LOS ANGELES — Largely made up of crack studio pros exercising their classical chops, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has entered a period of transition on two fronts. While they seem to be thriving under their charismatic music director, onetime flutist Jaime Martín, LACO recently announced that Martín’s 2026-27 season with the ensemble will be his last, after which he will assume the title of music director laureate. (That will give LACO two music director laureates, the other being Jeffrey Kahane.)
On top of that, LACO is anticipating yet another move into a new home. After recently leaving their longtime digs in UCLA’s Royce Hall and Glendale’s Alex Theatre, the ensemble set up shop at The Wallis in Beverly Hills and, for the time being, at the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall in downtown L.A. They are supposed to move diagonally across 2nd Street from the Zipper to a new Frank Gehry-designed 1,000-seat concert hall when it is scheduled to be finished in fall 2027.
Presumably that will be an event to savor, but in the meantime, after hearing LACO in the cozy 415-seat Zipper Hall on Feb. 14, I find that they sound better there than in any of their previous homes dating back to the orchestra’s founding in 1968. The strings come through with a clear, rich warmth that the many other rooms in which I’ve heard them could not quite project. Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium comes closest. The balances are good, even from a seat close up, and the orchestra’s sound doesn’t overpower the small room with a packed audience. All of this made Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite, taken by Martín at comfortable tempos with sweeping phrasings and a good sense of flow, seem like a luxurious dip in a jacuzzi.
LACO has a long-running program of new-music commissions called Sound Investment, which by its 25th year has produced 25 new compositions. So when the world premiere of a Beal-Fund-commissioned piece by Michael Abels, Meraki, had to be postponed, LACO went “into the vault,” so to speak, and slipped an earlier Sound Investment commission, Gernot Wolfgang’s Desert Wind, into the breach on two weeks’ notice.
The Austrian-born composer, who now lives near Santa Fe, N.M., told me that he couldn’t find his score, but fortunately LACO had a set of orchestra parts from its 2007 world premiere on hand, which saved the day.
The nearly 16-minute piece holds up as a busy, eclectic portrait of Los Angeles, traffic and all, occasionally swept by the Santa Ana winds from the nearby desert on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains. There is a Hollywood-style opening that quickly segues into an auto trip on Wilshire Boulevard, with a jazz rhythm section grooving away. A canonic string fugue meanders about, five principal players get featured solos (written originally for the principals in the LACO in 2007). Now and then, we hear sliding strings; those must be the Santa Ana winds. It’s a jumble of images, yet an arresting one that reflects and refracts the diversity and instability of this region.
Coincidentally, Desert Bloom, another portrait of Los Angeles and the desert, this time composed by someone (Sílvia Lanao) who had never visited the region, had been played the week before by Elim Chan and the LA Phil New Music Group. Something must have been in the air.
The rest of the concert found Martín and the LACO laying down a fast, responsive, absolutely together carpet for the unique Turkish pianist-composer Fazil Say, who brandished both aspects of his art. The vehicle was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, in which the first movement barreled along at a chipper pace, at times brusquely, until Say got around to a cadenza of his own, which he calls his Op. 10. That cadenza was high drama all the way, from huge chords tapering down to a twee tinkling repetition of Beethoven’s opening theme.
Aside from his political provocations, Say also stirs up controversy for his poly-styled compositions and interpretations — which can have a sly, redeeming sense of humor — as well as his uninhibited fidgeting, gesturing, feet-bouncing physical manner. Sometimes, his free left hand seemed to be conducting himself, a throwback to Glenn Gould. That stuff didn’t bother me at all. Even Say’s clownish pausing of trills in the Rondo finale could be said to amplify Beethoven’s own sense of fun in this, the most jovial of his concerto finales.
As an encore, Say added his signature piece, Black Earth, Op. 8 — which has been recorded many times by himself and others — with its ominous motif in the bass clef peppered by prepared piano plunks. He’s an interesting cat.
