Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil tune up for their ‘dream’ gig at Coachella
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On Tuesday afternoon, the spring heat crackled over a near-empty Hollywood Bowl. The L.A. Phil had pulled down a sun visor over the stage for their rehearsals, where music and artistic director Gustavo Dudamel led the orchestra through a few heavy-hitter moments of their upcoming set this weekend.
On Saturday evening, the Phil will trek out to new ground. They’re finally playing the other verdant, globally recognized outdoor music venue that embodies the Southern California idyll — the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
For Dudamel, 44, who arrived in L.A. 17 years ago to lead the Phil, playing Coachella was “a dream, ever since I started here” he said in an interview backstage at the Bowl.
It’s surprising that the two dominant music institutions of Southern California had never formally teamed up onstage before with an original set. But as Dudamel prepares to make his emotional exit to lead the New York Philharmonic next year, the timing was especially poignant.
“I think we were always waiting to see who would take the steps to say, ‘Let’s do this,’” he said about performing at Coachella. “It’s wonderful because of all the work that we have done at the Hollywood Bowl, playing every summer with so many artists with different styles. I think the road took us to this moment, to celebrate all of these years in such an iconic place where classical music is not usually part of the message.”
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The L.A. Phil is no stranger to pop music collaborations, and orchestras have appeared at Coachella before (film composer Hans Zimmer had an especially memorable set in 2017). But this first-time crossover continues a long tradition of the Phil’s music directors sharing mutual curiosity with the city’s other flagship music industries.
“It starts with Zubin Mehta decades ago. He left a piece of him with the L.A. Phil that we still embrace today. He performed with Frank Zappa, so he kind of broke that boundary,” said Meghan Umber, the L.A. Phil’s chief programming officer. “He started the first John Williams concert at the Hollywood Bowl. And then Esa-Pekka Salonen brought new music and all these composers and crazy ideas to the L.A. Phil. Then Gustavo just ripped the gates open.”
“Gustavo has been in this position for 17 years, and I think we started talking about Coachella 17 years ago,” added Johanna Rees, vice president of presentations. “Frankly, I feel like we waited for the perfect time.”
For Dudamel, a Venezuelan who famously came out of that country’s vanguard El Sistema youth music program, and who opened his L.A. tenure with a free Bowl concert introducing the new Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, it fits with his lifelong value of bringing classical music to young audiences.
This performance “represents a journey of making music accessible to everybody, but also creating a culture where people don’t feel that classical music is far away, not part of their lives,” he said. “What we want is for that old music to embrace this moment.”
After chaotic few post-COVID Coachella years at the pop headliner level — Kanye West and Travis Scott cancellations, Frank Ocean’s divisive one-night return — there is something counterintuitively buzzy about seeing the city’s flagship orchestra on the same stages.
Coachella founder Paul Tollett “obviously does such creative, unexpected things in the desert for this festival,” Rees said. “You don’t even know until you get there. So it was super exciting that people would only see this once, over two weekends. There’s going to be people out there discovering an orchestra — what it looks like, sounds like, the emotional impact. I would say the majority probably are experiencing that for the first time.”
A golden era at the Los Angeles Philharmonic approaches its end as the organization announces its final season under Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel before he departs for the New York Philharmonic.
Some pop-friendly guests, like the EDM composer Zedd and Icelandic jazz phenom Laufey, will join the Phil for one-off collaborations. While much of the program is under wraps, the rehearsals suggested a bombastic mix of festival-primed classical music and big swings across nearly every other genre at Coachella.
“It was a dream come true when Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic, arguably the best orchestra in the world, reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in performing ‘Clarity’ live with them on the piano, in the midst of some of the greatest compositions of all time,” Zedd told The Times in an e-mail. “As many of you may know, classical music has been a huge part of my life. At my fifth Coachella, bringing this special song to life in such an epic, cinematic way is just surreal.”
Dudamel sounded enthused as well about the sequencing challenge, how to grab and hold a festival crowd who might be passing the orchestra en route to the bass-soaked Sahara Tent.
“We made this amazing arrangement, which goes through Strauss’ ‘Also sprach Zarathustra,’ Beethoven’s ‘5th,’ John Williams, Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird,’ it’s all there,” he said. “It’s the desire to really connect and make a journey that is well balanced. The classical piece that we play is inside of the song that they’re singing after.”
The orchestra, sadly, won’t have much time to stick around for the weekend’s revelry (they’ve got Vivaldi sets at Disney Hall the nights before and after).
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But there might be a pang of melancholy in the crowd too, among fans seeing the eminently charismatic Dudamel conducting at Coachella just as he wraps up his era-defining tenure in L.A.
While he’ll be moving to take the music and artistic director job at the New York Philharmonic, he’ll leave Los Angeles as a uniquely open-minded, accessible and ambitious global capital for orchestral music — a legacy that any Phil successor will surely have in front of mind.
“This will forever be my family, always,” Dudamel said. “But it’s a high point where we have arrived, working with so many artists and making that a part of our identity.”
“Gustavo will not have the same title with us anymore, but that doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning that,” Umber said. A spirit of collaboration is “now built into our core in a way that we’ll always embrace.”
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” Rees added. “We’re getting into another phase, but all of the artists who are participating, he’s talking about all these ideas with them. I mean, some of the artists are ready to go on tour with him now.”
This big-hearted set also arrives at a fraught moment for the arts in America, as stalwart institutions like the Kennedy Center have suddenly been bureaucratically gutted and stained by culture war rhetoric from the Trump administration.
This Coachella gig will be a glamorous evening playing to 125,000 rowdy young fans. But it’s also an argument for how immigration can invigorate and inspire creation, including from countries such as Venezuela that have come under fire from the American government.
It’s proof of the arts’ resonance in all corners of American life, that new and diverse crowds can be moved by an orchestra, and vice-versa.
“You see that art, especially in difficult moments, plays a very important action in healing,” Dudamel said. “People are trying to divide us. In complex situations, we speak what we believe through the music that we have the chance to play. Art is important because it heals, it educates, it gives a space of inspiration for people. In any context — difficult, good, happy, sad, terrible, wonderful — that’s important.”
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