, the In Focus series curated by Ms. Batjer, the  à la carte salon series held at the homes of local foreign consul general and other dignitaries — all return in their typically compelling way.

LACO’s Orchestral Fellows Program — made public before the LA Phil announced its own similar, albeit larger,  version — welcomes its first class this year.

Full press release is below

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Photo credits:

PRESS CONTACTS:
Libby Huebner, 562 799 6055, pr@laco.org
Laura Stegman, 310 470 6321, pr@laco.org

SUMMARY OF SEASON DATES
AT END OF THIS NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA’S 2018-19 SEASON
INCLUDES BROADENED COLLABORATIONS,
INVENTIVE NEW PROGRAMMING, POPULAR WORKS AND
PERFORMANCES ACROSS THE SOUTHLAND

SEASON HIGHLIGHTS:

• Three World Premieres, all LACO Commissions/Co-Commissions, by Celebrated Film Composer James Newton Howard, Juan Pablo Contreras and Los Angeles Composer Sarah Gibson, Plus West Coast Premiere by Bryce Dessner, Best Known as Member of Grammy® Award-Nominated Band The National;

• LACO Creative Advisor Andrew Norman and Composer/Conductor Matthias Pintscher among Curators of SESSION, LACO’s New Events Designed to Explore Classical Music’s Cutting Edge Sounds and Challenge Concert Experience Expectations;

• Pintscher and New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinet Anthony McGill are 2018-19 LACO Guest Artists-in-Residence;

• Versatile, Diverse Array of Exceptional Orchestral Series Guest Artists Include Hilary Hahn and Jennifer Koh, Violins; Jonathan Biss, Piano; Anthony McGill, Clarinet; Kelley O’Connor and Michelle DeYoung, Mezzo-Sopranos; and Conductors David Danzmayr, Thomas Dausgaard, Bernard Labadie, Jaime Martín, Gemma New, Peter Oundjian, Matthias Pintscher and LACO Conductor Laureate Jeffrey Kahane;

• Mozart Requiem with USC Concert Choir, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony among Signature LACO Works to be Performed;

• Leading Baroque Violinist Monica Huggett, Acclaimed Conductor Matthew Halls, Mandolin Virtuoso Avi Avital and LACO’s Principal Oboe Claire Brazeau Lead Celebrated Baroque Conversations Series Performances;

• LACO’s In Focus Chamber Music Series, Curated by Concertmaster Margaret Batjer, Provides Insights into Quintessence of Chamber Music Repertoire;

• Other Presentations include LACO à la carte Salon Performances, Concert Gala and Community/Education Programs that Reach Thousands of Young People;

• Los Angeles Orchestra Fellowship Introduces First Class of Fellows to Launch the Comprehensive Program Addressing Lack of Diversity within American Orchestras.

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), one of the nation’s premier music ensembles and a leader in presenting wide-ranging repertoire and adventurous commissions, announces broadened collaborations and inventive new programming for its 2018-19 season.  Opening in September 2018 and continuing into May 2019, the season spotlights LACO’s virtuosic artists and builds upon the Orchestra’s five decades of intimate and transformative musical programs.

Highlighting an eight-program Orchestral Series are two world premieres and a West Coast premiere, all LACO commissions/co-commissions, including the world premiere of celebrated film composer James Newton Howard’s Cello Concerto, a world premiere by Los Angeles composer Sarah Gibson and a West Coast premiere by Bryce Dessner, best known as a member of the Grammy® Award-nominated band The National and a force in new music.  The series also features a broad array of works by other internationally-renowned living composers, among them LACO’s Creative Advisor Andrew Norman, Matthias Pintscher, Arvo Pärt and Gabriella Smith.  A versatile and diverse array of exceptional guest artists range from classical music’s most eminent to those who have more recently established themselves as among the most compelling musicians of their generation.  They include Hilary Hahn and Jennifer Koh, violins; Jonathan Biss, piano; Anthony McGill, clarinet; Lydia Teuscher, soprano; Kelley O’Connor and Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-sopranos; Tuomas Katajala, tenor; and conductors David Danzmayr, Thomas Dausgaard, Bernard Labadie, Jaime Martín, Gemma New, Peter Oundjian, Pintscher and Jeffrey Kahane, who stepped down as LACO Music Director in June 2017 after a 20-year tenure and makes his second appearance as Conductor Laureate.  LACO musicians spotlighted on several programs include Concertmaster Margaret Batjer, Principal Flute Joachim Becerra Thomsen, Principal Cello Andrew Shulman and Principal Timpani/Percussion Wade Culbreath.  Making LACO debuts are New, McGill, Danzmayr, O’Connor, DeYoung, Teuscher and Katajala.  Among the LACO signature works being presented this season are the Mozart Requiem with USC Thornton Chamber Singers, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony.  [details below]

Assuming LACO Guest Artist-in-Residence roles are McGill (Shaheen and Anil Nanji Guest Artist-in-Residence) and Pintscher.  McGill, now in his second season as Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, has been recognized as one of the classical music world’s finest solo, chamber and orchestral musicians.  Pintscher, who is equally accomplished as conductor and composer, also leads his own work, Transir for Flute & Orchestra, with LACO in March 2019.  Their residencies include master classes, community engagement opportunities and free public performances, along with concert appearances, providing more accessible musical opportunities to the broader Los Angeles community.

LACO Creative Advisor Andrew Norman, in his third year as LACO Composer-in-Residence, is joined by composers Derrick Spiva, Jr., Matthias Pintscher and Christopher Rountree as curators of SESSION, new artist-curated events designed to explore classical music’s cutting-edge sounds and challenge concert experience expectations.  Set in nontraditional spaces, SESSION features LACO musicians who join a different composer or musical artist for each concert.  Programs fit the unique properties of the space and test ideas about the relationship between performers and audience.  As a prelude to the season, LACO Creative Advisor Andrew Norman kicks off SESSION on Thursday, May 24, 2018, at the Arts District’s Angel City Brewery.  Each evening includes a “Hang SESSION” with the artists, drinks and a bite to eat.  SESSION continues in fall 2018 with Los Angeles composer Spiva, known for integrating into his work music practices from different cultural traditions around the world; in Winter 2019 with Pintscher; and in spring 2019 with conductor/composer and wild Up director Rountree, whose work stands at the intersection of classical music, new music, performance art and pop.  Dates and details to be announced.

Leading baroque violinist Monica Huggett, acclaimed British conductor Matthew Halls and mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital join LACO’s Allan Vogel Chair and Principal Oboe Claire Brazeau as leaders of LACO’s celebrated Baroque Conversations performances.  The five-concert series, held at The Colburn School’s Zipper Hall in downtown Los Angeles, spotlights repertoire from early Baroque schools through the pre-classical period.  Programming ranges from Bach’s orchestral suites and keyboard concertos and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to Thomas Adès’ Sonata da Caccia for oboe, horn and harpsichord.  In signature LACO style, Baroque Conversations artists share their musical insights and invite questions from the audience to provide patrons with an in-depth look at the music and an opportunity to get to know LACO’s artists.  Programs take place on Thursdays, 7:30 pm, with dates and details to be announced.

LACO’s In Focus chamber music series, curated by Concertmaster Margaret Batjer, provides insights into the quintessence of the chamber music repertoire through the lens of LACO’s artists.  Program highlights include a world premiere by prominent Latin American composer Juan Pablo Contreras, recipient of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award who is currently Los Angeles-based and noted for incorporating Mexican popular and folk music into his works.  The three-concert chamber music and discussion series is performed Wednesdays at The Huntington, San Marino, and Thursdays at the Ann and Jerry Moss Theater at Santa Monica’s New Roads School.  All evenings begin at 7:30 pm, with dates and programs to be announced.

Six LACO à la carte fundraising events illustrate that music truly knows no boundaries by pairing international cuisine and musical performances in spectacular private residences of the consul general corps.  LACO’s annual fundraising Concert Gala features auctions, dinner and a special performance.  Dates, locations and programs to be announced.

LACO’s education and community outreach programs, which nurture future musicians and composers as well as inspire a love of classical music, continue to reach thousands of young people through programs like Meet the Music, Community Partners, LACO-USC Thornton Strings Mentorship Program, master classes and school visits with guest artists.  LACO musicians also perform side-by-side with Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (ICYOLA), deepening the Orchestra’s commitment with that training organization, which introduces inner-city youth to the life-affirming power of music.

The Los Angeles Orchestra Fellowship, announced jointly last season by LACO, ICYOLA and USC Thornton School of Music, introduces its first class of Fellows.  Designed as the West Coast’s first comprehensive fellowship program for top-tier string musicians from underrepresented communities on the verge of launching careers in orchestral performance, the program is primarily funded by generous grants totaling $700,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The Fellowship is a unique partnership between the country’s largest African-American-majority youth orchestra, one of the world’s leading chamber orchestras and a university with one of the country’s top music programs.  Ultimately, the program seeks to address the lack of diversity within American orchestras, in which less than 5% of the workforce is African American, Hispanic or Native American, according to a 2016 report on diversity issued by the League of American Orchestras.

ORCHESTRAL SERIES DETAILS
LACO’s vibrant and engaging Orchestral Series showcases the ensemble’s remarkable artistry and trademark mix of orchestral masterpieces and new works from today’s leading composers, as well as the much-admired collaborative style between LACO artists.  The 2018-19 season launches with HILARY HAHN PLAYS BACH on Saturday, September 29, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, September 30, 2018, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, when Gemma New, formerly a Los Angeles Philharmonic Dudamel Conducting Fellow, leads a program with three-time Grammy® Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn and LACO Concertmaster Margaret Batjer.  The program features LACO Creative Advisor Andrew Norman’s Try, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Violin Concerto in E major, Franco Donatoni’s Eco and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, “Italian.”  On Saturday, October 27, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, October 28, 2018, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, Thomas Dausgaard conducts SIBELIUS’ THIRD, a program that includes Edvard Grieg’s Two Nordic Melodies, Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song, Sibelius’ Symphony No. 3 and Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto, featuring Anthony McGill, clarinet.  Dausgaard is Principal Conductor of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Chief Conductor Designate of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Designate of the Seattle Symphony.  For the Orchestra‘s BEETHOVEN’S “PASTORAL” performances, LACO is led by David Danzmayr, widely regarded as one of the most talented and exciting European conductors of his generation, and joined by violinist Jennifer Koh, who performs Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, on Saturday, November 17, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, November 18, 2018, 7 pm, at Royce Hall.  Also on the program are Korngold’s Straussiana and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral.”  Koh, named Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, has premiered more than 60 works written for her.

The year 2019 begins with MOZART + BEETHOVEN’S FIFTH, including the season’s first world premiere, on Saturday, January 26, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, January 27, 2019, 7 pm, at Royce Hall.  Conductor Peter Oundjian leads composer Sarah Gibson’s new work, a LACO Sound Investment commission, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, featuring Jonathan Biss, piano.  Oundjian, who is music director of both the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Royal National Orchestra in Scotland, is lauded as “consistently illuminating” by Gramophone.  Biss is widely regarded for his artistry, winning international recognition for his performances and award-winning recordings.  LACO commissioned Gibson as part of its singular Sound Investment program that engages LACO audiences in developing new works.  It gives participants who invest $300 (or more) the rare opportunity to create a legacy in music and observe first-hand the development of a new work from the composer’s earliest ideas to the finished composition.  Membership includes intimate salons throughout the season featuring in-depth discussion with the composer about the creative process, unique reading sessions of the work-in-progress and tickets to the work’s premiere.

LACO’s Orchestral Series continues with MICHELLE DEYOUNG – SONG OF THE EARTH on Saturday, March 2, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, March 3, 2019, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, when Matthias Pintscher leads his own work, Transir for Flute & Orchestra, with LACO’s Principal Flute Joachim Becerra Thomsen.  Also featured on the program are Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano, and Tuomas Katajala, tenor, in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (orch. Cortese).  DeYoung appears frequently with many of the world’s leading orchestras, and Katajala is one of Scandinavia’s most versatile and sought after artists.  The season’s second world premiere is spotlighted during KAHANE ON MOZART, Saturday, March 23, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, March 24, 2019, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, featuring LACO’s Conductor Laureate Jeffrey Kahane, who conducts and performs Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14.  LACO Principal Cello Andrew Shulman is featured on the world premiere of Grammy®-, Emmy®- and Academy® Award-nominated composer James Newton Howard’s Cello Concerto, a LACO commission.  LACO Principal Timpani/Percussion Wade Culbreath takes center stage for Gabriella Smith’s Riprap for marimba and strings, and the program also includes Mozart’s Symphony No. 36, “Linz.”  On Saturday, April 27, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, April 28, 2019, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, MOZART’S REQUIEM is led by Jaime Martín, who conducts a West Coast premiere by Bryce Dessner, Voy a Dormir, a LACO co-commission with Carnegie Hall and Orchestra of St. Luke’s, featuring Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano.  The USC Thornton Chamber Singers join LACO for Mozart’s ever-popular Requiem.  Martín has risen to international acclaim as a conductor in recent years, following his prominent career as a flautist.  Dessner is one of the most sought-after composers of his generation, with a rapidly expanding catalog of works commissioned by leading ensembles.  Known to many as a guitarist with The National, he is also active as a force in the flourishing realm of new, creative music.  O’Connor, possessing a voice of uncommon allure and musical sophistication far beyond her years, has won a Grammy® Award.  The season concludes with BACH, HANDEL, MOZART & HAYDN on Saturday, May 18, 8 pm, at the Alex Theatre, and Sunday, May 19, 2019, 7 pm, at Royce Hall, with a program led by Bernard Labadie, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Baroque and Classical conductors, featuring Lydia Teuscher, soprano.  Labadie conducts Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 and Haydn’s Symphony No. 94, “Surprise,” among other works.  Teuscher collaborates regularly with Sir Roger Norrington, Helmuth Rilling, Markus Stenz and Labadie, among other conductors.

ABOUT LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, proclaimed “America’s finest chamber orchestra” by Public Radio International, has established itself among the world’s top musical ensembles.  Over the past five decades, the Orchestra, noted as a preeminent interpreter of historical masterworks and a champion of contemporary composers, has made 31 recordings, toured Europe, South America, Japan and North America, earning adulation from audiences and critics alike, and garnered eight ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming.  With the establishment of LACO in 1968 as an artistic outlet for the recording industry’s most gifted musicians, Los Angeles’ music and culture scene took a major step forward.  Since then, the Orchestra’s five illustrious music directors – Sir Neville Marriner, Gerard Schwarz, Iona Brown, Christof Perick and Jeffrey Kahane – have set a standard of musical excellence for the Orchestra that continues today.  LACO’s founder, cellist James Arkatov, envisioned an ensemble that would allow the Orchestra‘s conservatory-trained players to balance studio work and teaching with pure artistic collaboration at the highest level.  Financial backing for the Orchestra came from philanthropist Richard Colburn and managerial expertise from attorney Joseph Troy, who also became LACO’s first president.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LACO recognizes the generous support of The Colburn Foundation and Carol & Warner Henry.  Steinway is the official piano of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.  The Orchestra also receives public funding via grants from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

TICKETS/INFORMATION
For a free season brochure, additional information about Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s 2018-19 season or to order tickets, please call 213 622 7001 x1, or visit www.laco.org.
# # #

LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
2018-19 SEASON

ORCHESTRAL SERIES 

Hilary Hahn Plays Bach
Saturday, September 29, 2018, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, September 30, 2018, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Gemma New, conductor
Hilary Hahn, violin
Margaret Batjer, violin

ANDREW NORMAN     Try
BACH                           Concerto for Two Violins
BACH                           Violin Concerto in E major
DONATONI                  Eco
MENDELSSOHN          Symphony No. 4, “Italian”

Sibelius’ Third
Saturday, October 27, 2018, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, October 28, 2018, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Thomas Dausgaard, conductor
Anthony McGill, clarinet

GRIEG                         Two Nordic Melodies
ARVO PÄRT                 Silouan’s Song
NIELSEN                      Clarinet Concerto
SIBELIUS                     Symphony No. 3

Beethoven’s “Pastoral”
Saturday, November 17, 2018, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, November 18, 2018, 7 pm, Royce Hall
David Danzmayr, conductor
Jennifer Koh, violin

KORNGOLD                 Straussiana
LIGETI                         Violin Concerto
BEETHOVEN               Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral”

Mozart + Beethoven’s Fifth
Saturday, January 26, 2019, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, January 27, 2019, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Jonathan Biss, piano

SARAH GIBSON           title TBA (LACO Sound Investment commission, world premiere)
MOZART                      Piano Concerto No. 17
SEEGER                      Andante for Strings
BEETHOVEN               Symphony No. 5

Michelle DeYoung – Song of the Earth
Saturday, March 2, 2019, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, March 3, 2019, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Matthias Pintscher, conductor
Joachim Becerra Thomsen, flute
Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano
Tuomas Katajala, tenor

MATHIAS PINTSCHER              Transir for Flute & Orchestra
MAHLER (orch. Cortese) Das Lied von der Erde

Kahane On Mozart
Saturday, March 23, 2019, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, March 24, 2019, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor & piano
Andrew Shulman, cello
Wade Culbreath, percussion

MOZART                      Piano Concerto No. 14
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD Cello Concerto (LACO co-commission, world premiere)
GABRIELLA SMITH      Riprap for Marimba and Strings
MOZART                      Symphony No. 36, “Linz”

Mozart’s Requiem
Saturday, April 27, 2019, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, April 28, 2019, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Jaime Martín, conductor
Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano (Dessner)
USC Thornton Chamber Singers

BRYCE DESSNER        Voy a Dormir (LACO co-commission with Carnegie Hall and Orchestra of St. Luke’s,
West Coast premiere)
MOZART                      Requiem

Season Finale: Bach, Handel, Mozart & Haydn
Saturday, May 18, 2019, 8 pm, Alex Theatre
Sunday, May 19, 2019, 7 pm, Royce Hall
Bernard Labadie, conductor
Lydia Teuscher, soprano

BACH                           Orchestral Suite No. 3
HANDEL                       Three Opera Arias
MOZART                      Three Arias
HAYDN                        Symphony No. 94, “Surprise”

SESSION
Thursday, May 24, 2018, Angel City Brewery, Los Angeles’ Arts District
Andrew Norman, curator
Fall 2018
Derrick Spiva Jr., curator
Winter 2019
Matthias Pintscher, curator
Spring 2019
Christopher Rountree, curator
Dates, times, locations and programs to be announced.

BAROQUE CONVERSATIONS
Dates and programs to be announced; 7:30 pm, Zipper Hall, downtown Los Angeles.

IN FOCUS 
Dates and programs to be announced; 7:30 pm, The Huntington, San Marino, and Ann and Jerry Moss Theater at The Herb Alpert Educational Village at New Roads School, Santa Monica

LACO À LA CARTE, LACO CONCERT GALA
Dates, locations and programs to be announced

# # #

Artists, dates, times and programs subject to change.

01/29/18

After teasing its 2018/19 season in November and postponing its originally planned announcement by an extra couple of days, the Los Angeles Philharmonic finally dropped the other shoe last week and released full details of its Centennial Season.

It is, to use a word that is ubiquitous yet completely accurate and appropriate this time:  awesome.

Totally awesome.  Defiantly awesome.  Rewardingly awesome.

The season is a marvel to behold, cementing and extending the LA Phil’s leadership position among orchestras in the U.S. and even the world.

• More than fifty world premieres (?!!!) Is there any other orchestra that has the combination of chutzpah, resources, and musical acumen to pull that off?  No.  No, there isn’t.
• Festivals to celebrate Stravinsky, the Harlem Renaissance, the Fluxus movement, and, of course, Los Angeles.
• Collaborations featuring film, ballet, opera, popular music, new music specialists, and others.
• Surveys of Brahms symphonies and concertos, Tchaikovsky works juxtaposed with American composers (conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas), a two-day celebration of the Chinese New Year, and pairings of late Haydn symphonies with all of the Beethoven Piano Concertos.
• And so much more . . . (full details HERE)

An “A+” season, without a doubt.

That said, there were few truly jaw-dropping revelations made last week, especially when it comes to guest conductors and soloists.  Much of the sizzle — like all of those world premieres, festivals, and new initiatives — was already made public in November.

So what more is there to say that hasn’t already been said by others?  Quite a bit, actually.  I’ve been taking some time to process the immensity of the season, analyzed the offerings beyond what the press release had to say, and came up with three big takeaways plus some other interesting tidbits worth mentioning.  

Big takeaway #1:  This is a remarkably dense season

In typical years, most of the programs are repeated over the course of three or four concerts.  Not so for the 100th season.  There are an astounding number of one-night or two-night concerts — particularly within regular subscription series — thereby creating a heightened sense of occasion for each evening and increasing the chance of turning any individual performance into a “must-see” event.

The biggest implications of squeezing a greater variety of music into the same amount of time:  more opportunities to present world premieres, explore rarely played repertoire, and still fit in familiar works.

One way to quickly see this is by examining the ratio of programs-to-concerts.  First, realize that a traditional week of orchestral programming often has a four-concert week of the same program, which would be program-to-concert ratio of 25% (1 program / 4 concerts).

Compare that to 2018/19 ratios for the three main LA Phil conductors which often double that:

• Gustavo Dudamel (Music & Artistic Director):  14 weeks, 21 different programs, 40 total concerts –> 52.5% program-to-concert ratio
  • Of those 21 programs, 14 are regular subscription programs played over 33 concerts –> 42.4%
  • The remainders are single-performance events:  opening night gala; “Celebrate LA” event; one concert each from the Green Umbrella,  Jazz, and Songbook series; a special non-subscription concert with Moby (!); and a telecast for the 2019 Oscars
• Esa-Pekka Salonen (Conductor Laureate and former Music Director):  4 weeks, 5 different programs (all regular subscription concerts), 13 total concerts –>  38.5%
  • The numbers when you isolate his Stravinsky Festival are even more dramatic:  2 weeks, 3 programs, 6 total concerts –> 50%
• Susanna Mälkki (Principal Guest Conductor):  3 weeks, 4 programs (three subscription, one Green Umbrella), 10 total concerts –> 40%

That means that on average over the course of the season, Mr. Dudamel leads a completely different program every-other time he conducts . . .  let that sink in for a second . . . and Mr. Salonen and Ms. Mälkki aren’t far behind.

For a smaller orchestra, this isn’t a big deal.  For musicians doing four, sometimes five, performances every week over nine months, that’s incredible.

At the same time, there is also one non-trivial side effect worth noting:  this will put much more pressure on those same musicians:

• When it comes to digesting tons of new and/or complicated music while maintaining incredibly high performance standards, the LA Phil musicians have the best track record of any major orchestra in the world.  The  2018/19 season is a testament to the extraordinary skill of those musicians.  At the same time, the amount of new music combined with the density of programming is asking quite a bit of them, and I doubt that the rehearsal time available will increase for the centennial.  It will be interesting to see how well the musicians hold up over the course of the season, and how polished the individual concerts will be.
• Again, compare that to a typical four-concert week.  There are four rehearsals to make sure the conductor and players are exactly in sync, with four more actual performances to really get it right.  Often, the third and fourth performance of a program are the best — particularly for world premieres — because the musicians will have had more experience playing it and have worked all the bugs out.  They often won’t have that luxury next season.

In the end, it’s a give and take.  There’s a huge upside, but it doesn’t come for free.

Big takeaway #2:  there’s a mind-blowing amount of new music on tap

That the LA Phil would load up on new music for its centennial is to be expected, but the sheer volume of new (and relatively new) music is staggering:  54 LA Phil commissions; 51 world premieres, three U.S. premieres, and four West Coast premieres; 61 living composers.  That would be a crazy number even for an ensemble specializing in new music; for a large organization as friendly to new music as the LA Phil, it’s barely comprehensible.

• You have to acknowledge that the fact that the vast majority of world premieres — 38, to be precise — appear as part of the Green Umbrella new music series or other non-subscription concerts, and not part of the orchestra’s main season offerings.  A little marketing puffery to conflate those premieres with the ones in subscription concerts?  Perhaps, but commissioning and programming all that new music an impressive and admirable feat no matter how you slice it.
• Of course, even if you only count the works that are appearing on full LA Phil orchestra concerts, you’d still have 13 world premieres, one U.S. premiere, and two West Coast premieres.  In addition, the breadth of conductors and composers, even for those orchestral concerts only, is remarkable:
  • Mr. Dudamel conducts five world premieres (by Julia Adolphe, Paul Desenne, Andrew Norman, John Adams, and Thomas Adès) and one U.S. premiere (by Tan Dun)
  • Mr. Salonen leads world premiere performances of The only one (by Louis Andriessen)
  • Ms. Mälkki is on the podium for two:  a world premiere (by Steve Reich); and a U.S. premiere (by Kaija Saariaho)
  • The remaining world premieres by Christopher Cerrone, Philip Glass, Du Yun, Unsuk Chin, Steven Takasugi, and Augustus Hailstork, plus a West Coast premiere by Olga Neuwirth, are led by various guest conductors (see below for more details)

No one else comes close.  For comparison, here are the other major U.S. orchestras who’ve already announced their 2018/19 seasons, plus a couple of other orchestras who recently celebrated centennial seasons of their own, and the number of world premieres they offered (and the  composers whose works are being performed):

• Chicago Symphony:  two (Mantovani, Stephenson)
• Cleveland Orchestra (2017/18, their 100th season):  one (Staud)
• Houston Symphony:  one (López)
• National Symphony:  two (Aurbach, Bates)
• New York Philharmonic:  five (Andriessen, Fure, Lang, Tao, Wolfe)
• Philadelphia Orchestra:  two  (Hannibal, Muhly)
• San Francisco Symphony (2011/12, their 100th season):  four (Adams, Bates, Monk, Subotnick)
• St. Louis Symphony:  two (Beale, Rouse)

BTW: if you also appreciate or even prefer (gasp!) music by composers who are already dead, here are the men (yes, all men) whose works get squeezed in between those world premieres:  Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Bruckner, Debussy, Ellington, Gershwin, Haydn, Hindemith, Ives, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Sibelius, Still, Stravinsky, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Weil.

Big takeaway #3:  If you don’t like conductors with ties to the LA Phil, you’ll be disappointed

You’d expect Music Directors, Conductor Laureates, and Principal Guest Conductors to take up the bulk of the regular subscription season.  No surprises here.  The combination of Mr. Dudamel, Mr. Salonen, and Ms. Mälkki will be on the podium for a total of 21 weeks of the seasons.  I think most orchestras would be thrilled to have any of those three conductors waving a baton in their own concert hall for as long as they could get them.

The startling thing is the list of other guest conductors for the regular subscription concerts and the paucity of true stars:

• Start with conductors associated with the greater Los Angeles Philharmonic Association:
  • John Adams (Creative Chair):  one week, including a world premiere of Glass’s Symphony No. 12, Lodger
  • Thomas Wilkins (Principal Conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra):  one week conducting a two-program look into the music of William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance, including a world premiere by Adolphus Hailstork
  • Christopher Rountree (education programming partner):  one week
• Add former LA Phil staff conductors:
  • Zubin Mehta (former Music Director): two weeks
  • Michael Tilson Thomas (former Principal Guest Conductor):  two weeks
  • Lionel Bringuier (former Resident Conductor):  one week
  • Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (former Associate Conductor):  one week, including a world premiere from Unsuk Chin
  • Elim Chan (former Dudamel Conducting Fellow):  one week, part of a celebration of the Chinese New Year, and featuring a world premiere of a new work for Chinese opera singer and orchestra by Du Yun
• That leaves only four weeks left for conductors who’ve never had a formal affiliation with the LA Phil:
  • Daniel Harding (Principal Conductor of the Orchestre de Paris and Swedish Radio Symphony):  one week, including the West Coast premiere of Masaot/Clocks without Hands by Olga Neuwirth
  • Simone Young (former Principal Conductor of both the Hamburg Opera and Hamburg Philharmonic)
  • Roderick Cox (Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra), one week, including a world premiere by Christopher Cerrone
  • Jessica Cottis (Principal Conductor of the Glasgow New Music Expedition)

For those of you keeping score, that’s 12 guest conductors over 14 total weeks:  ten weeks by eight current and former staff conductors, plus one week each for two experienced visitors and two newcomers.

It’s not a bad list per se and there are many capable conductors that are part of it, but that roster of guest conductors is easily the most underwhelming aspect of the full season announcement.

Compare it to the opening season at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003 which featured internationally renowned podium figures who were NOT regular visitors to Los Angeles — Pierre Boulez, Valery Gergiev, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Antonio Pappano, to name just a few — and the difference is shocking.

I expected the orchestra would use the opportunity/excuse of the centennial season to bring back at least a few more conductors whose careers are well established and internationally recognized.  I think Messrs. Mehta and Tilson Thomas easily fit that bill; so that means that the LA Phil has ten (10) weeks available for other guest conductors — couldn’t they give us at least one or two more big names for this 100th season?

There are four likely reasons why the orchestra didn’t:

1. They prefer nurturing extant relationships with up-and-comers and providing opportunities for unknowns rather than pursuing new relationships or rekindling dormant ones with celebrity conductors
2. They’re putting a high priority on increasing the racial and gender diversity of their guest conductors
3. They’re choosing programming first — Chinese New Year!  Fluxus! Harlem Renaissance!  — and picking conductors later, as opposed to the other way around
4. They’re choosing/needing to save money because the rest of the centennial season is really expensive

Reasonable and admirable reasons all, and the end results are somewhat disappointing nonetheless.

So who is missing?

• The most obvious absentee:  Simon Rattle.  He was Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra longer than MTT, he’s a colossal conducting star, and his last appearance with the LA Phil was an unmitigated triumph that had the musicians so animated in foot-stomps of approval that I thought they would give a standing ovation of their own for him.  I would have bet serious money his name would’ve been one of those mentioned, and clearly, I would’ve lost.  The orchestra had to have asked Sir Simon to join them, right?  It’d be shocking if they didn’t.  I’d be interested to know if they just couldn’t come up with enough money to entice him to make the trip all the way to the Pacific Timezone, or if perhaps one party or the other simply wasn’t interested.
• Three other conductors noteworthy for their absence:  David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, and Bramwell Tovey. Messrs. Slatkin and Tovey were both formerly “Principal Guest Conductor at the Hollywood Bowl,” while Messrs. Slatkin and Robertson are both native Angelenos who have been regular visitors in the recent past.  None of them are megawatt-level draws like Mr. Rattle, but given their obvious connections, you’d think at least one of them would’ve made the cut.
• Other notable conductors not part of the LA Phil’s 100th season that would’ve been nice to see (in no particular order):  Bernard Haitink, Valery Gergiev, James Conlon, Mariss Jansons, Kirill Petrenko, Vladimir Jurowski, Alan Gilbert, Antonio Pappano, Gianandrea Noseda, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Franz Welser-Möst, Christoph von Dohnányi, Riccardo Muti, and a few more I’ve left off for one reason or another.

Yes, they’re all men, and all except for the half-Asian Mr. Gilbert are white.  Sure, many would be unavailable or unwilling.  Doesn’t matter — I definitely would’ve preferred to have any of them over your pick of 2018/19 conductors not named Dudamel, Salonen, Mälkki, Mehta, Tilson Thomas, Adams (for his  programming of living composers), or Wilkins (for his Harlem Renaissance concerts).

Other tidbits about the 2018/19 season

LA Phil musicians getting a well-deserved solo turn in subscription concerts:

• Martin Chalifour (Principal Concertmaster), Robert deMaine (Principal Cello), Joanne Pearce Martin (piano):  Beethoven Triple Concerto; Mr. Dudamel conducts
• Andrew Bain (Principal Horn):  Britten:  Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings; Ms. Young conducts

Soloists I’m most happy to see returning:

• Piano:  Emanuel Ax (Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 22, with Mr. Salonen), Yefim Bronfman (Brahms, Piano Concertos 1 and 2, with Mr. Mehta), Hélène Grimaud (Ravel, Piano Concerto in G, with Mr. Bringuier), Yuja Wang (Adams, world premiere of Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, with Mr. Dudamel) Lang Lang (all five Beethoven piano concertos, with Mr. Dudamel), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Turangalîla-Symphonie by Messiaen)
• Other:  Gautier Capuçon (cell0, Tchaikovsky, Variations on a Rococo Theme, with Mr. Tilson Thomas), Matthias Goerne (baritone, Beethoven, Mass in C and Haydn, “Lord Nelson” Mass, with Mr. Dudamel), Paul Groves (tenor, Stravinsky, Perséphone), Audra McDonald (soprano, cabaret music and Weill, The Seven Deadly Sins, with Mr. Salonen),

Soloists that I’m bummed won’t be here next season:

• Piano:  Martha Argerich [yeah, I know what you’re thinking . . .], Evgeny Kissin, Daniil Trifonov, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mitsuko Uchida, Murray Perahia [he’s making a recital appearance, but it’d be awesome to see/hear do a concerto again], Richard Goode, Garrick Ohlsson, and Marino Formenti
• Violin:  Gil Shaham, Hillary Hahn, Midori [this one really caught me off guard considering she helms the strings department at the nearby USC Thornton School of Music], Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman [another recital-only year for him], Gidon Kremer, Julia Fischer, and Leonidas Kavakos
• Cello: Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, Alisa Weilerstein, and István Várdai
• Singers:  Plácido Domingo [yeah, the odds weren’t great, but I was really hoping that he’d do his buddy Gustavo a solid and make an appearance; can you imagine his voice in WDCH?], and whole bunch more . . .

Composers and/or specific compositions worth mentioning:

• Especially happy to see pieces by these composers appearing on the subscription docket:  Debussy, Ellington, Gershwin, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev, Salonen, Still, and Stravinsky
• Surprised and disappointed that works by these composers who had strong connections to Los Angeles and/or the LA Phil (in no particular order) are  not included in the orchestral season:  Copland, Rachmaninov, Stucky, Lutosławski, and Schoenberg
• Nothing by Bartók or Shostakovich?  Bummer!!
• Regularly played (overplayed?) warhorses that are nowhere to be found:  Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Dvorak Cello Concerto, Beethoven 3rd, 5th, 7th, or 9th Symphony, Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony, Dvorak 9th Symphony, Orff Carmina Burana,  Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, and undoubtedly a few more I’m neglecting

Esa-Pekka Salonen and Witold Lutosławski

Regarding visiting orchestras:

• The only visiting symphony orchestra this season is the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with Daniel Barenboim conducting
• I loved the San Francisco Symphony’s idea for their centennial:  have the six other biggest US Orchestras (from LA, NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago) make guest appearances at Davies Symphony Hall instead taking the SFS on tour.  Have everyone over for a party in your house for your 100th birthday rather than go visit everyone else’s place.  It was a brilliant idea that I was hoping the LA Phil would borrow.  Alas, they didn’t.

Final thoughts

In the end, the biggest takeaway is that this centennial season is the LA Phil celebrating its 100th birthday in its own way, with its own musical sensibility, and its own cluster of people.   In the past, that would be indicative of being close-minded, provincial, and even parochial.  These days, however, they’re more appropriately viewed as being iconoclasts at worst and as trailblazers at best.

The alternative would be to do like too many other orchestras:  hunkering down in the safe and cozy familiarity of centuries of musical tradition unhampered by progress.  That’s not an option for this orchestra.

As the Los Angeles Philharmonic approaches 100 years old, it can’t imagine being anywhere else other than at the tip of the spear, with all of the requisite triumph and terror that goes along with it.  There’ll be plenty of both to go around in the coming season, I have no doubt.

“Fortune Favors the Bold,” goes the ancient truism, one that resonates so clearly for this very 21st Century orchestra.  The LA Phil’s 2018/19 season will be their boldest yet, and we in Southern California are most fortunate to be a witness to it.

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Photo credits:

• Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Zubin Mehta:  courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association
• Susanna Mälkki:  Simon Fowler
• Esa-Pekka Salonen and Witold Lutosławski:  courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association
• Simon Rattle:    Sheila Rock/www.simonrattle.de

Thirty-five years ago today, New Order released their seminal New Wave dance hit, “Blue Monday.”  The song — along with its iconic packaging for the 12″ vinyl single as an over-sized floppy disc — represents a key moment in time for the band, the clearest  indication that it had moved beyond its more austere roots as Joy Division and towards a populist direction that would later yield hits like “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith,” among others.

As steely-eyed readers may have figured out, I’m a bit of a Joy Division and New Order fan.  So to help celebrate this milestone, I offer “Blue Monday” as interpreted by Orkestra Obsolete on 1930’s gear, some in rather useful disrepair.  They preemptively answer the question, “What would ‘Blue Monday’ have sounded like if it were recorded 50 years earlier?”  The result manages to capture the moodiness of the original piece in unexpected ways by employing traditional and non-traditional instruments including an old radio, a musical saw, some wine glasses, theremin, and much more.  Special thanks to BBC Arts for the presentation.

(By the by, this seems to be the only offering ever from Orkestra Obsolete. Too bad . . . )

Enjoy!

The Los Angeles Master Chorale opened their 2016-17 season with staged performances of Orlando di Lassos’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter), a Renaissance-era work unknown to most singers and audience members alike, even the most ardent aficionados of choral music.

I spoke to Artistic Director Grant Gershon at the time.  We discussed the piece, his approach to it, and how and why it became a gargantuan undertaking, one requiring the longest rehearsal schedule in the Master Chorale’s history.

Those efforts paid off handsomely, with Lagrime proving to be a revelation.  Staged by Peter Sellars for 21 singers (seven parts, with three on a part) performing 21 movements, it traverses the thoughts of St. Peter after denying his relationship to Jesus.  It is a powerful, deeply moving work which Mr. Gershon and the Master Chorale performed with a searing intensity matched with technical ferocity. The small ensemble sang with a remarkable purity of tone throughout the range of timbres and dynamic levels demanded by Mr. Gershon, on top of the physical machinations required by Mr. Sellars and his directions.  It was a triumph.

This coming weekend, in the midst of this year’s Lenten season, the Master Chorale revisits the work, and again, I spoke to Mr. Gershon about it.  Below is much of that conversation.

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CK Dexter Haven:  You first performed Lagrime a year and a half ago.  How were your thoughts and approach different this time around?  What were the things that surprised you or didn’t surprise you?   

Grant Gershon:  First off, I have to say that it’s great coming back to a piece this complex and demanding with the knowledge that it’s possible.  When we did it the first time, we really didn’t know if this was actually going to work.  So coming in with that comfort level, trusting each other, trusting the process, and knowing that all the work and the herculean effort that goes into it has such a strong musical and emotional pay off, it’s such a great feeling we didn’t have the first time around.  It felt like plunging into the void that first time.

I think that in the process, when we initially did the piece, it was a real revelation just to realize how deep and how important Lagrime di San Pietro is just as a testament to everything this great composer, Orlando di Lasso, had achieved in his life.  In a sense, it sums up the entire tradition of Renaissance Italian music.

We all knew going in that this was a great masterpiece, but I think we’ve now come away thinking that it truly is one of the most profound musical and personal expressions in all of music.  It’s mind-blowing to us that the piece is not better known and understood.

One of the things that became really evident that surprised us all and that we’re more aware of now that we’re remounting it is how the piece itself evolves over the course of 21 movements.  It starts “on topic” as a description of the Apostle Peter, his denial of Jesus, and the regret, remorse, and shame he lives with for the rest of his life.  So it starts in that place.

But through the course of the piece, it becomes much more personal.  For instance, the actual name of Peter disappears after the tenth madrigal.  In fact, from the 15^th madrigal on, everything in the poetry is written in the first person.  It really becomes about the composer, Orlando himself, writing this music in the last weeks of his own life, and the poetry is about looking back on your life as an old man and being aware of when you didn’t measure up, but also describing in the music what it feels like to lose yourself and losing your memory.

One of the final madrigals talks about how he can barely remember the miracles of healing the lame, giving sight back to the blind, and raising the dead.  Musically, it feels like that as well, and it becomes so tender.  It almost sounds like you’re hearing it through a shroud, and there’s a veiled quality to the music that is really unlike any other music I can think of.

I think it related closely to the final string quartets of Beethoven, Bach’s Musical Offering or Art of the Fugue, or Schubert’s Winterreise for that matter.  It’s an extremely personal testament of an artist who has one foot on each side of the divide between life and death.  I can’t imagine that Orlando thought that this music would be performed:  you wouldn’t do it in a church service, you wouldn’t do it in a frivolous evening of singing madrigals with friends.  It’s tough to imagine the venue in which it would have been performed.  There’s really a purity to the intention, and that’s what we tried to bring to the remounting of it.

CKDH:  Have those insights manifested themselves in you conducting Lagrime differently or asking different things from the singers, or is it a subtle thing that you keep in the back of your head?

GG:  I think it is a couple of things.  All of us are ready to go deeper, to go further in the color, emotions, and contradictions of the work.

Of course, when we did it the first time, we learned all of the initial madrigals of the piece without really knowing where the piece was going.  Now that we know the complete journey, of course it colors the opening madrigals in a completely different way.  There are relationships between phrases in the first 15 minutes that now clearly relate to the later madrigals.

So those connections have deepened our experience of the piece, refined it, and allowed us to explore even greater tonal variety and even more extremes of color, temperature, and tempo.  In a way, it’s become more spontaneous from simply knowing the material that much more.

Think about it, we’re going to be doing this piece a lot over the next year.  We’ll be at the Ravinia Festival, then later in the season we’ll be taking it to Mexico City, probably to the Melbourne Festival, and definitely to the Barbican in London, and Paris at the Cité de la Musique.  We’re basically embarking on at least three and as many as five or six tours of it over the next year.  I can hardly wait to see where the piece is a year from now; I think it’s going to be very different still, very much deeper in a year than it already is even now.

CKDH:  Given the number of times you’ll be doing Lagrime, in the context of everything you’ve said about its complexity and depth and that you’re exposing European audiences to what is still a relatively unknown masterpiece, this work has the potential to become a defining piece for the Master Chorale.  It could become a calling card if you will, the same way that Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium or Lux Aeterna has been, so that when people think of Lagrime di San Pietro, they immediately think of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and visa versa.

GG:  That’s true, and it was one of the fondest hopes for this project when we were cooking it up, that it would become a calling card as you put it, that it would define the level of music making, commitment, and artistry that exists within the Master Chorale.

It’s been amazingly gratifying to see the huge response from festivals and presenters from around the world.  We’re going to be in three and possibly four continents with it next year, and there’ll be even more in the 2019-20 season as all.  People are really excited, and when they get the chance to see the video clips from those first performances in Disney Hall, they’re blown away.

It’s really great that we have [those videos] because it’s really hard to describe what the experience of this piece is as an audience.  Peter has never staged a work for completely a cappella chorus before, and I don’t know of any piece of this complexity that has allowed the Master Chorale to go this far into an exploration, to really consider every single phrase, every word, and syllable of poetry.

The piece itself really rewards that level of exploration in such a strong way.

CKDH:  The first time you performed it, the preparation was all about exploration and experimentation, especially with regards to Peter’s direction and blocking.  It sounds like you’re still doing exploration and experimentation, just at more of a micro level.  Is that fair?

GG:  All of Peter’s staging is trying to get at the essence of the poetry of the music and emotion.  The staging is all about unlocking what is already there.  What’s different really is again in our understanding of the music and the poetry.

It’s not just that it’s deepening.  Sometimes, we’ll have blinding revelations that there’s something we totally missed when we prepared the piece before.  It happens when you come back to a piece this rich.

What I find so interesting about Peter’s staging, and I think Peter would say this himself, it’s not about the actual movement.  It’s not about, “Oh, put your hand here on this word, and take a step on this phrase.”  All of it is based on an intensive study of the poetry.

We’ve had multiple rehearsals with Peter that have been incredibly rewarding.  We’ll sing each madrigal and we’ll talk about each phrase and what it’s really about, both the words of the poetry and the subtext.  Sometimes that’s clear, sometimes that’s elusive.  We’ll experiment with different ways to approach it musically and in the phrasing.  And that experimentation informs the staging, not the other way around.

The great thing about music of this era is that there are no tempo markings and no dynamics.  You’re invited by the composer to find your own way through the music.  You take clues that he’s given you, but beyond that, there is so much room for imagination and for discovery.  I find that seriously rewarding.  There’s no right way to perform this music.  That’s quite liberating.

It has nothing to do with the staging per se, but the staging tries to unlock and maximize it all.  That’s why I think Peter is such a genius, especially working with him on chamber music like this.  I think we find ourselves fantastically lucky to be doing this together with him.

CKDH:  Last time, one of the big parts of the story was the enormity of preparation and the huge number of rehearsals you had to do.  How is it this time?

GG:  [Laughs]  Yup, that’s another great thing about the second time around.

Out of the 21 singers, 15 have performed it with us the last time, and another one of the singers was covering.  So there are only four out of the 21 who are experiencing it for the first time.

So basically, we are only having eleven rehearsals this time, as opposed to last time where we ended up with something like 28! [laughs]

The other advantage that we have this time besides the fact that we’ve done it before and I’m not trying to go from zero to 60 is that we have archival video of the first time, both of the performances and some of the rehearsals.  We’ve been utilizing that in preparations which has been very useful.

CKDH:  Are you guys going to record it?

GG:  Yes, we’re definitely going to record it, next year at some point.  We’re going to make a video documentary as well.

You know, given that we’re doing it a lot, we just want to live with it that much more because we know it’s going to get better and better, as I said.

It’s funny:  Peter has had the experience before of recording things early in his process and then looking back after a couple of years thinking, “Now is when we should make that recording.  What were we thinking??!!!”

CKDH:  Looking forward to those recordings.

GG:  Thanks, and thanks for taking the time to chat!

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The Los Angeles Master Chorale presents Lagrime di San Pietro by Orlando di Lasso at Walt Disney Concert Hall:

• Saturday, March 17, 2018, 8pm
• Sunday, March 18, 2018, 7pm

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