Following an 18-month pandemic-mandated hiatus, the Colburn School has announced an ambitious lineup of in-person performances for 2021–2022, featuring such artists as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Andrew Davis.
The season will include concerts by the Colburn Orchestra at four Southern California venues, as well as chamber-music recitals, dance programs, and master classes. With a notably diverse lineup of artists, the season will “advance an inclusive future for classical music and the performing arts,” said President and CEO Sal Kardan.
The season gets underway Oct. 2 with “See the Music, Hear the Dance” in Zipper Hall, on the Colburn School’s downtown Los Angeles campus. It will include the world premiere of a work choreographed by Silas Farley, dean of the school’s Trudy Zipper Dance Institute. The dance will feature Los Angeles Ballet soloist and Colburn faculty member Jasmine Perry.
The chamber-music series begins Oct. 3 in Zipper Hall, with a recital by Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony. Other programs will feature violist Geraldine Walther, Los Angeles Philharmonic Principal Horn Andrew Bain, and violist/composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama, who will perform music of Prokofiev, Dvořák, and her own work.
Ngwenyama’s Feb. 6 recital and week-long residency will also kick off the new Amplify series, which will bring prominent artists of color to the Colburn campus to perform, work with students, and, in two cases, make recordings. Other participants will include jazz bassist Marlon Martinez and Andrew Brady, principal bassoonist of the Atlanta Symphony.
In addition, Colburn School will host members of Sphinx Virtuosi for a three-day residency in October. The group, which features some of the nation’s foremost Black and Latinx classical musicians, will perform music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and Jessie Montgomery on Oct. 30 in Zipper Hall.
The Colburn Orchestra’s first performance will be Oct. 16 in Zipper Hall, when Yehuda Gilad conducts music of Mendelssohn and Ginastera. On Nov. 13, Esa-Pekka Salonen will bring the orchestra to the Soraya in Northridge for a heavyweight program featuring Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony and Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, with soloist Hao Zhou.
The series also includes a Feb. 27 concert at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, in which Carlos Miguel Prieto will conduct mid-20th-century symphonies by Aaron Copland and Carlos Chavez. Andrew Davis will lead the orchestra in an April 21 concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall, which will feature Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with soloist James Baik, and a rare Southern California performance of an English masterpiece, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony.
The “Recovered Voices” series, a longtime passion of conductor James Conlon, will expand with a free, six-part online series. Three of the 45-minute multimedia presentations will focus on composer Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a Nazi prison camp in 1942.
More information on all events can be found at colburnschool.edu/calendar/season-overview. For tickets, call (213) 621-1050 or write [email protected].
