James Conlon
After 20 Magic Years, James Conlon To Exit LA Opera With ‘Flute’
From Classical Voice North America
By Richard S. Ginell
PERSPECTIVE – One afternoon in July 1997 while on vacation, I made a drop-in visit to Tanglewood, just for fun. First, I snuck into a rehearsal in the Koussevitzky Shed, where James Conlon was leading the Boston Symphony in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 with soloist Ignaz Solzhenitsyn. When that finished, I hiked over to the then-new Seiji Ozawa Hall and found Daniel Harding, then just 21, rehearsing Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat.
You can bet it never occurred to me that nearly 30 years later, I would be contemplating the legacy of Conlon’s 20 years as music director of Los Angeles Opera and the ascension of Harding as the next Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, all in the same week. Funny how life sometimes works out.
The Harding appraisal, of course, will come at another time. Meanwhile, the Conlon years, which will end June 21, when he leads Mozart’s The Magic Flute in his final performance as music director, has been a transformative time for LA Opera, a period in which the 76-year-young conductor gave more of himself to the city than just about any musical figure one can name.
Credit Plácido Domingo — the great tenor, conductor, mover, and shaker whose crucial role in the founding, development, and eventual running of LA Opera has been, alas, mostly wiped from view by allegations of unwanted sexual advances — for bringing Conlon on board. Conlon readily acknowledged his debt to Domingo when I met with him over hot chocolate at the Colburn Café in late April.
“I was thrilled to be invited by Plácido,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it. It was not a time in my life where I was thinking about taking another big job at an opera house. I didn’t have a lot of history in California. I’d been to the (Hollywood) Bowl a few times in the `70s, and I hadn’t been back to the LA Phil for over 20 years. I never expected to spend 20 years here.
“And Plácido said to me several times over the years, `I was hoping you would come for only a few years, give it the kind of electricity we needed. I never expected you to stay.’ I liked everybody here, I liked the atmosphere. And so, you know, I dug in right away.”
He certainly did. The tireless Conlon seemed to be everywhere at once.
Not content to simply prepare the works at hand and wave the stick in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion pit, Conlon started giving entertaining, highly informative lectures before each performance, conducting podcasts, and writing long, erudite essays in the program book and online about the operas. The lectures turned out to be popular attractions in their own right, always filling the lobby on the second floor of the Chandler Pavilion to standing-room capacity.
Conlon never talked down to his audience; rather, he invited them into his world, always asking for a show of hands of how many folks had seen this or that opera — or any opera at all. He would lace his talks with humor; for example, when discussing the “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin, he would note that everyone has heard this tune before, “some of you several times!”
Off the campus, Conlon gave speeches to any organization that would have him. Over at the city’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels down the block from the Music Center, he conducted annual free performances of audience-interactive operas, starting with recurring outings of Britten’s Noah’s Flood and continuing with commissions of new operas that followed Britten’s model. Children would scamper around the big room as part of the show, and Conlon would rehearse the audience in their choral lines with the same commitment as he would for the LA Opera Chorus. “I only know how to be one kind of music director, and that’s hands-on,” he said.
As for repertoire, Conlon came into the job with two conditions — and they were big ones. “He (Plácido) certainly knew what he wanted, but he was also happy to let somebody else thrive, and he let me thrive,” he said. “So a lot of my ideas actually got realized, especially in the early years.”
First, Conlon wanted to make LA Opera into a Wagner house. Before his time, LA Opera — still a relatively new company, having been founded in 1986 — had done a handful of Wagner productions that attracted some national attention, like the David Hockney-designed Tristan und Isolde and Robert Wilson-staged Parsifal, but very little else. Conlon wanted more. He wanted a Ring cycle, and one was already on the drafting board by the time he started the job. He got his Ring in 2010, with a city-wide Ring Festival LA built around it — and if you closed your eyes, it sounded terrific, with a good cast and rich, propulsive orchestral playing.
But the director of that Ring was the German Bertolt Brecht disciple Achim Freyer, who delivered an abstract, tech-happy, never-never-land of repellent aliens on some Planet X where the audience was never encouraged to care a whit about any of the characters. The $31 million production nearly bankrupted the company, and the reaction was hopelessly mixed among critics and even the performers. One distinguished member of the cast told me in confidence, “I hate this production,” while a USC professor proclaimed it a brilliant example of Brechtian alienation theater. Although it was never revived and, to Conlon’s regret, there have been just three Wagner productions since, LA Opera nevertheless proved that it was capable of producing a Ring, thus fulfilling Conlon’s mission.
Secondly, Conlon wanted to continue his ongoing campaign for music by composers who were persecuted by the Nazis, driven into exile, or killed in the camps. Conlon recalls Domingo saying, “`Look, I don’t know anything about this music, but if you tell me it’s good, I’ll believe you.’”
So under LA Opera’s umbrella, the campaign was named “Recovered Voices,” and it immediately bore some fruit in Conlon’s first season with Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and a concert performance of Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy. These were followed by a double bill of Viktor Ullmann’s The Broken Jug and Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, Walter Braunfels’ The Birds, and the most lavishly beautiful score of all, Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, a U.S. premiere and the first time any Schreker opera had been staged in the Western Hemisphere. All except Florentine Tragedy were recorded and released on DVDs, or, in the case of Gezeichneten, on CDs, further establishing this company as a pioneer in broadening the operatic repertoire.
When the grant for “Recovered Voices” ran out, Conlon retreated to the nearby Colburn School where he continued — and will continue — to give lectures and conduct neglected scores under the handle that, for copyright reasons, has been renamed “Music Restored.” The company even managed to revive Der Zwerg on the main stage in 2024, now coupled with William Grant Still’s Highway 1, USA as an extension of the project to include Americans who ran into discrimination.
“These (Wagner and ‘Recovered Voices’) were the two major subjects that I wanted Plácido to buy into,” said Conlon. “Then I said, `And then, thereafter, I didn’t want to do anything else except function the way I’ve seen the best music directors function and to have their hand on a vast amount of repertoire. And I was thinking specifically of James Levine (at the Metropolitan Opera).”