East Meets West to Feature World Premieres by Mason Bates and Eímear Noone

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), led by guest conductor Ludovic Morlot, presents EAST MEETS WEST, a program weaving together the voices of East and West featuring two world premieres: Mason Bates' Concerto for Pipa and Eímear Noone's Five Episodes in LA. LACO is joined by Grammy Award-winning pipa player Wu Man for Bates' premiere. A founding musician in Yo-Yo Ma's Silkroad project, Wu Man has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa.

Composer Mason Bates, whose singular career encompasses both being the first composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and performing in clubs as DJ Masonic, has made his reputation by bringing the sounds and rhythmic sensibilities of popular music into the orchestra. A similar stylistic curiosity underlies his new Concerto for Pipa, co-commissioned by LACO, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the National Center for Performing Arts (Beijing, China). Conceived specifically for Wu Man after the two musicians met in Beijing, the work brings together elements of American jazz, blues, and minimalism with the musical traditions and distinctive sound world of the pipa. As Bates' inaugural composition for the iconic instrument, the piece embraces the pipa's ability to straddle many different kinds of music, as well as Wu Man's extraordinary range as a performer.

The concerto opens with a suite of three short movements in different characters before turning to two larger movements that make up the concerto's second half. “The stride” overlays virtuosic passages atop a heavy backbeat groove, while “Dawn chorus” evokes birds bustling at sunrise. “All things change” responds to recent life changes with a poignant melody over quiet strings, followed by “Transcendental,” which brings the concerto to a deeper level, reaching a mystical space before turning to a brighter sound world that leads into “The finale,” which Bates describes as “us[ing] the pipa in an almost punk-rock manner.”

Turning to the West, Irish-born composer Eímear Noone's Five Episodes in LA receives its world premiere with LACO Principal Flutist Benjamin Smolen. Growing up in rural Galway, Noone studied flute from the age of ten and trained as both a composer and conductor in Dublin. Desiring a musical life that would include both classical music and popular music, Noone moved to Los Angeles in 2005 and has since become a prominent orchestral voice in game music, providing the music for World of Warcraft and more. The Joan and Jeff Beal Fund for Living Composers, which supports original concert hall works by film, TV, and game composers, makes Noone's composition possible.

This autobiographical composition gathers Noone's varied musical encounters in LA, which span genres of jazz, world music, R&B, and more, to create a portrait of the city and the artist she became in her time here. Benjamin Smolen performs the flute solo for this multifaceted work. Smolen has performed across the globe and, like Noone, is active in the media music landscape, recording with composers including John Williams, Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri, John Powell, and Randy Newman in the Hollywood scoring industry.

The concert opens with LACO Composer-in-Residence Huang Ruo's Folk Songs for Orchestra, which connects melodies from Chinese ethnic traditions with the sound world of the Western orchestra. Huang Ruo, who was born on Hainan Island, China, grew up as China opened to Western cultural influences and experienced the meeting of East and West through his musical upbringing. At the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, alongside Chinese musical traditions, he encountered Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutosławski, as well as the Beatles, rock, heavy metal, and jazz, and later moved to the United States. In Folk Songs for Orchestra, Huang Ruo focuses on four songs drawn from Anhui, Sichuan, Northern Shaanxi, and Xinjiang, all songs he has known since childhood. Their melodies remain direct and memorable, but Huang Ruo changes their pacing, context, texture, and scale. Huang Ruo has described composing with them in part as a way of preserving them for new generations, as he believes “Folk songs reflect the life, culture, and soul of a civilization.”

The concert closes with Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38, a work that encompasses both his early compositional voice and the style he developed later in his career. Schoenberg returned in 1939 to the unfinished symphony he had begun composing in 1906, seeking to reconcile his earlier musical language with the sensibilities he had developed in the intervening decades. The opening Adagio retains a late-Romantic character, with expressive melodies unfolding over rich, chromatic harmonies, while the second movement, marked Con fuoco (“with fire”), introduces a more urgent character, with fragmented melodies and restless figures passing between instrumental groups. Rather than reflecting a simple divide between his early and later styles, the work brings together music from the original score and revisions made more than three decades later.

LACO presents EAST MEETS WEST

Thursday, November 19, 2026 at 7:30 pm at Zipper Hall, Colburn

Sunday, November 22, 2026 at 4pm at The Wallis

Ludovic Morlot, Guest Conductor

Wu Man, Pipa
Benjamin Smolen, Flute

LACO musicians

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