Conductor

Artistic Director

Close Quarters: "Tchaikovsky Serenade" – S:1 E:14 – Grant Gershon, Guest Conductor

If Bach says that we should “Sing to the Lord a new song” that’s exactly what the Chorale will do—sing a world premiere work by Zanaida Robles. Similarly, when Bach suggests "Have no fear, I am with you,” we are asked to have faith, to believe in something that we feel in our hearts, just as Margaret Bonds uses W.E.B. DuBois’ poem Credo to share her beliefs. Spiritual Suite is Bonds’ magnum opus for piano with each movement based on a traditional Negro spiritual connecting hints of blues, jazz, and gospel with the classical styles of Romanticism and Impressionism. Collectively, the program is an evening filled with music with great strength of purpose in every phrase and note

EPSG:4326

I Believe: The Music of Bach, Bonds & Robles

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Following their widely acclaimed collaboration on Lagrime di San Pietro (which was performed at Koerner Hall in 2020), Peter Sellars, Grant Gershon, and singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale reunite with a deeply personal yet uplifting meditation on what it means to say goodbye to those we love. 24 singers will be accompanied by Baroque organ and viol da gamba to create an intimate ceremony of connection across time and space.

Los Angeles Master Chorale, staged by Peter Sellars

The Royal Conservatory of Music

Join in singing one of the great musical treasures, Handel’s timeless Messiah. This uplifting and heartwarming tradition, filled with sublime music, is sure to add sparkle and glow to your holiday season

Messiah Sing-Along

Come one, come all to sing along with the Chorale! Bundle up and raise your voices in merriment with songs such as Deck the Hall, Frosty the Snowman, Joy to the World, and more, all led by Grant Gershon

Carols on the Plaza

The Music Center

From the joyful Hallelujah Chorus to the final majestic Amen, be awed by Los Angeles’ premiere performance of this iconic oratorio of prophesy and resurrection. Celebrate the season with our glorious soloists, Baroque orchestra and, of course, “the best-by-far chorus in America!”

Handel's Messiah

¡Feliz nochebuena! ¡Feliz navidad! Join us at Navidad Nuestra (Our Christmas) to enjoy Christmas carols sung in the musical traditions of the composers’ homelands of Argentina, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the United States. From the locomotion of Cristian Grases’ El tren para Belén (Train to Bethlehem), the rhythms of cueca (a traditional dance rhythm from Argentina and Chile), carnavalito (a Bolivian folk dance), chacarera (a traditional dance from northwestern Argentina) in Ariel Ramírez’s Navidad Nuestra, Eric Whitacre’s peaceful and uplifting Glow, filled with lush harmonies and ethereal melodies, as if it is illuminating the darkness, to a world premiere by Ernesto Herrera, it's sure to be a magical evening filled with warmth and holiday spirit!

Navidad Nuestra: December in the Americas

Delight in the traditional Christmas carols and festive folksongs from around the world. Big, bold versions of your favorite holiday music, sung as only the Los Angeles Master Chorale can. Fun for the whole family, children aged six and older are welcome to attend

Festival of Carols

Maurice Ravel’s “choreographic symphony” Daphnis and Chloé challenges conventional music status quos while highlighting his genius as an orchestrator. The epic dreamscape consists of the most number of musicians for any of Ravel’s works, yet allows for soloists to shine brightest here. Born out of the Sound Poetry and synthetic language of Hugo Ball’s Dadaism, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s cyclical Karawane is a monumental study of the familiar and unfamiliar. Here, the words are the music and the music is the words, brought to haunting life by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and Ravel

Where there is darkness, we seek to illuminate the spirit with eternal light. In Lux Aeterna, (Eternal Light), the spellbindingly rapturous work premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 1997, Lauridsen created a rich and intensely moving work that sparked a renaissance of choral music throughout the world. Paired with this masterpiece will be a world premiere by Billy Childs – one of the world’s most celebrated jazz pianists and composers – reuniting the Chorale and brilliant violin virtuoso Anne Akiko Meyers along with the Billy Childs Jazz/Chamber Ensemble and The Lyris Quartet

Lux: The Music Of Morten Lauridsen & Billy Childs

The Los Angeles Master Chorale and acclaimed directed Peter Sellars have once again created a stirring, searing, and thoroughly contemporary work from an ancient source. Musikalische Exequien by Heinrich Schütz, the most formidable German composer prior to J. S. Bach, is a musical response to the plagues of his time. It was the first German requiem, and the writing for solo voices is often florid in the Italian Baroque manner, while the choral sections build upon the German chorale tradition.

Los Angeles Master Chorale: Music To Accompany A Departure

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

As Warner Bros. celebrates 100 years of entertaining audiences around the world, the Hollywood Bowl will add a highlight to the yearlong celebration through Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. A landmark film in the 1960s, it has topped many critics’ lists for greatest film of all time. A key ingredient in Kubrick’s cinematic alchemy was his clever use of classical music, which forever changed and gave new meaning set against stunning celestial imagery. From the ethereal music of György Ligeti to Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss, Jr.’s The Blue Danube, watch and listen as the Los Angeles Philharmonic performs the score live to picture while the movie shows on the Bowl’s big screens.

A Live Presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Hollywood Bowl

From its stunningly beautiful solo moments to the rapturous “Dies Irae” that movie trailers have—rightly—lifted as a soundtrack to the end of the world, Verdi’s Requiem is a darkly dramatic 90-minute roller-coaster ride. When Gustavo Dudamel last conducted it a decade ago, the Los Angeles Times raved about his “radical and wondrous” performance that drew in the Bowl audience for moments of “intimate, personal expression” while also soaring in the many massive moments that “shook the Cahuenga Pass.”

Dudamel conducts Verdi’s Requiem

The Hollywood Bowl transforms into Shakespeare’s magical forest when Gustavo Dudamel leads Mendelssohn’s whimsical incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Complete with projections on the Bowl’s shell and a narrator to be announced, the piece casts a musical spell, filled with drama, fairies, and more than a little comedy. Spanish pianist Javier Perianes plays with “a combination of evident modesty and utter brilliance” (The Sunday Times) and joins Gustavo for Manuel de Falla’s rich and mysterious Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Dudamel

One of Mahler’s most massive creations, his Third Symphony vies to express the whole world, as the composer expected all symphonies to do. Long-time Mahler champion Zubin Mehta describes the Third—a piece close to his heart—as containing all of nature (“you can smell the Alpine flowers”), complete with nature’s contradictions of endearing beauty and stark brutality. Mehta stirs the vocal and instrumental ensembles into expressions of summer bursting forth, followed by profound communications from the flowers, the forest animals, humankind, and the angels, all capped by a monumental movement conveying Love itself.

Mehta Conducts Mahler 3

“Listening to his music, it’s just the most sensuous and passionate thing. I don’t know where he got it,” Yuja Wang has said of Rachmaninoff. “Every time I play his music, it’s a gift.” In this finale to the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Cycle, Wang and Dudamel perform the rare Fourth. Still lush and full of Romantic melody, this concerto is rhythmically complex and makes the orchestra a more equal partner to the piano than in Rachmaninoff’s other concertos.
“All my life, I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells,” Rachmaninoff said. The Bells was inspired in large part by the poem of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe. Each movement evokes a different flavor of bells connected to life stages and the passing of time—from sleigh bells to wedding chimes to a mournful funereal peal. Dudamel leads the LA Phil and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in this gorgeous and haunting choral symphony.

Yuja Wang & Dudamel: Rachmaninoff Concerto 4

“All my life, I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells,” Rachmaninoff said. The Bells was inspired in large part by the poem of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe. Each movement evokes a different flavor of bells connected to life stages and the passing of time—from sleigh bells to wedding chimes to a mournful funereal peal. Dudamel leads the LA Phil and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in this gorgeous and haunting choral symphony.

Yuja Wang & Dudamel: Rachmaninoff Concerto 3

Named after a poem by Robert Frost, this concert features music of aspiration and inspiration from Brahms and Schumann to Meredith Monk and Michael Abels. 

Choose something like a star

John Adams’ powerful new opera, Girls of the Golden West, is a rejection of the whitewashed romantic view of California in the early days of the Gold Rush. Director Peter Sellars drew from historical texts when he created the libretto, particularly from the memoirs of a woman who called herself Dame Shirley. As Sellars has said, “These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion, and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build new life.” Responding to these incidents, Adams’ propulsive music captures all the conflicting emotions with his characteristic insight.

John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West

After the sensuousness of Debussy’s Prelude, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the sometimes lively, sometimes dreamy early Messiaen work with hints of birdsong, featuring the theremin-like ondes martenot and the treble voices of the Los Angeles Master Chorale singing the composer’s own mystical Christian words. Jean-Yves Thibaudet performs Debussy’s remarkable Fantaisie, an Impressionist piano concerto. The LA Master Chorale again joins forces with the LA Phil in Heitor Villa-Lobos’ most performed of his 14 Chôros, a dramatic work filled with Latin percussion and rhythms.

Debussy and Messiaen with MTT

For the first time, Gustavo Dudamel conducts the return of this remarkable production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars with video by Bill Viola, one of America’s leading visual artists. When the Tristan Project was first performed in 2004, The New York Times hailed it as “a multimedia conception that promised to be so ingenious that listeners traveled long distances to catch it and talked about it for months.” Matching Wagner’s 19th-century desire to expand what opera could be with 21st-century innovation, Viola’s and Sellars’ staging explores the psychological, spiritual, and elemental subtext of the story. This rare opportunity to see the Tristan Project features a globally celebrated cast, headlined by Michael Weinius and Miina-Liisa Värelä.

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act III

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act II

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act I

From the creative mind of acclaimed director Peter Sellars comes his very first a cappella staging and most personal work to date. Orlando di Lasso, writing in the late 1500s, knew that Lagrime di San Pietro was to be the last piece he would ever compose, so he packed every measure with an emotionally charged texture that channeled his pain and remorse into a towering work of beauty. With the music committed to memory, the 21 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale—widely recognized as the country’s leading professional choir—transform this sweeping Renaissance work into a breathtaking experience. Modern English translations are projected above the stage, while lighting design by James F. Ingalls and costume design by Danielle Domingue Sumi complement Sellars’ dramatic staging.

Los Angeles Master Chorale: Lagrime Di San Pietro (tears Of St. Peter)

Let there be light! We begin our season with Haydn’s grand celebration of the dawn of life. With a libretto that draws on Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, this mysterious and dramatic work will transport you to a time before time itself, followed by an explosion of sound that vividly illustrates the creation of Earth. It all adds up to what Grant Gershon calls “one of the most joyous and life-affirming works ever written.”

Haydn's Creation

As part of the Pan-American Music Initiative, Gustavo Dudamel—a lover of choral music whose mother was a voice teacher—leads arresting choral music from North, South, and Central America. Featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Mexican Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, who Gramophone hailed for their “tour-de-force of subtle and forceful artistry,” this wide-ranging program includes Gabriela Ortiz’ musical telling of the 16th-century liberator of slaves in Veracruz in Yanga and Villa-Lobos’ mysterious and heart-rending Chôros No. 10. Opening the concert is a sublime piece composed by the late José Antonio Abreu, founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema and mentor to Dudamel.

Dudamel Leads Songs of the Americas

Beethoven’s towering Ninth—the composer’s revolutionary exaltation of equality and humanity—rings through the Hollywood hills, led by the Chief Conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra with marvelous vocal soloists and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Beethoven's Ninth at Hollywood Bowl

The B-minor Mass is a monumental testament to Bach’s artistry; its sheer power astounds us, and its beauty brings us to tears. Bach spent his final years composing and compiling a lifetime’s worth of his most powerful music into this single work which Robert Shaw called “the most remarkable musical allegory of human existence–its pain, aspiration and promises.”

Bach's B-minor Mass

2005 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World — soprano Nicole Cabell — joins force with conductor Grant Gershon on Les illuminations, a song cycle by Benjamin Britten.

Les Illuminations

Written when Beethoven was completely deaf, his epic Ninth Symphony has become the go-to composition for people to celebrate joy and our common humanity. The creativity that erupts through the first three movements achieves an ecstatic climax at the finale when voices are added. To begin the evening, Dudamel gives world premieres of music by Peruvian-born composer Gonzalo Garrido-Lecca and Francisco Cortés-Álvarez from Mexico.

Dudamel Conducts Beethoven’s 9th

Relationships are hard work. Especially when it's between a prisoner of war and her captor. Oh, and their love has to remain a secret (for obvious reasons).  Verdi's epic drama Aida returns to our stage for the first time in 16 years, in a sensational production starring Latonia Moore and Russell Thomas. Director Francesca Zambello conjures a gorgeous world where hieroglyphics by the L.A.-based artist RETNA create a striking backdrop to the timeless story. Expect to be further blown away by a huge chorus and orchestra, a ballet, and beautiful music that's both intimate and heroic in this grandest of grand operas.

Aida

Los Angeles Music Center

Pittance is pleased to present this special evening featuring the complete Liebeslieder of Johannes Brahms, for vocal quartet and piano four hands. Members of the LA Opera Chorus - mezzo-soprano Melissa Treinkman, tenor Edmond Rodriguez and baritone James Martin Schaefer, are joined by soprano Elissa Johnston, with LA Opera conductors Grant Gershon and Jeremy Frank moonlighting on piano four hands.

Liebeslieder

First United Methodist Church

Gustavo Dudamel leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a deeply emotional, innovative new semi-staged production of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, created for both Deaf and hearing audiences. Told through the composer’s music sung by hearing vocalists and the expressive gestural poetry of sign language by Deaf actors, the performances explore the search for communication—both primal and sublime—that is at the heart of all artistic expression.  Premiered in 1805 as Beethoven was reckoning with his own Deafness, Fidelio is a tale of triumph over oppression as the noblewoman Leonore goes undercover to daringly rescue her husband from political imprisonment. Dudamel conducts the LA Phil and a star-studded cast in a groundbreaking event directed by Alberto Arvelo, co-directed by Joaquín Solano and produced in collaboration with Los Angeles’ acclaimed Tony Award®-winning Deaf West Theatre (Artistic Director, David Kurs) and El Sistema’s Coro de Manos Blancas (White Hands Choir, Artistic Director, María Inmaculada Velásquez).

Dudamel Conducts "Fidelio"

With the voices of the LA Master Chorale and an international cast of soloists, Zubin Mehta leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Mozart’s stirring unfinished masterpiece. Though we don't know why Mozart stopped composing it, the Great C-minor Mass is considered one of the finest and most ambitious examples of his sacred music.

Mozart’s Great Mass with Mehta

Two extraordinary settings of sacred texts demonstrate the range of spiritual expression made possible through music. Handel’s Dixit Dominus, one of the composer’s earliest works, is full of vocal fireworks and virtuosity reflecting the composer’s youthful passion. Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum is music of profound humility and faith, conveying inner peace through the resonance of the human voice. Shimmering new works from Ko Matsushita and Galina Grigorjeva round out the program.

Handel / Pärt

Awe-inspiring in its complexity, universal in its appeal, Bach's St. Matthew Passion is considered by many to be the single greatest masterpiece of western sacred music, a profoundly moving depiction of the final days of the life of Jesus. John Neumeier, the celebrated choreographer who made his LAO debut with Orpheus and Eurydice in 2018, returns to Los Angeles with one of his signature creations, a ballet that has been cheered by audiences throughout the world.  Marrying the powerful music and narrative with dance in complete harmony, Neumeier fills the stage with unforgettable movement and images. The extraordinary dancers of the Hamburg Ballet join forces with James Conlon, a team of brilliant vocal soloists, and LA Opera's formidable orchestra and chorus for a spellbinding, deeply meaningful performance you'll never forget.

St. Matthew Passion

Taking its title from the famous African American Spiritual, this eclectic concert explores themes of homecoming and aspiring towards paradise. Earlier this year, we premiered a short film of Derrick Skye’s, a piece which, in the artist's words, "sonically and visually interprets the process of gaining release from restraint using the mind, body, soul, and voice". After being postponed from our 2019–20 season, this breathtaking new commission will finally receive its live debut. We're also thrilled to present world premieres by two brilliant composers— Saunder Choi and Dale Trumbore.

City Called Heaven

Although Mozart didn’t dictate his Requiem to Salieri from his deathbed as depicted so dramatically in the film Amadeus, the younger composer was indeed gravely ill and did not live to finish this beloved masterpiece. But what does remain is such glorious music that we can’t do without it. Our Hungarian guests and their marvelous music director take their leave sharing one of the greatest of all Requiem settings.

Mozart Requiem

Close Quarters Season One Finale! Guest conductor Grant Gershon and the musicians of LACO wrap up the 2020/2021 season in spectacular fashion with Tchaikovsky’s beloved Serenade for Strings. Fully embracing the rich grandeur of this enduring masterpiece, we have assembled the largest ensemble of LACO musicians since February 2020, closing this extraordinary season with a note of joy and optimism. This culminating episode of Close Quarters is laced with a poignant visual tone poem that reflects the diverse artistic family that LACO built through the series and chronicles Los Angeles’ emergence from the global pandemic

Tchaikovsky Serenade

The world premiere of <em>Hyo</em>, from 2021 Sound Investment composer <strong>Peter S. Shin</strong>, performed at the Newman Scoring Stage at Fox Studio Lots.

2005 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World — soprano Nicole Cabell — joins force with conductor Grant Gershon on Lumee’s Dream from Ellen Reid’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, p r i s m.

"Lumee's Dream" from p r i s m

In honor of Beethoven’s 250th birthday, this concert boasts a fabulous mix, from the composer’s radical Egmont Overture and Second Piano Concerto with Javier Perianes to the inspiring Prisoner’s Chorus from his only opera and his celebrated Choral Fantasy that served as a precursor to his Ninth Symphony – all concluding in a rare performance of Wellington’s Victory.

Beethoven’s 250th Birthday Concert Celebration

Gustavo Dudamel ignites the Bowl’s classical season with the mother of all power choruses. Carl Orff’s iconic score sets a sequence of irreverent medieval texts with ear-beguiling melodies and brightly colored orchestration. 

Dudamel Conducts Carmina Burana

When the world wants to celebrate big, it turns to Beethoven’s last completed symphony, one of the supreme achievements in Western music. His visionary aspiration of all mankind in unity has inspired millions all over the world since its premiere, which was completely unheard by the deaf composer except in his imagination. The concert begins with a world premiere by young Pulitzer winner and singer Caroline Shaw, which, perhaps surprisingly, is for instruments alone.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Beginning with an intense scene of a hero’s funeral, Mahler’s huge Second Symphony transports us on a remarkable journey, delving deep into life and death from every possible perspective, from terrifying to transcendent. As Beethoven did in his Ninth, Mahler adds voices near the end, barely audible at first, but then ringing out along with massive orchestral forces in a towering climax, as the soul is raised into immortality.

Dudamel Conducts Mahler’s 2nd

Carl Orff’s blazing magnum opus, Carmina Burana, tops a super-powered program that begins with Beethoven’s intriguing hybrid – a free-form piano concerto, played by Emanuel Ax, mixed with a preview of the “Ode to Joy” – all led by the delightful Bramwell Tovey.

Carmina Burana | Led by conductor Bramwell Tovey

Dudamel leads one of Verdi’s supreme masterpieces, whose larger-than-life anti-hero will be played by leading American tenor and Verdi-specialist Russell Thomas in this special concert performance.

Grant Gershon

Conductor, Artistic Director

Events

6 - 7 Apr, 2024

I Believe: The Music of Bach, Bonds & Robles · Los Angeles Master Chorale

Feb 7, 2024

Los Angeles Master Chorale, staged by Peter Sellars · Royal Conservatory

Dec 18, 2023

Messiah Sing-Along · Los Angeles Master Chorale

Dec 18, 2023

Carols on the Plaza · Los Angeles Master Chorale

Dec 17, 2023

Handel's Messiah · Los Angeles Master Chorale

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