LOS ANGELES — Since its founding in 1968, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has been a bit of a vagabond organization with no single concert hall to call its own. If you’ve followed them during the past 30 years or so, you have probably been to the Alex Theatre in Glendale, The Huntington in San Marino, Zipper Hall at the Colburn School, the Moss Theater in Santa Monica, the Wallis Center in Beverly Hills, and UCLA’s Royce Hall. The chamber orchestra’s burnished sound has often been lost in these rather dicey acoustical spaces — dry in the Alex, diffuse in the cavernous 1,800-seat Royce Hall.
Throughout the ensemble’s wanderings, one thing was certain: LA Chamber Orchestra remained a major part of the musical-cultural life of this city. Its music directors have included Neville Marriner, Gerard Schwarz, Iona Brown, Jeffrey Kahane, and, most recently, Jaime Martín. The ensemble has attracted guest artists like Hilary Hahn, Marc-André Hamelin, Isabelle Faust, Christian Tetzlaff, Fazil Say, Richard Goode, and Matthias Pintscher.
The orchestra left Royce Hall in April 2024 for the Wallis’ more chamber-like space. After more than three decades, it departed the Alex in May 2025. And in 2027, LACO is scheduled to begin a relationship with the Frank Gehry-designed Terri and Jerry Kohl Hall, adjacent to the Colburn School’s campus downtown. The orchestra hopes its new home — one of Gehry’s final major projects, with acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota, who worked with the architect on nearby Walt Disney Concert Hall — will help attract a larger audience. LACO also plans to continue serving Westside concertgoers at the Wallis.
Meanwhile, as an April 11 concert at the 430-seat Zipper Hall downtown proved, the orchestra has never sounded better. Not just the strings, but every section rose to the occasion for the world premiere of Fire Cycle by Indian-born American composer Juhi Bansal.
Bansal, who lost her home and possessions in the Altadena fire of January 2025, and who reportedly is still dealing with the psychological damage that rupture caused, said in a program note that Fire Cycle was partly about “learning to engage with the source of grief rather than avoiding it.” Remarkably, she’s found a way to communicate the emotions, disorientation, and unreality of such a devastating experience.
Bansal’s Fire Cycle is a profoundly personal and moving work in which nothing seems extra, gimmicky, or out of place. With its smoldering opening of muted sliding strings (especially the cellos) and concertmaster Margaret Batjer’s quietly repeated arpeggios, the piece conveyed an insidious calm building to a kind of cataclysm where, to paraphrase Norman Mailer, the nerves of one’s memory run back to a life no longer there.
Percussionist Wade Culbreath, collaborating with the composer, produced dramatic and descriptive sounds using bamboo wind chimes, wood and temple blocks, and various pod rattles. Culbreath made a larger version of the Brazilian reco-reco using a 55-gallon steel drum. He added variety to the raspy, sharp metallic sonics by using a tuned brass rod, which he struck and bowed. The percussive musical imagery worked organically within the orchestral fabric, suggesting crackling tree bark, or perhaps the composer’s piano and scores, which she lost in the fire. Tender violin solos, along with JoAnn Turovsky’s restrained harp, suggested a tentative regeneration as the embers burned away. Martín and the orchestra gave a disciplined, balanced account throughout.
After such a stunning opener, Martín wisely reversed the program order so that Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending came before another work depicting a response to the January fires, Eric Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory.
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers vividly rendered one of the loveliest depictions in music of a bird ascending in flight, and her performance came as a relief. It also suggested that an important part of earthly beauty is its fragility. Whitacre’s The Pacific, written for Meyers, couldn’t help seeming anodyne in comparison with Bansal’s deeply specific Fire Cycle. Both the Vaughan Williams and the Whitacre received committed readings from Martín and LACO, but the latter work summoned John Adams’ warning about the “unbridgeable” gap between a person’s lived experience and a composer’s well-intentioned musical memento of loss.
In the concert’s second half, LACO returned with a riveting and richly textured version of Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony for Strings in C minor, an arrangement of his Eighth String Quartet by Rudolf Barshai. The composer called it both a requiem to himself and a response to the harrowing Dresden fire-bombings during World War II. Though the music is bleak, driven, anxious, and despairing, the conductor and the orchestra paradoxically made it thrilling, the audience likely primed by Martín’s opening remarks about the repeated motto based on the composer’s initials, which at one point morphs into a creepy danse macabre-like waltz.
After such darkness, Martín called the upbeat concluding piece, Prokofiev’s witty Symphony No. 1 (Classical), “like opening a 55-liter bottle of champagne.” And, one might add, drinking it fast. Perhaps conductors like to push LACO musicians because they know they can. In March 2026, Dinis Sousa took us through Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (Italian) at a near-reckless clip, losing some of the vistas and charm but not the score’s shape.
One thing the intimacy and warm acoustics at Zipper suggested: Over the next few seasons, downtown Los Angeles is poised to become a more vibrant center of musical culture, with Kohl Hall an enticing alternative to Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
As Ben Cadwallader, LACO’s executive director, said recently in a phone interview, “Part of what makes a chamber music concert special is that an audience member should not only be an observer to the art that’s happening, but also a participant, seeing the musicians responding and reacting in real time to each other. That energetic exchange is what makes LACO special.”
Batjer, who has served as LACO’s concertmaster since 1998, agreed, adding that though they’re concerned about filling the 1,000 seats in Kohl Hall, they are confident new people will come to hear the chamber orchestra. “The design of Kohl Hall is circular and will feel intimate,” Batjer said. “The stage is actually on the same level as the first row of seats, so it’s a very close environment for the audience.”
One drawback is that after eight years, Martín is leaving as the ensemble’s music director at the end of the 2026-27 season. The conductor, who lives in London, has a family and has been chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2022. He was doubtless aware that LACO’s projected expansion will mean more time-intensive seasons. “It’s a big load to carry,” Batjer said, adding that Martín will still guest conduct as music director laureate.
At the start of his tenure in 2018, Martín told me he’d like LACO to “have a presence not only in the U.S. but also in Europe.” Indeed, last year the orchestra hired a national publicity firm to help make those plans a reality. Cadwallader, who harbors similar ambitions, said the timing is not yet ideal, although LACO’s brand has started to expand with a three-record Apple Music Classical deal.
Cadwallader said his immediate aim is to help LACO enhance its reputation at home. “We are entering a period with the Olympics coming, where the eyes of the world will be trained on Los Angeles,” he said. “We just got ahead of our skis and jumped too quickly.”
But postponing a national and international tour was not easy. “It was an excruciating decision,” Cadwallader said, “because you want everything.”
