NEWS AND LINKS: LACO announces 2011-2012 season, extends Kahane’s contract as music director<

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News

On the eve of its final concerts in the 2010-2011 season Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has announced next season’s schedule and reported that Music Director Jeffrey Kahane’s contract has been extended through the 2013-2014 season.

Next season — the orchestra’s 43rd and Kahane’s 15th as musical leader — will feature one world premiere and four West Coast premieres among the seven sets of orchestral concerts, each of which begin with a Saturday performance in Glendale’s Alex Theatre and conclude the following evening in UCLA’s Royce Hall.

The latest installment of LACO’s “Discover” series will be Feb. 25, 2012 at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium. Kahane will first discuss, and then conduct the orchestra and the USC Thornton Chamber Singers in, Bach’s Magnificat in D major, BWV 243. Kahane and LACO members will also appear March 8, 2012, on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Colburn Celebrity Recital” series at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Kahane will conduct five of the seven sets of orchestral concerts and will also appear as soloist in the opening program Sept. 24 and 25 conducting Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 from the keyboard. That program will also include two of the West Coast premieres: Osvaldo Golijov’s Sidereus (since it’s not a world premiere one presumes it will be completed on time, unlike his unfinished Violin Concerto that was supposed to be played last week by the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and Composer-in-Residence Derek Bemel’s Ritornello for electric guitar and orchestra.

The world premiere by pianist Thomas Andres, the latest installment in the orchestra’s “Sound Investment” commissioning series, will take place March 24 and 25, 2012. Andres will also be the soloist in his “recomposition” of Mozart’s Concerto No. 26 (Coronation). In what the orchestra is calling a “classical mash-up,” Andres has replaced Mozart’s incomplete sketches for the left hand with his own creations. Perhaps to act as a leavening agent, the program will conclude with Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, K. 550, presumably unaltered.

In one of the other anticipated programs of the upcoming season, Kahane will conduct his son, Gabriel, for the first time, on April 21 and 22, 2012 in a work Gabriel composed that was inspired by the Kahane family history and co-commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra.

In addition to Kahane, Concertmaster Margaret Batjer will conduct LACO in the complete Bach Brandenburg Concerti on Nov. 5 and 6 and principal cellist Andrew Shulman be on the podium Jan. 21 and 22, 2012.

The orchestra will again offer its three-concert “Westside Connections” chamber music series at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, a five-concert “Baroque Conversations” series at Zipper Hall in The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles and several concerts for families. LACO will also be involved in the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, which is being sponsored by the L.A. Phil and the USC Thornton School of Music next spring. Cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, the festival’s curator, will be the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Roccoco Theme on Dec. 10 and 11.

For a complete list of the orchestra series concerts, download a file by clicking HERE. For other information, click HERE.
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.

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