LA Phil 100 gala concert. Performed 2019 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gustavo Dudamel, Zubin Mehta, and Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Here is the program:
Wagner, Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Ravel, La Valse
Lutosławski , Symphony No. 4
Stravinsky, The Firebird Suite (1919 Version)
Bjarnason, From Space I Saw Earth (World premiere performance)
Also features The Los Angeles Philharmonic - The Tradition of the New, a documentary by Laszlo Molnar. Concert recording directed for TV by Michael Beyer. Produced by Bernhard Fleischer. Released 2020, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA
Andrew Mellor says in the August 2020 Gramophone (page 43) that this was an appropriate program for the LA Phil to commemorate the 100th year birthday of America’s most “forward-looking orchestra”: no baroque or classical music at all, 3 early modern works, and 2 major contemporary pieces commissioned by the orchestra itself. The older commissioned piece is the Lutosławski Symphony No. 4 from 1992. And the Bjarnason From Space I Saw Earth was played for the first time to the public as recorded for this title. It gets better. The Bjarnason might be the first piece for a major orchestra requiring three conductors working simultaneously with different sections of the band. Who says today’s audience will not sit still for contemporary classical music!
The three conductors were, of course, the 3 living music directors for the LA Phil: Zubin Mehta, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Gustavo Dudamel. In the trailer below you can see each of them conducting solo and all three working together in the Bjarnason number, which Mellor describes as “music of the spheres, colossal planetary rotation, the grandest of grand gestures cast in . . . galactic orchestral upholstery.” Wow, Andy must have had three beers before he dreamed that up!
The only drawback would be that this title was recorded by Michael Beyer, whom we have bumped out of orbit a colossal number of times for making symphony videos hopelessly ravaged by galactic levels of pandemic DVDitis. With 3 conductors, how can the video director not take too many conductor shots? Well in the clip below, even after ignoring all the multiple-conductor segments, we counted 18 clips marred by DVDitis and only 5 of the kind of clips we like to see. Of course, friends of the LA Phil and Mr. Bjarnason will buy this title as a souvenir. But even that suggests this title will be a disappointment of deep-field scope to us discerning fans of symphony HDVDs. I hope I’m wrong.
Here’s a clip from C Major:
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