October 7, 2021

Gustavo and LA Phil make long-awaited return to Walt Disney Concert Hall

On October 9, 2021, Gustavo and the LA Phil will kick off the 2021-22 Season with a Homecoming Concert and Gala, a very special event that will mark the first time in 579 days that they have performed on stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The program features vocalist Cynthia Erivo and pianist Seong-Jin Cho, as well as the world premiere of Kauyumarii, a new work for orchestra by composer Gabriela Ortiz. The new piece begins Ortiz’s one-year curatorship of the multi-year Pan-American Music Initiative (PAMI), celebrating the explosive creativity of music found across the Americas that will run throughout the season.

Looking ahead, the 2021-22 Season continues with programs that reflect on the profundity of our cultural moment by examining themes of life, death and transcendence in music. Gustavo explores the richly colored, harmonically searching music of the late Romantic era in its metamorphosis into modernism (October 14–17). Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night will be paired with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs—featuring soprano Golda Schultz—and Death and Transfiguration.

Gustavo conducts the orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 (featuring soloist Camilla Tilling) on a program combining it with the world premiere of Steven Mackey’s LA Phil-commissioned Shivaree: Fantasy for Trumpet and Orchestra, featuring soloist Thomas Hooten, as well as Jessie Montgomery’s Strum (October 21-24).

Throughout the rest of the 2021/22 season, Gustavo conducts a dozen wide-ranging programs, including the world premiere of Thomas Adès’ complete Dante as part of the Gen X Festival (April 2022), two world premieres by Gabriela Ortiz, Pan-American Music Initiative programs in Spring 2022 that pair Stravinsky’s major ballet scores (The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, The Firebird) with ballet and film scores by Ginastera (Estancia), Villa-Lobos (Uirapuru), and Revueltas (La noche de los Mayas) and a season-capping Power to the People! festival in Spring 2022 that includes the world premiere of a new work for orchestra by Angélica Negrón, alongside William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.”

For more information on the October 9 Homecoming Concert and Gala, visit the LA Phil website.