{"id":17576,"date":"2025-09-29T12:41:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T16:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=17576"},"modified":"2026-01-28T12:44:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:44:15","slug":"conductor-james-conlon-looks-back-at-20-years-with-la-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/conductor-james-conlon-looks-back-at-20-years-with-la-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Conductor James Conlon Looks Back at 20 Years With LA Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

From San Francisco Classical Voice<\/a><\/p>\n

By Jim Farber on September 29, 2025.<\/p>\n

When I sat down with James Conlon, Music Director and Principal Conductor of Los Angeles Opera, it was the morning of the piano run-through for the company\u2019s production of West Side Story. Right from the start, he wanted to make one thing crystal clear:<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not retiring \u2014 that\u2019s a rumor that has taken on a life of its own,\u201d Conlon said. \u201cOn March 13, 2024, I said, \u2018It’s been 20 years and I’m going to stop now. We’re going to celebrate my 20 years as music director along with the company’s 40th anniversary. I’ve had a great time and it’s time to pass this on to other people. I want to stop while I’m at my height.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI swear, 80 percent of the people I talked to after that said they were so sorry to hear I was retiring. That’s all anybody heard. I am absolutely not retiring! I am simply leaving a post I have held for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conlon, 75, pointed out that he has spent the last 47 years as a music director \u2014 first with the Cincinnati May Festival starting in 1979, then with the Cologne Opera starting in 1989, and with the Los Angeles Opera since its 2006-2007 season.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only time I’ve spent an entire year without getting on an airplane was during COVID,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

A lot has happened during Conlon’s 20 years with LA Opera, most of it good. His journey with the company began when the company’s president and CEO, opera singer and conductor Pl\u00e1cido Domingo made him an offer. \u201cAt the point I came to LA Opera, I had just gotten rid of two enormous jobs and was looking to cut back,\u201d Conlon recounted. \u201cMy goal was to only have to work 10 months a year. That’s what I told Pl\u00e1cido.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conlon\u2019s conditions for taking the job were that he would conduct a range of repertory, especially Wagner, and that he would institute Recovered Voices, \u201ca series of concerts and performances that would shine a spotlight on works by neglected composers whose careers, and ultimately their lives, were destroyed by the rise of Nazi Germany and the ensuing Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his inaugural season, Conlon led a stellar lineup of productions: Verdi’s La Traviata and Don Carlo, Wagner’s Tannh\u00e4user, Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, two performances of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and the premiere of Recovered Voices \u2014 a semi-staged production of Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy.<\/p>\n

The orchestra musicians quickly appreciated him, and over two decades they\u2019ve bonded. John Walz, the principal cello, remembers LA Opera prior to Conlon\u2019s tenure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe LA Opera orchestra, for many years, was a \u2018pick-up\u2019 orchestra made up of excellent players, but for more than a decade we saw a stream of guest conductors. It\u2019s not easy to establish a sense of ensemble or unity or, to be blunt, a good center of intonation, in that environment,\u201d Walz said. \u201cWith Conlon, we knew we had found a good fit. His knowledge and insight into virtually every score, and the meaning of each musical gesture makes each rehearsal a masterclass. But through all this, he\u2019s one of us. We all look forward to hanging out with him after a performance in the Dorothy Chandler\u2019s restaurant, Kendall\u2019s. He\u2019s even been known to go behind the bar and \u2018host.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The big story in 2010 was LA Opera’s intended presentation of Wagner\u2019s four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung \u2014 a saga that began years before when the company announced a planned collaboration with George Lucas’s special effects house, Industrial Light and Magic. This was to be the \u201cStar Wars Ring,\u201d but it never made the jump to lightspeed. In a series of post-mortem interviews, staff members from ILM said that LA Opera had expected a lowered rate for services in exchange for the opportunity to work with an arts organization. \u201cWe don’t work that way,\u201d was ILM\u2019s response.<\/p>\n

The project did not, however, end there. Under pressure from then director of artistic operations, the late Edgar Beitzel, The Ring was passed to German avant-garde director and designer Achim Freyer. Conlon conducted the full production between May 29 and June 26, 2010. It was a financial disaster that would hinder the company for years. The company took another financial hit from the COVID shutdown, from which it is still recovering.<\/p>\n

Throughout his tenure, Conlon has shown an athletic ability to shift gears \u2014 a skill especially useful for 20th-century and contemporary scores like John Corigliano\u2019s The Ghosts of Versailles, Jake Heggie\u2019s Moby Dick (both seen in L.A. in 2015), and West Side Story.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy job is always to convey what’s there in the score,\u201d he said. \u201cI have my body and my gestures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full interview.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From San Francisco Classical Voice By Jim Farber on September 29, 2025. When I sat down with James Conlon, Music Director and Principal Conductor of Los Angeles Opera, it was the morning of the piano run-through for the company\u2019s production of West Side Story. Right from the start, he wanted to make one thing crystal … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3613,3659,4401,3705],"class_list":["post-17576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conductor","tag-interview","tag-james-conlon","tag-opera"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17577,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17576\/revisions\/17577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/1167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}