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No one needs reminding that 2025 began in an L.A. aflame. Musicians didn\u2019t escape the fires<\/a>, especially in Altadena. Concerts were canceled but then became events of communal healing, a process that continues.<\/p>\n There were further troubling signs. Institutions continued to struggle to bring audiences back to pre-COVID numbers. Major orchestras and opera companies \u2014 San Francisco Symphony, Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony, among them \u2014 feared fraught contract negotiations. Government funding for the arts dried up. Censorship, new to modern America, appeared a threat. And a military presence on downtown L.A. streets made trips to the Music Center and elsewhere in DTLA less inviting.<\/p>\n Our picks for this year\u2019s best in arts and entertainment.<\/p>\n Still, classical music\u2019s survival instincts proved reliable. New leaders of L.A.\u2019s arts institutions are bringing vitality to the region, empowering musicians and giving fans hope and optimism. Here are my Los Angeles classical music highlights of 2025. <\/p>\n Coachella phenom of the year<\/p>\n It has been a year of transition for Gustavo Dudamel. The long \u201cGracias Gustavo\u201d goodbye to the Los Angeles Philharmonic music and artistic director has begun. For its part, the New York Philharmonic, where Dudamel is headed next season, wonders how it can ever top the L.A. Phil visit to Coachella <\/a>in April. Pop music crowds, 100,000 strong, shouted, \u201cL.A. Phil! L.A. Phil!\u201d and \u201cGustavo! Gustavo!\u201d Big cheers rang as well at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and on an Asia tour<\/a>, particularly for Dudamel\u2019s increasingly rich Mahler performances. In late winter he led an impressive Mahler Grooves festival; the summer brought an exhilarating performance of Mahler\u2019s First Symphony<\/a> and the fall an extraordinary Second Symphony.<\/p>\n Gustavo Dudamel onstage April 12 at the 2025 Coachella festival in Indio, where he conducted the L.A. Phil.<\/p>\n (Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Orchestral visionary of the year<\/p>\n In his own transitional year, Esa-Pekka Salonen finished an unhappy five-year tenure as music director of a San Francisco Symphony that foolishly failed to share his vision with a startlingly dramatic Mahler Second<\/a> \u2014 known, tellingly, as \u201cThe Resurrection.\u201d That was followed three months later by the L.A. Phil announcing it was all in with its transformative former music director and had created a new position of creative director <\/a>in which he would rethink the role of the symphony orchestra in society. As a preview, Salonen had conducted a revelatory performance of Pierre Boulez\u2019s \u201cRituel\u201d in the spring, with the L.A. Phil musicians and L.A. Dance Project dancers spilling around the Disney Hall stage.<\/p>\n Dancers from L.A. Dance Project perform as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the L.A. Phil in Pierre Boulez\u2019s \u201cRituel\u201d on May 11 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. <\/p>\n (David Swanson \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n L.A. opera director of the year, although you\u2019d never know it in L.A.<\/p>\n Peter Sellars was barely home in 2025, although that is certain to change with the return of Salonen. Among his newsworthy projects in New York, France and Italy, a busy Sellars collaborated with Salonen on an unflinching, intense and unforgettable staging of two end-of-life monologues: Schoenberg\u2019s \u201cErwartung\u201d and, with yet more Mahler, the end of \u201cDas Lied von der Erde.\u201d On opening night, it left a gala audience stunned.<\/p>\n Former L.A. opera director of the year, although you\u2019d never know it in L.A.<\/p>\n L.A.\u2019s next-generation opera revolutionary, Yuval Sharon, bid his own farewell to the city where he founded the experimental company the Industry, and where he became L.A. Phil\u2019s first artist collaborator. He now serves as artistic director of Detroit Opera and has relocated to New York City as he prepares to mount Wagner\u2019s \u201cTristan und Isolde\u201d at the Metropolitan Opera in March. But Sharon carried L.A. with him in 2025 to the University of Chicago, where he delivered the annual Berlin Family Lectures, and in which he considered opera from an anarchistic point of view, inspired by John Cage. He also staged in Chicago Cage\u2019s \u201cEuropera 5,\u201d completing a project he had begun in L.A., where, in collaboration with the L.A. Phil,\u201d he had mounted \u201cEuroperas 1 & 2\u201d on a Sony Pictures sound stage.<\/p>\n Uncompromising opera administrator of the year<\/p>\n While serving as interim managing director of Long Beach Opera in 2025, board chair Marjorie Beale put her company on the line by boldly devoting the entire season<\/a> to the open-ended, deep listening<\/a> music of the late Pauline Oliveros. While Oliveros worked little in opera and never in a remotely traditional manner, Beale felt the spiritual operatic substance of Oliveros\u2019 work was what the company needed and what the world needs. Inspired, unexpected productions by the company\u2019s artistic director and chief creative officer, James Darrah, and conducted by music director Christopher Rountree were staged in operatic byways (parks and the Queen Mary) as ear-opening, mind expanding experiences. It was a sell-out sensation season that may not have paid the bills, requiring some cutting back for next season as the company catches its breath but Beale has shown what it means to stand for something and why Long Beach Opera matters.<\/p>\n Wilding Wild Up<\/p>\n Along with his Long Beach Opera gig, Rountree is founder and music director of Wild Up, the avant-garde chamber orchestra of virtuoso musicians, all of whom happen to be progressive composers as well. For 15 years, Wild Up has been a crucial component in the grander L.A. vision of orchestral, operatic and dance reinvention. This year it found infectious joy in the music of Julius Eastman; it significantly helped the Martha Graham Dance Company <\/a>remain relevant, and it began new series at the Nimoy in Westwood and Sierra Madre Playhouse.<\/p>\n More Pauline<\/p>\n Claire Chase, who has been one of the most influential instigators of the Pauline Oliveros revival, was this year\u2019s Ojai Festival<\/a> energizer bunny. Her flutes \u2014 from piccolo to bass and all in between \u2014 and friends became magic makers in this numinous physical and musical landscape. Oliveros\u2019 deep listening and that of other composers of her environmental ilk, particularly the atmospherically ethereal sound worlds of Annea Lockwood, were made for Ojai.<\/p>\n Mark Morris Dance Group performs the world premiere of \u201cMoon\u201d at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater on April 4.<\/p>\n (ximena brunette \/ xmbphotography)<\/p>\n Saving the Kennedy Center (for a couple of days, anyway)<\/p>\n Choreographer Mark Morris staved off the federal government\u2019s arts wrecking ball by salvaging his latest work, \u201cMoon,\u201d a commission for the Kennedy Center\u2019s Earth to Space festival in April. The institution\u2019s dance team hadn\u2019t yet been fired. And Morris displayed, in this marvelous outer-space dance adventure, that wonder could exist in what had become the most unlikely of places. <\/p>\n Handel Heroine<\/p>\n French harpsichordist and conductor, Emmanuelle Ha\u00efm, the latest L.A. Phil artist collaborator, began a three-year Handel festival<\/a> with a dazzlingly sung and played performance of the oratorio \u201cTriumph of Time and Disillusion.\u201d This study of extravagance and sanctity made Handel seem utterly relevant in his attempt to thwart early 18th century censorship and say something important.<\/p>\n Mehta and MTT<\/p>\n There are no words for what Zubin Mehta and Michael Tilson Thomas have meant for L.A. over the past three-quarters of a century. Native Angeleno and former music director of the San Francisco Symphony, MTT, who suffers from glioblastoma, retired from conducting with an 80th birthday celebration<\/a>, hosted by the San Francisco Symphony, in a profoundly moving and musically fulfilling exhibition of valedictory resilience. Although Mehta<\/a>, the L.A. Phil\u2019s 89-year-old conductor emeritus, has canceled concerts that require travel, he took on Bruckner\u2019s massive Eight Symphony with his old band. His movements are limited. He reportedly has difficulty with vision and hearing. Beyond all that, though, an orchestra that knows and loves him brought into existence, especially in the slow movement, an inner Mehta vista that felt like a world unto itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No one needs reminding that 2025 began in an L.A. aflame. 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