EGN NEWS DESK
The yr 2026 will mark James Conlon’s twentieth anniversary as music director of the Los Angeles Opera. That appeared to him like it might be the fitting time to step down.
“I’ve had 20 years — that’s a superb spherical quantity,” Conlon, 73, stated in a phone interview. “I wish to cease once I’m at my full capability and I would like to have the ability to go on loving the corporate the best way I do.”
His last season, the 2025-26 season, will coincide with the corporate’s fortieth anniversary, and Conlon stated that he “needed to be there to have a good time that with them.”
“It will imply I’ll have been there for half of its historical past,” stated Conlon, who has led greater than 460 performances of 68 totally different operas there, greater than another conductor.
Conlon shall be named the opera’s conductor laureate, which the corporate stated could be in recognition “of his distinguished tenure and contribution to Los Angeles Opera and the group at massive, and in acknowledgment of the mutual intention for Conlon to return to the corporate as a visitor conductor.”
Christopher Koelsch, the opera’s president and chief government, praised Conlon’s musical management and stated that there was “one thing elegant in regards to the timing” of his departure, coinciding because it does with each anniversaries. He added that the transition “presents a possibility for us as a company for a unique perspective and generational change.”
It shall be a transformational second for classical music in Los Angeles: 2026 can be the yr that Gustavo Dudamel will depart the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the New York Philharmonic.
L.A. Opera is already in a second of transition. Plácido Domingo, who was instrumental in its creation, reigned for many years as its main star and served as its normal director, stepped down in 2019 amid allegations of sexual harassment.
As to what the opera shall be in search of in Conlon’s successor, Koelsch stated, “Someone who has the same evangelism for the artwork kind and a Twenty first-century standpoint on what which means.”
Conlon, who shall be 76 when he steps down, stated he isn’t retiring, and that he plans to proceed as a visitor conductor in Los Angeles and elsewhere, commit time to private objectives (“I nonetheless wish to see the Taj Mahal and I’d prefer to go on safari”) and to proceed to concentrate on music training.
“The most essential disaster going through classical music is we’re all combating for an viewers,” he stated, including that he “might be very persuasive in engaging individuals who really feel afraid of classical music to not be inhibited by these huge buildings that seem like fortresses.”
Education has been an indicator of Conlon’s tenure. Before performances he talks audiences via key moments of every opera, lectures captured on the corporate’s “Behind the Curtain” podcasts and YouTube channel.
Highlights of his tenure in Los Angeles embody the corporate’s first staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle; a “Figaro Trilogy” that featured Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles”; “Britten 100/LA,” which celebrated the centennial of the composer Benjamin Britten’s beginning; and a efficiency of “The Anonymous Lover,” a hardly ever seen opera by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a outstanding Black composer in 18th-century France.
Conlon has performed at many main opera homes around the globe, together with the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Paris Opera, the place he was the principal conductor.
He has persistently sought to deliver consideration to composers suppressed by the Third Reich with efforts like “Recovered Voices,” which has introduced uncared for operas to the stage of Los Angeles Opera since 2007.
“If you’re a superb music director, it means you’re actually devoted,” Conlon stated. “That has at all times been my function and objective — to be a superb music director.”
