Uncertainty

SAN DIEGO — José E. Feliciano, the new controlling owner of the San Diego Padres, lives in Los Angeles. You know, that place at the end of the Padres’ incessant “Beat L.A.” chants.

No worries, Padres fans. Feliciano is — make that was — a longtime New York Yankees fan.

“The good thing is,” he told me after an introductory news conference Monday, “rooting against the Dodgers comes naturally to me.”

It was only 18 months ago that Padres fans wondered whether the good times might come to an end, with the widow of beloved owner Peter Seidler suing his brothers for control of the team. For their part, the brothers said they had “no plans to sell the Padres.”

That sounds a lot like what Dodgers president Stan Kasten said Friday, amid a federal investigation into alleged financial improprieties among insurance companies controlled by Dodgers owner Mark Walter.

“The Dodgers are not being sold,” Kasten said. “They’re not going to be sold.”

What is true today might not be true tomorrow. What is true today, as potential bidders for the Dodgers lurk and coalesce amid L.A.’s turn at uncertainty, is that the Padres have an energetic and effervescent couple as their new principal owners.

Feliciano, a founder of Clearlake Capital in Santa Monica, took the mound at Petco Park on Monday afternoon, working out of a stretch and looking toward an invisible runner at second base before delivering a pitch. In spring training, he said, he stepped into the batting cage to try to hit simulated pitches from Padres All-Star closer Mason Miller.

His wife Kwanza Jones, an artist and entrepreneur, led her husband into the news conference amid the sounds of a song she co-wrote, she said, inspired in part by a catch made by Padres outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr.

“My only musical talent is my name,” Feliciano said. “I humbly ask you to please add my middle initial so I never get confused with the singer.”

As the couple looks for a home in San Diego, Jones appealed to fans to share what they love about their neighborhoods. Later, the couple took selfies along the first-base line.

New San Diego owners Kwanza Jones, center, and José E. Feliciano, right, speak at a news conference with Padres Chief Executive Erik Greupner at Petco Park on Monday.

(Greg Beacham / Associated Press)

Their enthusiasm bubbled forth as the news conference proceeded, as their sense of whether the Padres might finally win a World Series got more and more optimistic.

Feliciano, three minutes into the news conference: “We cannot promise we are going to win.”

Jones, two minutes later, riffing off her lyrics, her voice rising: “We gonna win! We gonna win! We gonna win — win it all!” And then a pause, to lower her voice: “We hope it’s sooner rather than later.”

Feliciano, two minutes later: “We need to win a World Series. It’s that simple. That’s what we’re going to do.”

Jones, one minute later: “Multiples.”

Feliciano, one minute later: “The impossible becomes possible when somebody does it. So let’s do it.”

This is not Feliciano’s first foray into professional sports. Clearlake Capital is the majority owner of Chelsea, the storied soccer club.

“I’m missing the first game of the Premier League right now,” Feliciano said.

He said he could not comment on reports Walter is looking to sell his stake in Chelsea. Two weeks ago, Walter announced an agreement to sell controlling interest in the Lakers at a $12.5-billion valuation, the cash from which could help repay loans under scrutiny. The Dodgers could command a similar valuation, industry sources not authorized to discuss the issue publicly told The Times, should Walter decide to sell.

As part of a search for cash, Puck reported last week, Walter had talked with Charter Communications about whether the company would be interested in paying a lump sum now to get out of its SportsNet LA contract — a money-losing deal for Charter, but the primary source of the Dodgers’ financial advantage over the other 29 teams in the major leagues.

The talks “went nowhere,” Puck reported. Kasten declined to address the matter, as did a Charter spokesman.

In 2011, with the Dodgers headed toward bankruptcy, former owner Frank McCourt found what he believed would be his financial lifeline in a television rights deal with Fox Sports.

In a withering letter to McCourt, then-commissioner Bud Selig rejected the deal, criticizing McCourt for proposing a financial structure that would have foreclosed the Dodgers from pursuing more lucrative options “because of your desperate need for immediate cash.”

That precedent could inform how Rob Manfred, the current commissioner, would evaluate any proposed restructuring of the Dodgers’ television deal. Under the owners’ current collective bargaining proposal, to which Walter agreed, the Dodgers’ annual television riches — more than $500 million per year by the end of the deal in 2038 — would be fully contributed toward revenue sharing among all 30 teams.

I asked Feliciano whether the Dodgers’ uncertainty might make this a particularly opportune time to buy the Padres.

“You’ve got to look at these things on a generational, multi-decade basis, honestly,” he told me. “It’s like trying to time a great investment in the market. You can’t.

“What I can tell you is that this is the good time — the best time — for us. I think it also coincides with Peter’s legacy: The team is in a great place, the city is in a great place.”

The Dodgers’ revenue advantage remains significant, not just because of their SportsNet LA deal but because they fill the largest stadium in the majors almost every night and employ Shohei Ohtani.

In San Diego, however, where ticket sales represent the largest source of team revenue, the Padres sell more tickets than any major league team besides the Dodgers. Petco Park already is a year-round concert venue and event center, and the Padres could rekindle plans to develop a large parking lot near the ballpark.

And, if owners emerge from collective bargaining with a salary cap or other restraint on the Dodgers’ spending, that would be a win for San Diego.

On the field, the Padres entered play Monday with 21 victories in their past 28 games. The Padres acquired Robbie Ray and Casey Mize at the trade deadline to bolster a patchwork rotation, and they retained Miller and Adrian Morejon rather than break up a mighty bullpen. Tatis leads the National League with 12 home runs since the All-Star break; outfielder Jackson Merrill has 11.

“As we have seen the last few weeks, we are very competitive. I feel we are one of those teams — us and the Phillies, probably — that nobody wants to play,” Feliciano said.

“We want to keep it that way.”

The Phillies entered play Monday on a nine-game winning streak, in position for one of the National League wild cards. The Padres also are in position for an NL wild card, keeping alive the possibility that the Dodgers and Padres could meet in the NL Championship Series.

If that happens, it won’t matter how many games the Dodgers finished ahead of the Padres during the regular season.

“We’d just need to win four,” Feliciano said.

Beat L.A., indeed.

Salzburg, Austria — “Optimism doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine,” the Belarusian flutist and political activist Maria Kalesnikava said in this year’s Salzburg Festival keynote address. “It means deciding to step up and act, even in the face of uncertainty.”

Picture-perfect, Mozart-drunk Salzburg can’t pretend everything is fine. Temperatures are rising and normally rainy Salzburg now worries about water shortage and the environmental ravage of over-tourism. The artistically and culturally exceptional six-week Salzburg Festival, which began mid-July with a two-week Ouverture Spirituelle this year titled “miserere” (mercy), is facing its own political and administrative turmoil and uncertainty.

Salzburg’s worries are our worries; its triumphs can be ours as well. Los Angeles and the Salzburg Festival have been cultural and political soulmates for close to a century, beginning when playwright, director and filmmaker Max Reinhardt, who co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920, found mercy in L.A. as refuge from the Nazis.

Reinhardt’s star-studded 1934 music-theater production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl offered a template for spectacle in the young amphitheater, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s participation crucially reinforced a young orchestra’s early venturesome ambition following an avant-garde Bowl season the previous summer that nearly bankrupted the Bowl. Over the next decade this Salzburger’s influence on Hollywood dramaturgy would become legend.

L.A. has reciprocated by sending our visionaries to Salzburg, where director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, for instance, have been given the license and means to inspire a reinvention of musical and theatrical thinking. L.A. arts patrons Betty Freeman and Richard Colburn provided important support for Salzburg during their lifetimes that included commissioning new work.

Gustavo Dudamel conducts Strauss’ ‘Alpine Symphony’ with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg Aug. 25, 2024.

(Marco Borrelli / Salzburg Festival)

Gustavo Dudamel, L.A. Phil’s optimist these 17 seasons, has long been a Salzburg regular as well, and he arrived last week just in time to take up Kalesnikava’s challenge. Her proclamation of optimism comes on the heels of her having been released in December from a brutal Belarusian prison for supporting an opposition candidate running against the country’s authoritarian leader.

In Dudamel’s case, his life has been turned around by the recent earthquakes that devastated Venezuela just two weeks after his last concerts in Walt Disney Concert Hall as L.A. Phil music and artistic director. His activities this summer now revolve around partnering with the United Nations Development Program to gather global support for Venezuela’s recovery, which is estimated at $6.7 billion.

Although little noted, Dudamel’s buoyant World Cup halftime appearance with 20 members of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and 20 from the New York Philharmonic was as a FIFA fundraiser supporting children affected by global crises, in this case earthquake relief in Venezuela. Dudamel has further turned his last Hollywood Bowl program as L.A. Phil music director into a benefit on Aug. 23.

Prophetically, Dudamel had months ago been invited to close this summer’s Ouverture Spirituelle by leading the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection.” One way to think about Mahler’s extravagant 90-minute exercise in his search for life’s meaning is as an exercise in attaining optimism in the face of tragedy.

“Rise again, yes, you shall rise again,” Mahler extols in a final ecstatic climax, and it is with the “Resurrection,” which includes chorus and a pair of vocal soloists, that Dudamel began his “Gracias Gustavo” L.A. Phil season last fall. Raising roof, the message was clear: optimism is the native language of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In Salzburg, where Dudamel’s two Vienna Philharmonic performances were dedicated to the people of Venezuela, those lines took on obvious new meaning. Earlier in the day, Dudamel gave a public talk with a lively German journalist, Marco Frei, in which he described himself as a “resurrectionist” in more ways than one.

The symphony has been a been a musical and spiritual guide for him since his boyhood. He became so excited about a new sense of freedom he feels in the second movement that he leaned back in his chair and kicked his white sneakers in the air.

After the talk, I walked with Dudamel back to his hotel as he displayed a different, more solemn passion describing the toll the earthquakes have taken on El Sistema, the Venezuelan youth program that has been behind his educational activism in L.A.

“At least 140 members of the El Sistema staff and educators were killed or are unaccounted for,” Dudamel said, and that’s not counting what may have happened to a great many children and their families. But remarkably, Dudamel noted, in places where few structures remain, the nucleos (the small El Sistema community schools) are surprisingly still standing. They have become centers for food, aid and shelter.

In Salzburg, Dudamel indulged the Vienna Philharmonic’s incomparable lushness, those plush strings, glowing winds, golden brass, voluminous timpani. The symphony received mixed reviews, with critics complaining of a lack of transparency, argument and depth. Had they been in Disney Hall, they would have had it all.

But here Dudamel became more simply an architect of awe, unfazed by Mahlerian uncertainty as he worked his way to an inevitable cosmic grandeur unfazed by uncertainty. An enthralled audience left opening its collective wallets. Ushers stood at all the exits of Great Festival Hall with baskets for donations for Venezuela. I did not see a single member of the audience leave without throwing in a bill or several.

Dudamel’s “Resurrection” might also be read as a message from L.A. to Salzburg. In the spring the festival board dismissed its artistic director of the past decade, Markus Hinterhäuser, saying there is a difference in vision. Hinterhäuser’s penetrating and uncompromising vision is what has made the modern festival matter. Hinterhäuser has implied political meddling.

It is a huge festival, with more than 200 performances. Last year’s audience exceeded 200,000, with visitors from 88 countries. The arts as a vehicle for coming together can be cliché. In Salzburg, sharing becomes essence, not the kind of narcissism that appears to be adopted by our upcoming LA28 cultural Olympiad, in which Angelenos are invited to submit entrees that show off our goods rather than a cultural exchange.

Over 100 artists have protested Hinterhäuser’s removal, including two Nobel Prize laureates. Hinterhäuser is also an insightful pianist, and he joined baritone Matthias Goerne in a chilling performance of Schubert’s existential song cycle, “Winterreise.” Hinterhäuser got thunderous ovations.

Salzburg’s future is anyone’s guess, but even with Hinterhäuser on the sidelines, this summer is still his festival, meaningful as ever.

A new production of “Carmen” could not be darker, nor more brilliant. It is the latest project of conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has worked extensively with Peter Sellars in Salzburg and elsewhere, and who brings electricity to every moment with his Utopia Orchestra and Choir. Argentine choreographer Gabriela Carrizo makes her debut directing opera and utilizes her alarmingly vibrant Belgian dance company, Peeping Tom. Performing in a vast empty space, two gripping singers — Asmik Grigorian plays an understated Carmen as a survivor in a hostile society, while Jonathan Teltelman’s Don José is unable to cope with that society — turn Bizet’s opera into revelatory existential theater in which survival is toleration.

A scene on the moon in director Yuval Sharon’s magical new production of Janacek’s neglected opera “The Excursions of Mr. Broucek to the Moon and the 15th Century” at the Bregenz Festival.

(Daniel Ammann / Bregenz Festival)

Something similar happens in “Faust, Part 1,” in which the actors spend the entire four hours in a new production by German director Ulrich Rasche walking against the direction of of a revolving disc. To remain in front of the audience, they must remain in motion. They’re dressed in modern business attire, but as they bare their souls, they bare their torsos as they step against forces that prevent progress. The backdrop is brightly illumined screens that hurt your eyes.

This, however, can serve as a reminder of a “Faust” staged by Reinhardt at the Pilgrimage Theater (now John Anson Ford Theater) when it was designed to look like the gates of ancient Jerusalem in 1935. Practically all of Hollywood celebrity showed up for what was the theatrical event of the season.

I asked Lukas Crepaz, who directs the Salzburg Festival’s administrative and business operations, whether it would be possible and whether there still is time for the Salzburg and L.A. to collaboration on an opera production. He said yes, if funding could be found. In fact, the L.A. Phil will mount in February “One Morning Turns Into an Eternity,” a Salonen/Sellars essay in intensity from Salzburg last summer.

Another option: The Bregenz Festival, also in Austria, has just staged a new production by Yuval Sharon of Janacek’s little-known opera, “The Excursions of Mr. Broucek to the Moon and the 15th Century.”

Sharon — who was responsible for the fabulous excursions of his L.A. experimental company, the Industry — supplies his characteristic wit, imagination and insight into a hard-to-please opera about a beer-besotted philistine landlord, who comes to no good in his drunken dreams of going to the moon and back in history, as he does as an angry old man stumbling home from the bar or sitting watching TV (Sharon’s invention).

L.A. optimism may matter more to Austria this summer than it does to L.A. We have two years to step up and act, even in the face of uncertainty.

In Venezuela, the focus has shifted from rescue to rebuilding three weeks after devastating earthquakes killed at least 4,829 people. But for many affected communities, uncertainty remains over how and when the government’s reconstruction plan will take shape.

WASHINGTON — The House Appropriations Committee has approved $875 million to fund public transportation for the 2028 Olympic Games, a positive sign for LA28 after the exclusion of Olympics transit funding from President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget request this spring.

The funding must be passed by Congress in a future spending bill — part of a lengthy 2027 budgeting process that is underway now — but its approval in committee last week is a crucial signal of investment from Washington after weeks of uncertainty.

“We are encouraged by the House Appropriations Committee’s action,” spokesperson Maya Pogoda of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said in a statement, “and we look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the White House to make America’s Games the best ever in history.”

LA Metro has sought $2 billion in federal funding for the planned transit service for the Games, which includes leasing buses, hiring drivers and building temporary depots. With the clock ticking to start projects that require significant lead time to be completed before the Games, the absence of any funding in Trump’s budget request in April had raised concerns among lawmakers and other stakeholders.

In recent weeks, the transit authority, the city and LA28 had publicly pressed for federal funding; LA28 Chief Executive Casey Wasserman reportedly met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in April.

“The House Appropriations Committee’s most recent transportation bill is another positive signal of the continued bipartisan support in Congress to provide federal transit money for the Games,” LA28 spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez told The Times.

The inclusion of the funding in the bill conveyed bipartisan support for the Games, an event that Trump — who places an outsize importance on displays of patriotism — is likely to want to see go well during his tenure.

“This is on the American stage,” said former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who was on the City Council during the 1984 Olympic Games. “The success of the Games are the success of the country.”

The Olympics item was included in the fiscal year 2027 transportation funding bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee last week. In its report, the committee noted that the funding is intended for all host cities, including those outside California.

“The 2028 games will put our nation on center stage, and this investment will help ensure that we are prepared to meet the moment and showcase why the United States is the best country in the world,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who chairs the subcommittee that put forth the bill, said in a statement.

The Games in Los Angeles are expected to draw massive crowds and will be the first Summer Olympics held in the United States since Atlanta hosted in 1996. More than 4 million tickets were sold during LA28’s first ticket release; a second ticket drop is coming in August.

The massive event requires federal involvement not just on funding but also on issues including athlete visas and the import of Olympic horses.

LA Metro has planned to lease 1,700 buses from transit agencies across the country, build three temporary transit depots and create dedicated traffic lanes for athletes, officials and others as required by the International Olympic Committee. Metro estimates that 1 million additional trips per day will be taken during the 16-day Games.

It’s crucial for federal funding to come through in a timely manner, Yaroslavsky said, particularly given the scope of the security and transportation considerations for the sprawling Games.

“The city and the LA28 committee need to know that this money is going to be made available,” Yaroslavsky said. “This has to be in place long before the Games start.”