Los Angeles is famous for many things, for Hollywood stars and Hockney’s blue pools, for ambition and sunshine. What is perhaps less well known is that Los Angeles is one of the best places in the world right now, if not the best place, to hear classical music.
This was certainly news to me. I have been going to LA nearly every year for the past decade — my sister lives there — and in that time we have done many things. We have hiked the Hollywood Hills, been to the beach, to the Getty Museum, stood in Keanu Reeves’s shoe prints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We’ve been to thrift markets and Korean spas, tattoo parlours and Pilates studios, drunk a lot of coffee and eaten a lot of avocado. But we had never been to a classical music concert. And yet the LA Philharmonic is one of the most acclaimed orchestras in the world. Since 2009 its director has been the celebrated Venezuelan conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel, who will be leaving for New York in 2026. And this is just one of the many classical music options available in the city. “LA is secretly one of the greatest culture cities in the whole world,” says Meghan Umber, the chief content officer of the LA Phil. “It’s not right in your face, the way it is in London or Berlin, you just have to look a little bit further.”
So for this year’s LA trip I decided to look that little bit further.
LA’s cultural centre is downtown, so it was there that I located myself, at the swish Conrad Hotel with its rooftop pool. Most thrilling was the view from my hotel picture window — the elegantly complex stainless steel edifice, somehow suggesting the deconstructed prow of a ship, that is the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the LA Phil and the LA Master Chorale. It opened in 2003 and the Douglas fir and oak-clad concert hall interior, designed by Minoru Nagata, claims peerless acoustics. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is part of a cultural hub that also includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, home of the LA Opera; the Broad, a museum of contemporary art that has just announced a £80 million expansion project; and the Colburn School for music and dance, which broke ground on a new Gehry-designed concert centre in Easter.
“The Colburn hall is going to be beautiful,” says Umber. “It will have about a thousand seats, a total jewel box, and it’s going to be such a nice pairing with Disney Concert Hall, because we don’t have a theatre like that downtown. There is such an explosion of art being made and music being heard in LA right now.”
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The music scene in LA has a long and impressive history, traceable in part to the influx of Jews fleeing the Nazis during the 1930s and the Second World War. One of those was Arnold Schoenberg, the modernist composer from Vienna who invented atonality. He played tennis with George Gershwin and taught music to John Cage. “We are very lucky to have this living history of all these amazing composers and artists who came to LA during what was of course a very difficult time in world history,” Umber says. “But it created a gorgeous and really rich culture here. Stravinsky was here, Korngold. It was these amazing artists who kick-started the LA culture scene. I mean, to have Rachmaninov around the corner for a while, it changes the ethos of a place.”
Of course the LA Phil still has some exciting neighbours, like John Williams, the composer and conductor behind the Star Wars and Harry Potter theme tunes. “John has been connecting almost continuously with the LA Phil for the last 50 years,” Umber says. “And there are a lot of other film composers, like Ludwig Göransson [the Swedish composer who won Oscars for Black Panther and Oppenheimer].” Bradley Cooper also spent a great deal of time with the LA Phil while he was preparing for his role as Leonard Bernstein in the film Maestro. “He’s a lovely guy,” Umber says. “It was really fun to have him backstage, he is really passionate about Bernstein, so he had all these questions about how Gustavo does what he does.”
This cultural richness is evidenced by the programming. While I was in LA I attended a gorgeous evening of Arvo Pärt, Elgar and Vaughan Williams by the LA Phil. As well as an exuberantly thrilling staging of La traviata at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with its terrace of fountains and pop-up champagne bars. LA’s opera-lovers were there in their full regalia, gowns and tiaras, giving the performers a five-minute standing ovation — a glorious sight my sister, who has lived 20 minutes away in Silver Lake for 15 years, had never previously experienced. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma had been performing with the LA Phil the evening before I arrived, and the jazz musician Herbie Hancock would be playing after I left. I was also sad to miss the series of Kraftwerk concerts, with the German pioneers of electronic music playing a different album each night. “Any night of the week you will be able to hear classical music in LA,” Umber says.
The weird thing was that once I had begun engaging with the LA’s music scene I seemed to encounter it everywhere. When I went with my sister to her yoga studio, Modo Yoga, halfway through the class the teacher, Anita, began singing Sanskrit sutras — it turned out she was a classically trained singer. And when I went to the Huntington Botanical Gardens, my absolute favourite place in LA, with its extraordinary cactus gardens, lily ponds and library of rare historical texts, I chanced upon Rene Ren Jian Wu, former musician with the Beijing Dance Academy Orchestra, playing the erhu, a two-stringed spike fiddle introduced to China in roughly the 10th century. She was sitting in a wooden pavilion in the Liu Fang Yang (the Garden of Flowing Fragrance), playing to a group of rapt garden visitors. It felt like we had been transported to a different time and place altogether.
The city abounds with these smaller, more site-specific music happenings. “There are lot of great creators who do things that aren’t so traditional,” says Umber. “Like Yuval Sharon and his company the Industry, which is most famous for the opera he produced in cars. It was unreal, almost like choose-your-own-adventure. You would buy a ticket for a different route and you would be transported around downtown LA in small groups for different scenes. Sometimes you would get in a limo and there would be a singer in there with you and they would take you to some gorgeous building you had never been to before where there would be a whole scene of the opera — it was an amazing feat.” Sharon has just staged a new piece in LA, The Comet/Poppea, which combined Monteverdi’s 1643 opera The Coronation of Poppea with a WEB Du Bois short story, The Comet, and was staged at Geffen Contemporary at Moca, another Gehry-designed building, this one a contemporary art museum in a former police car warehouse in Little Tokyo. Other interesting music venues include 2220 Arts. “It’s this little club in Silver Lake, it’s just a really cool little venue, with awesome programmes,” says Umber, and includes performances by the conductor Chris Rowntree’s new music ensemble, Wild Up.
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But back at the the LA Phil, where Dudamel’s final season is being planned. “We are having a Mahler festival for 2025,” Umber says. “Gustavo has titled it Mahler Grooves. In the 1970s Mahler was actually not really popular, but there were these neon orange bumper stickers which just said ‘Mahler grooves’. Leonard Bernstein put one of these stickers in his score to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, and we started looking around to find where these stickers were produced and it turns out they were made by the LA Mahler Society, which existed purely to advocate for Mahler’s music and bring it back into the mainstream. So our whole Mahler festival has this very fun retro LA vibe to it.’ As well as the big concerts, other happenings are planned, like Mahlerthons and vinyl-listening sessions. “It’s really capturing the spirit and creativity and history of classical music in LA,” Umber says.
I know what I will be doing when I return next year.
A night at Conrad Los Angeles starts from £350 per night. For more information, see discoverlosangeles.com
