LADP PERFORMS: RITUEL
Walt Disney Concert Hall
111 S Grand Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Thursday May 8, 2025 | 8pm
Saturday May 10, 2025 | 8pm
Sunday May 11, 2025 | 2pm
As a teenage aspiring composer with a modernist ear, Esa-Pekka Salonen idolized composer and conductor Pierre Boulez and has become one of the biggest champions of his music. Salonen writes, “It can be complex without ever losing its clarity, it can be aggressive or delicate, hypnotic or kaleidoscopically flickering, ritualistic or virtuosic. But most importantly, it is often hauntingly beautiful.” Salonen contrasts Boulez’ serialist voice with fellow French composer Debussy’s impressionism—a pairing critic Mark Pullinger compared to “glaring sunburst [and] smudgy haze” or “Monet and Jackson Pollock.” Boulez’ solo piano Notations (each only 12 bars) flow into a version for orchestra that explodes the original musical idea with orchestral colors.
For this event at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Salonen, teaming up with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, leads one of Bartók’s most lucid and lyrical creations and Debussy’s conversation between wind and wave. In the finale, L.A. Dance Project and Benjamin Millepied combine the classicism of ballet with contemporary dance to celebrate a ritual with the orchestra based on three seminal scores of musical modernity. They take the stage for Boulez’s Rituel—“the most sensuously appealing score of Boulez’s career” (The New Yorker)—in a new dance choreographed by Millepied.
This organization is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, and by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery LA, an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan.
