gustavo dudamel

No one needs reminding that 2025 began in an L.A. aflame. Musicians didn’t escape the fires, especially in Altadena. Concerts were canceled but then became events of communal healing, a process that continues.

There were further troubling signs. Institutions continued to struggle to bring audiences back to pre-COVID numbers. Major orchestras and opera companies — San Francisco Symphony, Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony, among them — 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.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

Still, classical music’s survival instincts proved reliable. New leaders of L.A.’s 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.

Coachella phenom of the year

It has been a year of transition for Gustavo Dudamel. The long “Gracias Gustavo” 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 in April. Pop music crowds, 100,000 strong, shouted, “L.A. Phil! L.A. Phil!” and “Gustavo! Gustavo!” Big cheers rang as well at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and on an Asia tour, particularly for Dudamel’s increasingly rich Mahler performances. In late winter he led an impressive Mahler Grooves festival; the summer brought an exhilarating performance of Mahler’s First Symphony and the fall an extraordinary Second Symphony.

Gustavo Dudamel onstage April 12 at the 2025 Coachella festival in Indio, where he conducted the L.A. Phil.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Orchestral visionary of the year

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 — known, tellingly, as “The Resurrection.” 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 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’s “Rituel” in the spring, with the L.A. Phil musicians and L.A. Dance Project dancers spilling around the Disney Hall stage.

Dancers from L.A. Dance Project perform as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the L.A. Phil in Pierre Boulez’s “Rituel” on May 11 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

(David Swanson / For The Times)

L.A. opera director of the year, although you’d never know it in L.A.

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’s “Erwartung” and, with yet more Mahler, the end of “Das Lied von der Erde.” On opening night, it left a gala audience stunned.

Former L.A. opera director of the year, although you’d never know it in L.A.

L.A.’s 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’s 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’s “Tristan und Isolde” 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’s “Europera 5,” completing a project he had begun in L.A., where, in collaboration with the L.A. Phil,” he had mounted “Europeras 1 & 2” on a Sony Pictures sound stage.

Uncompromising opera administrator of the year

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 to the open-ended, deep listening 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’ work was what the company needed and what the world needs. Inspired, unexpected productions by the company’s 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.

Wilding Wild Up

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 remain relevant, and it began new series at the Nimoy in Westwood and Sierra Madre Playhouse.

More Pauline

Claire Chase, who has been one of the most influential instigators of the Pauline Oliveros revival, was this year’s Ojai Festival energizer bunny. Her flutes — from piccolo to bass and all in between — and friends became magic makers in this numinous physical and musical landscape. Oliveros’ deep listening and that of other composers of her environmental ilk, particularly the atmospherically ethereal sound worlds of Annea Lockwood, were made for Ojai.

Mark Morris Dance Group performs the world premiere of “Moon” at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater on April 4.

(ximena brunette / xmbphotography)

Saving the Kennedy Center (for a couple of days, anyway)

Choreographer Mark Morris staved off the federal government’s arts wrecking ball by salvaging his latest work, “Moon,” a commission for the Kennedy Center’s Earth to Space festival in April. The institution’s dance team hadn’t 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.

Handel Heroine

French harpsichordist and conductor, Emmanuelle Haïm, the latest L.A. Phil artist collaborator, began a three-year Handel festival with a dazzlingly sung and played performance of the oratorio “Triumph of Time and Disillusion.” This study of extravagance and sanctity made Handel seem utterly relevant in his attempt to thwart early 18th century censorship and say something important.

Mehta and MTT

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, hosted by the San Francisco Symphony, in a profoundly moving and musically fulfilling exhibition of valedictory resilience. Although Mehta, the L.A. Phil’s 89-year-old conductor emeritus, has canceled concerts that require travel, he took on Bruckner’s 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.

The street was very quiet. The moon, full. The ocean in the background, calm. All the lights inside were on as I walked by a Santa Monica house, when I thought I heard the famous theme from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Bach wrote this for a certain Herr Goldberg seeking serenity to put him to sleep.

The music was in my head or, if you are willing to get spiritual about it, in an unidentifiable ether. Inside the house, another Mr. Goldberg, one who changed his name to Frank Gehry as a striving young architect having moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, lay dying, leaving the realm he had remade like no one else in our time. Gehry died on Friday at age 96 following a brief respiratory illness.

The “Goldberg Variations” was Gehry’s favorite work. He loved its otherworldliness and its worldliness. He loved its invitation to dance and to dream. He loved its astonishing sense of design, complex yet flowing with the ocean’s grace, its depth and its inviting surface. He loved that it was unfathomable. All things that have come to describe Gehry.

I once spent a day in Gehry’s office where we had takeout salads for lunch and talked for several hours about the “Goldbergs.” He had been asked by Princeton University Press to contribute to a book in which 26 artists and writers wrote about a piece that meant something special to them. But Frank — he was Frank to all Angelenos — couldn’t put it in words. He only agreed if it could be a discussion.

Everything for Frank was a discussion — an ongoing discussion between a building and its place, between a building and all who saw it and used it. And the discussion between Frank’s buildings and music was on an exalted level. He will be well-lauded around the globe for his art and architecture, but beyond all that, Frank Gehry did more than any other single individual in the 21st century to benefit music.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, which was built for and by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and opened in 2003 was, of course, his crowning achievement. I watched it go up from the old Times building downtown, which offered a perfect view, and witnessed how attitudes changed as people who had thought this was some kind of crazy thing started to fall head over heels for it. Attending daily orchestra rehearsals the summer before the hall opened, I discovered for the first time the essence of great architecture: Simply walking into a building made you feel good.

We’ve just had no better example of how that has never gone away with the Dodgers’ World Series victory parade on Grand Avenue last month. It was not Dodger Stadium, not City Hall, certainly not L.A. Live, that was chosen for the city’s first occasion of collective joy this difficult year.

Disney is the most spectacular example of what Gehry’s halls have meant for music. But every one has made a huge difference to the art form, to music and musicians and audiences, to our youth and to our institutions. His buildings are meant for imagination while amplifying tradition. They guide us to the next step.

When it comes to Disney, that has been incomparable. In the mid 1990s, when fundraising had stalled, the city all but gave up on the hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen, then-L.A. Phil music director, decided to step down. But he was convinced to stick it out for a bit longer by the orchestra’s visionary head, the late Ernest Fleischmann, who was a close friend of Gehry and who had connived a mostly hostile Music Center board into choosing Gehry over more conventional name architects. Through more conniving, the hall got built.

Disney, with stunning acoustics, proved both a place of modernity for a new millennium and one of the world’s most acoustically engaging venues. It is very new and very traditional, and the best of both worlds. Its promise helped bring Deborah Borda to the orchestra as Fleischmann’s successor, and she and Salonen created in it the most vibrant, progressive and successful major orchestra in this country and beyond.

Disney then became the place where Gustavo Dudamel could grow into the venturesome conductor he has become. Dudamel would have become great wherever he landed, but it was Disney where he had the greatest opportunity for adventure. For Gehry, Salonen and Dudamel became family (Dudamel dubbed him “Pancho”). Of all his buildings, other than his home, Disney is the one Gehry spent the most time in, regularly attending concerts.

This is a story told to some degree wherever Gehry built for music. His hall at Bard College became a venue for the most imaginative summer music festival in country. Education, in fact, has been at the heart of Gehry’s musical activities (when it came to music, he considered himself a student to the end). He turned an abandoned bank and burger joint into the celebrated Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood and was eager to build more (all pro bono). The Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin was his gift to Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from Israel and Arab countries.

Gehry’s latest musical masterpiece, the 1,000-seat Colburn Center, is currently going up across the street from Disney. After taking a hard-hat tour of it last month, I excitedly called Frank and predicted it would be a game changer for downtown. He then took a hard-hat tour and happily agreed.

There is much that Gehry was not able to realize. He had more plans for Disney, the Music Center and Grand Avenue. He has designed an opera house for Abu Dhabi, and wherever in the world he was building he was also asking about abandoned warehouses he could inexpensively turn into a YOLA center.

But the revolution Gehry began in creating spaces where music can be made and re-imagined and brought to life in ever new ways has caught on. Every concert hall that gets built these days, whether in Moscow or Munich, has to think about these things. In the meantime, let’s all listen to the “Goldbergs” to honor, full moon or crescent, our great and lasting Goldberg of music.