At nine-thirty on the morning of August 1st, thirty-eight members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic gathered onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, in the Hollywood Hills, to play the final movement of Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. It was the first time that an appreciable number of L.A. Phil musicians had played together since the covid-19 lockdown began, in mid-March, and elaborate preparations were necessary to insure safe conditions. All performers and staff were tested beforehand, and their temperatures were taken upon entrance to the Bowl. Socially distanced changing areas had been organized. Signs backstage marked one-way lanes. Members of the wind and the brass sections, who cannot wear masks as they play, sat behind custom-built three-sided Plexiglas enclosures. Musicians were placed much farther apart than usual. They would have to find new ways of following one another once the performance unfolded.
After this low-key frenzy came the relatively normal moment when Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s music and artistic director, gave the downbeat for the first bar of the Ravel: pianissimo C major in the strings, marked “Lent et grave,” or “Slow and serious.” Later, I asked several of the musicians what they had felt. Carolyn Hove, the orchestra’s veteran English-horn player, told me, “I wasn’t the only one who teared up at that first chord—an incredible relief of being able to make music again with my colleagues.” Ben Hong, the associate principal cellist, said, “There was something so incredibly poignant about playing that piece, in that moment. Looking out and seeing nobody in the Bowl—it wasn’t for the audience, it was just for us. It was maybe the purest musical experience I’ve had in the Bowl, or anywhere.” Dudamel said, “That first chord—we were in tears. The music was very tender, but there was also such a power in it—proof that we as a group of human beings could move forward.”
The L.A. Phil wasn’t performing solely for its own benefit, though. The orchestra is launching a series of nine online videos, “SOUND/STAGE,” which will begin airing weekly on September 25th. The project is described as a “collection of concert films and interviews, essays, and artwork,” interspersing orchestra outings with sessions by the jazz artist Kamasi Washington, the singer Andra Day, and the band Chicano Batman. The repertory includes Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and recent pieces by Thomas Adès, Gabriela Ortiz, and Jessie Montgomery. All performances in the series were rehearsed and filmed over five days in early August.
I observed two days of the sessions and felt my own rush of emotion at seeing an orchestra in person for the first time since early March. I’d watched dozens of estimable performances online, but it was another matter to be in the presence of live musicians. The first piece I heard was Adès’s “Dawn,” a freshly composed pandemic-era score, subtitled “Chacony for Orchestra at Any Distance.” Free of Adès’s customary harmonic and rhythmic complexities, it is an airy, wistful, gently swaying miniature, its slow triple meter recalling Satie’s “Gymnopédies.” The physical warmth of the sound, resonating in the Bowl’s amphitheatre, was what I had been missing in months of listening to broadcasts and Webcasts. Adès’s music blended into the morning light, swelling to brief brilliance and then flickering into silence.
Since the pandemic struck these shores, the situation for American classical music, as for the rest of the performing arts, has been one long, deepening agony. Orchestras and opera houses have been almost completely inactive throughout the spring and summer. Some of them have effectively given up the idea of a fall 2020 or a spring 2021 season. How many institutions will be able to return to what they were—or return at all—is an open question. Feelings of frustration and despair are heightened when musicians look across the ocean to Europe, where both outdoor and indoor performances have resumed. The Salzburg Festival succeeded in putting on a month of concerts and opera, including a production of Richard Strauss’s gargantuan “Elektra.”
Hove, who is in her thirty-third season with the L.A. Phil, told me, “What hurts so much is that it didn’t have to be like this. We could have nipped it in the bud, and we could all be going back to work in October. But, because the handling of this at the federal level has been so catastrophic, this is where we are. And what’s so unsettling, so very unsettling, is we have no idea when it is going to end. I think especially about the younger people, the freelance musicians, the dancers, the singers . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It’s a bit scary. It’s a lot scary.”
Performing-arts institutions faced enormous financial setbacks from the moment the shutdown began. The L.A. Phil faced a bigger problem than most, being more dependent on ticket revenue than many ensembles its size. Ordinarily, this is a sign of the orchestra’s robust health—it relies less on the largesse of big donors—but during the pandemic the abrupt end of performances created a deficit that grew by the day. With the cancellation first of the spring season and then of the lucrative summer Bowl season, the orchestra was facing a shortfall of more than eighty million dollars. Many employees were laid off or furloughed; others received pay cuts; musicians’ salaries were reduced to sixty-five per cent of minimum scale.
During the spring and the summer, I checked in several times with Chad Smith, who had become the C.E.O. of the L.A. Phil only last October. A Pennsylvania native who trained as an opera singer, Smith has been with the orchestra almost continuously since 2002, when, at the age of thirty, he arrived to work on its new-music series and on classical programming at the Bowl. He played a decisive role in establishing the L.A. Phil’s reputation as one of the world’s most adventurous major orchestras—arguably, the boldest of all. “This isn’t how I envisioned my first year going,” Smith told me, ruefully, in May, during a walk in the area of Lake Hollywood. “We had all these big plans, but right now it’s just a question of keeping our heads above water. Everything we’re doing, from morning until night, is just about figuring out a plan on the financial front—above all, a plan for our musicians.”
By early summer, an emergency budget was in place, allowing Smith and his staff to begin thinking about concerts again. At first, they thought that the orchestra could return to the Bowl with a socially distanced audience, but an acceleration of the pandemic in Los Angeles County in June and July ruled that out. The events would have to be virtual, and Smith wanted to find a fresh approach to the format. “Online is its own medium, and we have to adapt to it,” he said. “It can’t be a few fixed cameras and closeups for solos. We have to give a sense of our mission as an orchestra. With so much out there to be consumed, why this music, now?”
When the lockdown began, the L.A. Phil had just completed a survey of the symphonies of Charles Ives—Deutsche Grammophon recently released a digital album of those concerts—and was in the middle of an ambitious festival, Power to the People!, emphasizing African-American music and themes of musical activism. One “SOUND/STAGE” program will have the same title, and it will reprise Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” a skeptical musical fantasia on the national anthem. Orchestras have been scrambling to diversify their programming in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests; the L.A. Phil has less ground to make up in that regard. It also has the advantage of a conductor who speaks to a wide audience with unusual urgency.
Dudamel stayed in Los Angeles throughout the early months of the pandemic. The conductor who first thrilled audiences with his boyish energy fifteen years ago is now a bit gray around the temples; from certain angles, he is almost statesmanlike. He has undergone upheavals political and personal. In 2017, his criticism of the Maduro regime in Venezuela effectively broke off his relationship with his native land. Nonetheless, he remains ebullient, and in rehearsal he seemed to be releasing pent-up conductorial energy, peppering his remarks with lively metaphors and inside jokes. “O.K., good, we all finished pretty much at the same time,” he told the players, who responded with laughter. In quest of more characterful phrasing in “Rhapsody in Blue,” he said, “It needs more cigar.” Looking out at the scattered technicians and staff in the Bowl, he asked, “Is everyone comfortable? Do you have your wine and popcorn?”
