With Gustavo Dudamel\u2019s final season as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic reaching its homestretch, the orchestra has announced the appointment of its latest not music director. Anna Handler, a former Dudamel fellow and rapidly rising young conductor, will be given the new title of conductor-in-residence for the next three seasons.<\/p>\n
She will spend three weeks each season conducting the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as working with students at the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. In a phone call from Boston, where she serves as assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony, she says she is also strongly driven by technology and wants to explore all kinds of projects with the latest devises.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sky is the limit,\u201d Handler exclaims with the boundless enthusiasm that is said to have won over the orchestra and the administration. <\/p>\n
That might include, she further fantasizes, a technology tool you don\u2019t even notice but that focuses your attention to sound vibrations the way glasses give clarity to blurry vision. \u201cWhy not glasses for the ears?\u201d she excitedly asks.<\/p>\n
Kim Noltemy, the L.A. Phil president and chief executive, says Handler\u2019s appointment does not necessarily imply the orchestra won\u2019t ultimately find a music director who can oversee the bigger picture of the world\u2019s most artistically diverse, expansive and wealthy orchestra. But the L.A. Phil has so many fingers in so many pies that no one person can do it all.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the L.A. Phil now adds what it has been missing in what the institution calls its team of creative collaborators. As creative director,<\/a> former music director Esa-Pekka Salonen will spend six weeks a season helping envision what a 21st century symphony orchestra might look like. John Adams continues his role as creative chair as do early music specialist Emmanuelle Ha\u00efm (artist collaborator), Herbie Hancock (creative chair for jazz) and Zubin Mehta (conductor emeritus). None, however, is younger than 60. Handler turns 30 this month.<\/p>\n Born in France, she grew up in Germany and is Colombian German. Both her parents are electrical engineers, whom she says her love for technology come from. And she notes that her roots also make her feel at home with the L.A. Phil. She connects with Salonen\u2019s pioneering fascination with technology and the orchestra. With a Colombian mom, she is readily attuned to Dudamel\u2019s Venezuelan heritage. Like her, Salonen, Dudamel and Mehta first began working with the L.A. Phil in their 20s.<\/p>\n Handler\u2019s appointment came, she says, as a surprise. It was after her conducting the L.A. Phil at Disney last month that the orchestra suddenly sprang the idea of a residency beginning almost immediately with the 2026-27 season, even though the Bowl and fall seasons are already planned. Noltemy puts it to the fact that Handler and the orchestra simply got caught up in her energy. <\/p>\n Handler says she jumped at the chance to return to L.A. even though she would be beginning her first season of her first music director job at the Ulster Orchestra in Ireland. A pianist who loves chamber music (which she says will make part of her L.A. residencies), she also becomes artist in residence of the Beethoven House in Bonn, Germany. But, she excitedly exclaims, \u201cAt the L.A. Phil you can dream big. And if you have any big ideas, please tell me about them.\u201d <\/p>\n He excitement over music education and community outreach also proved a draw. At 17, she formed her own student orchestra, which performed in schools, old age homes, prisons, all over. And she points out that she is young enough to feel relatively close in age to the students at YOLA, or Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. She describes one of her missions in life as getting young people involved with classical music.<\/p>\n \u201cMy long-term dream,\u201d she proclaims, \u201cis to build a Disney World for classical music.\u201d There could be a Beethoven\u2019s Fifth ride. She imagines melody, rhythm, harmony and form as little creatures whom we follow on their journey through the piece. \u201cI\u2019m all about decoding the rhythms of the music,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n Tellingly, Handler had already been scheduled to be the first conductor to follow Dudamel\u2019s final Hollywood Bowl concert as L.A. Phil music director this summer at the iconic L.A. venue. It features Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony. Her two programs at Disney next season include West Coast premieres of Philip Glass\u2019s Symphony No. 15 (\u201cLincoln\u201d), which the composer recently withdrew <\/a>from the Kennedy Center, and John Williams\u2019 recent Piano Concerto.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Gustavo Dudamel\u2019s final season as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic reaching its homestretch,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[113222,21117,113224,113225,113226,21711,113223,48,52,51,47,50,49,31299,330,49534,10963,113227,278,1970,31448],"class_list":{"0":"post-255717","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-anna-handler","9":"tag-appointment","10":"tag-beethoven-house","11":"tag-conductor-in-residence","12":"tag-creative-chair","13":"tag-gustavo-dudamel","14":"tag-l-a-phil-president","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-los-angeles-philharmonic","22":"tag-music","23":"tag-music-director","24":"tag-orchestra","25":"tag-salonen","26":"tag-season","27":"tag-technology","28":"tag-zubin-mehta"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}