Gustavo Dudamel and James Conlon Exit L.A.

If Dudamel’s track record with the mainstream repertory has been irregular, Conlon’s has been remarkably consistent.Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller; Source photographs by Jack Vartoogian / Getty; Dale Wilcox / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Frank Gehry died on December 5th of last year, at the age of ninety-six. My father had passed away five days earlier, at the same age, and under the circumstances I was unable to write the tribute that Gehry’s death demanded. The gist of it would have been that Gehry was the greatest builder of concert halls of modern times. Recently, the architect has been on my mind again, as I’ve been making weekly visits to Disney Hall, his silver-winged masterpiece, to hear some of Gustavo Dudamel’s final concerts as the music director of the L.A. Philharmonic. Other halls may have a richer, more reverberant acoustic, although Disney’s is still uncommonly fine. Certainly, many have a longer, grander history; Disney opened in 2003. But it is a place where tradition and modernity achieve equilibrium—where both Beethoven and Meredith Monk feel at home. The space encourages boldness; at the same time, it possesses, as the architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has commented, a “warmheartedness,” a “small-d democratic sensibility.” It’s the hall I’ve come to love more than any other: music’s mellow citadel.

A few years ago, I visited Gehry at his studio, in Santa Monica. When I blurted out my fondness for Disney, he responded, in his impish way, “Tell them to let me do more concert halls!” Aside from Disney, he had built the Beckmen YOLA Center, for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles; the Fisher Center, at Bard College; the New World Center, in Miami; and Pierre Boulez Saal, in Berlin. Gehry showed me a model of a new hall, which was then in the planning stages and is now nearing completion: a music-and-dance complex for the Colburn School, down the hill from Disney. The other day, I received a hard-hat tour of the site. The exterior is less theatrical than Disney’s, its shape rectilinear rather than curvaceous, yet a pink hue adds the requisite Gehry jazz. The main auditorium, which will seat up to a thousand people, promises to replicate the vertiginous intimacy of Boulez Saal, with an oval balcony encircling the orchestra level and cloud-shaped panels floating above. Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry’s wizardly acoustical collaborator, is looking after the sonics; Craig Webb, the partner at Gehry’s firm who specializes in concert halls, is overseeing the design. When the Colburn center opens, next year, it will complement the big space up the hill, presenting local and touring groups alongside the school’s own artists.

The L.A. Phil paid tribute to Gehry in January with a concert titled “Music for Frank.” The pianist Víkingur Ólafsson played the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, nodding to the fact that Gehry was born Ephraim Goldberg, in Canada. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Dudamel’s predecessor as the orchestra’s music director, offered his own score “Wing on Wing,” in which Gehry’s voice is heard rumbling in the background. Herbie Hancock conjured what sounded like a lost Debussy Prélude. Dudamel led “Wild Nights,” from John Adams’s “Harmonium,” and the final movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. These choices reflected Gehry’s own enthusiasms in music old and new; he was a great builder of concert halls not least because he spent a good part of his life in them. Since December, I’ve missed seeing him in his usual seat in the front-orchestra section, with his wife, Berta, at his side. Yet he has been present all the same. To adapt Christopher Wren’s epitaph at St. Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek his monument, look and listen.