Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Will Perform Strauss, Ravel, Beethoven

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) will continue its 2026-27 season with STRAUSS, RAVEL, BEETHOVEN on Saturday, October 17, 7:30 pm at Colburn's Zipper Hall and Sunday, October 18, 4 pm at The Wallis. Led by LACO Music Director Jaime Martín and joined by Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning guest pianist Conrad Tao, LACO performs works spanning over a century of orchestral innovation, from Beethoven's revolutionary symphonies to Ravel's orchestral color and Strauss's soaring tone poems.

Strauss's monumental and mournful Metamorphosen, a work Martín has long wanted to share with LACO audiences, opens the program. Scored in its original form for 23 individual solo strings, the work is perfectly suited to LACO's strengths. Deeply moved by the loss of the Munich Hoftheater during WWII, Strauss sought the consolations of Goethe, whose ideas about transformation informed his concept of Metamorphosen. Throughout the work, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic ideas continually shift and transform, with overlapping lines building an uninterrupted flow of sound, eventually evoking the Funeral March from Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” The work serves not only as a memorial to the opera houses destroyed during the war, but also to the cultural life they represented and to which Strauss had contributed throughout his career.

LACO is then joined by virtuosic pianist Conrad Tao for Ravel's lighthearted Piano Concerto in G Major. Ravel's penultimate composition, this concerto follows the models of Mozart and Saint-Saëns while incorporating jazz-influenced themes. Tao, a pianist and composer celebrated for his boundary-defying artistry, is known for his powerful performances of traditional repertoire. He has been praised by New York Magazine as “the kind of musician who is shaping the future of classical music,” and by The New York Times for his “probing intellect and open-hearted vision.”