{"id":18404,"date":"2026-05-30T12:57:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T16:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=18404"},"modified":"2026-06-04T13:02:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T17:02:16","slug":"conlon-laopera-flute-cvna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/conlon-laopera-flute-cvna\/","title":{"rendered":"After 20 Magic Years, James Conlon To Exit LA Opera With \u2018Flute\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Classical Voice North America<\/a><\/p>\n

By Richard S. Ginell<\/p>\n

PERSPECTIVE \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s L\u2019Histoire du soldat.<\/p>\n

You can bet it never occurred to me that nearly 30 years later, I would be contemplating the legacy of Conlon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Harding appraisal, of course, will come at another time. Meanwhile, the Conlon years, which will end June 21, when he leads Mozart\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Credit Pl\u00e1cido Domingo \u2014 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 \u2014 for bringing Conlon on board. Conlon readily acknowledged his debt to Domingo when I met with him over hot chocolate at the Colburn Caf\u00e9 in late April.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thrilled to be invited by Pl\u00e1cido,\u201d he said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t have a lot of history in California. I\u2019d been to the (Hollywood) Bowl a few times in the `70s, and I hadn\u2019t been back to the LA Phil for over 20 years. I never expected to spend 20 years here.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd Pl\u00e1cido 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.\u2019 I liked everybody here, I liked the atmosphere. And so, you know, I dug in right away.\u201d<\/p>\n

He certainly did. The tireless Conlon seemed to be everywhere at once.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 or any opera at all. He would lace his talks with humor; for example, when discussing the \u201cBridal Chorus\u201d from Lohengrin, he would note that everyone has heard this tune before, \u201csome of you several times!\u201d<\/p>\n

Off the campus, Conlon gave speeches to any organization that would have him. Over at the city\u2019s 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\u2019s Noah\u2019s Flood and continuing with commissions of new operas that followed Britten\u2019s 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. \u201cI only know how to be one kind of music director, and that\u2019s hands-on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As for repertoire, Conlon came into the job with two conditions \u2014 and they were big ones. \u201cHe (Pl\u00e1cido) certainly knew what he wanted, but he was also happy to let somebody else thrive, and he let me thrive,\u201d he said. \u201cSo a lot of my ideas actually got realized, especially in the early years.\u201d<\/p>\n

First, Conlon wanted to make LA Opera into a Wagner house. Before his time, LA Opera \u2014 still a relatively new company, having been founded in 1986 \u2014 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 \u2014 and if you closed your eyes, it sounded terrific, with a good cast and rich, propulsive orchestral playing.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cI hate this production,\u201d while a USC professor proclaimed it a brilliant example of Brechtian alienation theater. Although it was never revived and, to Conlon\u2019s regret, there have been just three Wagner productions since, LA Opera nevertheless proved that it was capable of producing a Ring, thus fulfilling Conlon\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n

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, \u201c`Look, I don\u2019t know anything about this music, but if you tell me it\u2019s good, I\u2019ll believe you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So under LA Opera\u2019s umbrella, the campaign was named \u201cRecovered Voices,\u201d and it immediately bore some fruit in Conlon\u2019s first season with Kurt Weill\u2019s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and a concert performance of Alexander Zemlinsky\u2019s A Florentine Tragedy. These were followed by a double bill of Viktor Ullmann\u2019s The Broken Jug and Zemlinsky\u2019s Der Zwerg, Walter Braunfels\u2019 The Birds, and the most lavishly beautiful score of all, Franz Schreker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

When the grant for \u201cRecovered Voices\u201d ran out, Conlon retreated to the nearby Colburn School where he continued \u2014 and will continue \u2014 to give lectures and conduct neglected scores under the handle that, for copyright reasons, has been renamed \u201cMusic Restored.\u201d The company even managed to revive Der Zwerg on the main stage in 2024, now coupled with William Grant Still\u2019s Highway 1, USA as an extension of the project to include Americans who ran into discrimination.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese (Wagner and \u2018Recovered Voices\u2019) were the two major subjects that I wanted Pl\u00e1cido to buy into,\u201d said Conlon. \u201cThen I said, `And then, thereafter, I didn\u2019t want to do anything else except function the way I\u2019ve 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).\u201d<\/p>\n

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

From Classical Voice North America By Richard S. Ginell PERSPECTIVE \u2013 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\u2019s Piano Concerto No. 23 with soloist … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3613,4401,7503],"class_list":["post-18404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conductor","tag-james-conlon","tag-la-opera"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18404","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=18404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18405,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18404\/revisions\/18405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/1168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}