LA Phil Unveils 2026-27 Insight Projects

The LA Phil has announced its 2026/27 Insight programs and special projects. Insight presentations take the LA Phil’s concert programming as a starting point for thematic exploration, bringing together a diverse range of guest artists and partner organizations with intellectually curious audiences. Ranging from panel discussions and performances to exhibitions and publications, Insight projects are typically offered in conjunction with festivals and multidisciplinary programming. 

This year, events are paired with programs from the monthslong Rituals festival curated by LA Phil Creative Director Esa-Pekka Salonen; concerts from the Minimalist Icons festival celebrating the music of Philip Glass, Henryk Górecki, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Arvo Pärt, Pēteris Vasks, and LA Phil Creative Chair for New Music John Adams; and presentations in the LA Phil’s trademark series for adventurous and ambitious new music, Green Umbrella. 

LA Phil President and Chief Executive Officer and David C. Bohnett Presidential Chair Kim Noltemy said, “In partnering with a broad coalition of organizations, bringing LA Phil programming to new sites and deepening our understanding of music through interdisciplinary experiences, Insight has become a unique expression of the LA Phil’s commitments to innovation and access. It is community-based work that seeks the kind of cross-cultural understanding and connection available to us through art, gathering and the power of learning.” 

Senior Programming Director Julia Ward, who oversees Insight programming, said, “Built on collaboration and motivated by a desire to build community, Insight is an amalgam of public programming, audience development and the kind of experimentation only possible at the LA Phil. The programs take many forms, from multifaceted performance activations and listening salons to art installations and monographs, while grounding our mainstage musical programming in a broader curatorial context. This season, Insight is focused on the LA Phil’s two major 2026/27 season festivals, Rituals and Minimalist Icons, and seeks to explore the purpose of ritual in contemporary life and why Minimalist music has such an outsized impact on a wide range of disciplines and cultures.' 

---

Making Meaning: Ritual in Contemporary Life 

featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars, Dimitris Xygalatas and Aparna Ramaswamy with Ranee Ramaswamy and Ashwini Ramaswamy of Ragamala Dance Company 

Saturday, February 6, 2027, at 2pm 

LOCATION: REDCAT, 631 W 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 

Humans create rituals. It is among our most basic instincts. By generating shared values, rules of behaviors, and a sense of belonging, ritual perpetuates society itself, conjuring order out of entropy and binding us to one another. 

As part of the LA Phil’s Ritual festival curated by Creative Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, LA Phil Insight and REDCAT join forces for a day-long exploration on the subject of ritual. With perspectives drawn from artistic and scientific communities, Making Meaning: Ritual in Contemporary Life examines such questions as why rituals matter, how they contribute to a meaningful life, and whether they are disappearing from our increasingly atomized society. 

Co-presented by REDCAT. 

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Sound of Place, Place of Sound 

Wednesday, February 24, 2027, at 6pm 

Location: JACCC George J. Doizaki Gallery, 244 S San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 

Produced and co-presented by JACCC, LA Phil Insight, REDCAT, Temporal Drift and Wild Up, Hiroshi Yoshimura: Sound of Place, Place of Sound is an exhibition examining the life and work of Minimalist music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940–2003), one of the most celebrated composers within the Kankyō Ongaku or Japanese environmental music genre, a categorization of atmospherically attuned ambient and experimental compositions. The exhibition’s wide-ranging, eclectic works will showcase the creative process of the Tokyo-based sound artist and composer featuring handwritten scores, performance instructions, illustrations, archival ephemera, video field recordings, photographs and a Hi-Fi listening installation featuring Yoshimura’s recordings. 

In addition to the exhibition running from February 24 through April 30, 2027, this collaborative initiative celebrating Hiroshi Yoshimura’s legacy will also feature a concert series performed by Wild Up at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Downtown Los Angeles on March 19 and 20, 2027. 

Kyle Marshall Choreography: Joan 

featuring Kyle Marshall Choreography and Seth Parker Woods 

Friday, February 26, 2027, at 7:10pm 

Saturday, February 27, 2027, at 7:10pm 

LOCATION: BP Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 151 S Grand Street, Los Angeles, CA 

Joan is a quartet celebrating power over tyranny inspired by Julius Eastman’s Minimalist score The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. The story of Joan d’Arc, a female warrior who is called by God to lead her army to victory against an occupying oppressor before being burned at the stake, is central to this dance. The legacy of the 15th-century French hero is reinterpreted to draw parallels with the history of the Maroons, Seminoles and other communities of revolutionary people who fought for their freedom against slavery and colonial rule. Flanking “Joan” in the piece are three saints who symbolize the spirits of her ancestors guiding her and fighting by her side. 

Joan is an LA Phil pre-concert performance experience open to Vasks, Pärt & Górecki ticketholders.  

WITH FILM: Minimalist Sound—Minimalist Cinema  

Saturday, March 6, 2027, at 5pm 

LOCATION: Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90010 

Long before DJs and music producers began looping electronic beats and tones for the dance floor, Minimalist composers were shaping new worlds of sound through pulse and repetition. Terry Riley’s cyclical mysticism, Steve Reich’s mirage-like phase patterns and Philip Glass’s rolling arpeggios and crystalline rhythms pioneered a new musical language that continues to inspire the innovations of house and techno producers who shape fluid forms for the dance floor that transcend the structures of their own construction. 

Presented by LA Phil Insight in collaboration with KCRW and Marciano Art Foundation, WITH FILM traces the lineage of classical Minimalism's direct inspiration on electronic dance music. Bathed in the flickering, analog glow of Tacita Dean’s monumental installation FILM—an 11-minute looping piece mirroring the hypnotic magic that visionary classical composers and electronic music producers achieve through their own multilayered editing processes— a host of world-class DJs including John Tejada, King Britt, and Passionfruit will turn Marciano Art Foundation’s massive Theater gallery into a space where the sonic continuum converges in a space of transformative motion powered by Mobius Acoustics’ immersive, spatial sound system. 

Honoring the roots of Minimalism, In Sheep's Clothing will transform the Marciano Art Foundation library into a hi-fi listening room where Minimalist classical albums handpicked by electronic music producers will pay homage to the intergenerational and inter-genre relationship between these music cultures. 

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Flora / Green

featuring Wild Up 

Friday, March 19, 2027, at 8pm 

Saturday, March 20, 2027, at 8pm 

LOCATION: REDCAT, 631 W 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 

Wild Up brings Hiroshi Yoshimura’s landmark albums Flora and Green into live performance through new acoustic arrangements by Patrick Shiroishi and Christopher Rountree, accompanied by a new video work. A pioneer of Japanese ambient and environmental music, Yoshimura (1940–-2003) created works of extraordinary delicacy and clarity, shaped by timbral sensitivity, spaciousness and a profound attentiveness to the natural world. In these performances, Wild Up translates that sonic world into an intimate live setting, honoring the architecture and spirit of the original recordings while deepening their resonance through breath, touch and shared presence. 

In addition to these concerts JACCC, LA Phil Insight, REDCAT, Temporal Drift and Wild Up are collaborating to produce and co-present the exhibition Hiroshi Yoshimura: Sound of Place, Place of Sound at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) in Little Tokyo running from February 24 through April 30, 2027. 

BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC: Topanga Tower  

Conceived and directed by Dimitri Chamblas and Kate Nordstrum and featuring Holland Andrews, William Brittelle, Friidom Dunn, inti Figgis-vizueta, Ben Frost, Seth Parker Woods, Sam Wentz and Andrew Yee 

Saturday, March 20, 2027, at 1pm and 5pm 

Sunday, March 21, 2027, at 1pm and 5pm 

LOCATION: Topanga Tower, 24141 Saddle Peak Road, Topanga, CA 90290 

A pilgrimage. A progression. 

BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC transforms extraordinary places into dynamic environments where music, movement, architecture and landscape converge. At Topanga Tower, artists reimagine a decommissioned telecommunications site as a living instrument. Attendees move through the property in a deliberate progression of gathering, activation and release as performances continously unfold. 

From city to sea, body to horizon, gesture to vibration, BODY LIVE LIVE MUSIC at Topanga Tower offers an intensifying arc of visceral perception. Featured artists include Holland Andrews, Sam Wentz, init figgis-vizueta, Friidom Dunn, William Brittelle, Andrew Yee, Ben Frost, Seth Parker Woods, and more to be announced. 

Produced by LA Phil and Liquid Music in collaboration with John Jennings and Sasha Tarnopolsky, Topanga Tower.  

(NOTE: Special parking instructions will be delivered to audience members in advance of the performance.) 

WITH MUSIC: Minimalist Cinema—Minimalist Sound  

Saturday, April 17, 2027, at 12pm 

LOCATION: Now Instant, 939 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012 

LA Phil Insight partners with Now Instant to present a full day of companion film screenings that build on the programming of the LA Phil’s Minimalist Icons festival. Moving beyond the concert hall and into the cinema, this exploration traces how the composers who are being celebrated on stage shaped, and were shaped by, a parallel history of Minimalist cinema.  

For a movement built on reduction and repetition, Minimalism has proven remarkably expansive. What began in the 1960s as a rejection of excess, as demonstrated in the visual art of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt or in the looping phase patterns of Reich and Riley, soon found its way into moving images, where filmmakers arrived at the same instincts independently: fixed cameras held in sustained meditation, stories told through accumulation rather than events and image systems as exacting as any score. 

This mini-Minimalism film festival activates Now Instant, a magical micro-cinema tucked within Chinatown, through a durational screening featuring intimate documentary portraits of Minimalist composers, feature films built around their scores and landmark works where cinema discovered its own minimal grammar. The Center for Visual Music will curate a special block of films highlighting the work of visual music pioneers who utilized custom-built instruments to create their abstract visions exploring image-as-rhythm long before genres were coined to identify such aesthetics. Alongside these offerings, the Center for Visual Music will also feature select works by contemporary artists influenced by the pioneers. The program closes with a live performance pairing Minimalist music with real-time video synthesis, bringing sound and image together in the same room. Presented alongside the LA Phil’s concert programming, this is an invitation to experience Minimalism moving fluidly between mediums. 

Susie Ibarra: WATER AND STONE 

Saturday, April 24–Sunday, June 27, 2027 

OPENING: Saturday, April 24, 2027 at 6pm 

LOCATION: REDCAT, 631 W 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 

Artist Susie Ibarra invites audiences into a meditative study on human connections to ancient and present-day life inside historical waterways stretching from Colorado into Baja California Sur, Mexico. Drawing inspiration from the materiality of water and stone, Ibarra sculpts a sound installation expanding on the compositional process of her new LA Phil-commissioned opera The Water Dreams of Animals, premiering at Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 25, 2027.  

The sonic studies and visual surveys that have informed The Water Dreams of Animals will be presented to listeners and viewers in Ibarra’s Water and Stone exhibition. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has been researching and recording sounds of water and stone over the last six years across the connected Yampa and Green rivers of the Uinta Mountains of Fantasy Canyon and Dinosaur Monument in Colorado and Utah out to the Gulf of California at La Paz and La Ventana in Baja California Sur. This installation is shaped from her field recordings of marine life, music notes inspired by the natural pitches of canyons and ocean, and processions along Jurassic-era canyons and surveys of the desert flora and fauna found along these Southwestern waterways. Prototypes of several new sculptural instruments inspired by Eocene Epoch lithophones played by Ibarra’s CHAN percussion will also be on view. The exhibition will be rounded out with the work of two featured Los Angeles-based artists engaged in water inquiries to complement Ibarra’s multimedia offerings. 

Co-presented by REDCAT.