LA Phil Launches Centennial with Full Week of Special Events and Concerts

Celebrating 100 years of outstanding musical achievements and looking ahead toward its next century of artistic innovation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will launch its Centennial season - the most ambitious in the orchestra's history -with a full week of special events and concerts.

Extending from September 27 through October 4, the opening week is designed to showcase the extraordinary range of the LA Phil's artistry while offering opportunities for everyone in Los Angeles to join in the festivities.

"This is a celebration of achievement, diversity, energy and empowerment," explained LA Phil Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel. "This Centennial is a chance to rededicate ourselves to the transformative power of music and to the magnificent City of Angels, where we will continue to make magic happen."

LA Phil Chief Executive Officer Simon Woods said, "This is a season 100 years in the making. Like Los Angeles itself, it is a dazzling amalgam of rich historical influences and intuitions of the future, virtuosic expressions of multiple traditions, and daring excursions beyond the limits of convention. Our Centennial is as diverse as the communities the LA Phil serves, and it's a big embrace of Los Angeles, its people, and its amazing creative identity and as international as the artists who perform on our stages."

The Centennial season begins officially on Thursday, September 27 at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the California Soul gala. The evening will include a reception, dinner, and festive program celebrating Golden State creativity from A (John Adams) to Z (Frank Zappa). Gustavo Dudamel will lead the LA Phil, the Los Angeles Master Chorale (under Artistic Director Grant Gershon), and guest artists Chris Martin (vocals), Corinne Bailey Rae (vocals), John Dunsmuir (drums), and Tracy Silverman (electric violin) in the program, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. Performances will include the world premiere of Julia Adolphe's Underneath the Sheen (the first of over 50 LA Phil commissions to be premiered during the Centennial), Jerry Goldsmith's Love Theme from Chinatown, and classic California songs.

On Friday, September 28, the outside of Walt Disney Concert Hall will come alive with WDCH Dreams, created by award-winning media artist Refik Anadol. To answer the question of what the Walt Disney Concert Hall's dreams might look like, Anadol worked with the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google Arts and Culture to apply machine intelligence to the orchestra's digital archives, nearly 45 terabytes of data. The result is a radical visualization of the organization's first century, as well as an exploration of the synergies between art and technology, architecture and institutional memory. To actualize this vision, Anadol is employing 42 large-scale projectors to display three-dimensional "data sculptures" formed by the machine's interpretation of the archivesdirectly onto the undulating stainless-steel exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

WDCH Dreams will be on view nightly from 7:30 pm to 11:30 pm with performances every half hour, from September 28 through October 6. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, in the Ira Gershwin Gallery, a companion installation by Anadol will offer visitors throughout the season the opportunity to interact with the archives in multiple ways via a touchscreen interface. The space will be re-imagined as a mirrored U-shaped room with two-channel projection. Visuals will be projected onto the mirrored surface giving the visitor a truly immersive, 360-degree experience.

The season launch continues on Sunday, September 30, with Celebrate LA: LA Phil 100 x CicLAvia, a massive, free, eight-mile-long open-streets festival connecting Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Hollywood Bowl. Presented by the LA Phil in partnership with CicLAvia and Community Arts Resources (CARS), the event will feature 1,800 musicians, dancers, and visual artists along the route and at six major hubs along the auto-free zone, where the public will encounter performance stages, art installations, food trucks, screen-printing, kid-friendly activities, dancing, and live music from L.A.'s best musicians.

The unprecedented community event, organized as a gift to the city and a showcase of LA's creative spirit, begins with a marching band procession at 9 AM outside Walt Disney Concert Hall, on Grand Avenue between 1st Street and 3rd Street, while the day-long festivities kick off simultaneously at the five other hubs along the route. A special introductory ceremony at 8:30 AM outside Walt Disney Concert Hall will include remarks from LA Phil and CicLAvia project leadership, and city and state representatives, as well as performances by musicians from the LA Phil, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), and the Centennial High School Marching Band.

The Celebrate LA! street fair culminates with a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be joined by a dazzling line up of guest artists for the free Celebrate LA!: The LA Phil 100 at the Bowl concert. Starting at 7 PM, the concert will include performances by pop superstar Katy Perry, jazz legend Herbie Hancock, genre-defying Colombian-American singer-songwriter Kali Uchis, YOLA, and more. Celebrate LA! is generously supported by Target and these media partners: 94.7 The Wave, Classical KUSC, KCRW, K-LOVE 107.5, KPFK 90.7 FM, and Univision Los Angeles.

The LA Phil's 100th season then kicks off on Thursday, October 4, at 8:00 PM, when Gustavo Dudamel leads the orchestra in the inaugural evening of the nine-day, genre-spanning LA Fest. The program includes a breakthrough work by the LA Phil's Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen, LA Variations; the Beethoven Triple Concerto, with LA Phil principals Martin Chalifour (violin), Robert deMaine (cello), and Joanne Pearce Martin (piano), as soloists; and the world premiere of a major new work by Andrew Norman titled Sustain, which was commissioned by the LA Phil for the Centennial. Additional LA Fest artists include Herbie Hancock, Andrew Bird and Moby, each performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by Gustavo Dudamel.

laphil.com