LOS ANGELES — It didn’t take long to decode the meaning of “Movement(s),” the umbrella title of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s first program of the 2026-27 season on Sept. 26. The “s” in “Movement(s)” revealed the motive behind both guest conductor Lina González-Granados’ and the marketing department’s strategy, for there were multiple meanings packed within that word.
“Movement” can simply mean “dance” — and there was plenty of that to be heard in Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta as an opening piece and the Suite No. 1 from Falla’s ballet El sombrero de tres picos as the closer. It also referred to the idea of a movement as a social force; hence, the world premiere of Carlos Simon’s Afterparty, a song cycle based on texts by poets aligned with the Harlem Renaissance.
And “movement” can describe the continuing period of transition that the LACO is undergoing, this being their last season in the Colburn School’s small yet acoustically comfortable Zipper Hall before they move diagonally across the street in fall 2027 to the soon-to-be-completed Terri and Jerry Kohl Hall. In addition, this is music director Jaime Martín’s last season with the LACO before he gives way to his recently appointed successor, Matthias Pintscher.
As of this writing, Simon is still hanging tough as the Kennedy Center’s composer in residence through the plundered and shuttered center’s 2026-27 season, claiming that he does it for the “morale” of those who are left there trying to keep their work going. Meanwhile, his own work continues, distilling stories of Black history and oppression into hopefully uplifting concert pieces in demand in these authoritarian times.
Let’s say right up front that Afterparty is a gorgeous piece of music, full stop. Simon is not afraid to express himself in lush, songful terms with richly melodic lines for his singer, the astounding countertenor John Holiday, whose sweet, luscious timbre can easily be mistaken for that of a female soprano if your eyes are closed.
The strings shimmer over a glistening vibraphone in the song “What the Mirror Said” or shriek and squeak in “The Crisis,” and a Broadway influence can be sensed in some of the vocal lines. When listening to this and other orchestral works by the composer, picking out the variety of influences he works with, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific Simon sound, yet he does what he does with a sharp ear for color backed by plenty of craft.
But there was little else to grab onto in this performance. While Afterparty is supposed to be a conjecture on what some figures of the Harlem Renaissance may have been thinking and creating after a dinner party at Manhattan’s Civics Club in March 1924, I could not make out most of their words. The only song in which the text was consistently intelligible was Gwendolyn Bennett’s “What the Mirror Said,” whose repeated phrases of Black identity, “I am what I am,” “I am what I see,” were sung with increasingly assertive fervor by Holiday. So the music alone had to carry the load. It was enough on a sensual level but not on the totality of what this work could mean.
Elsewhere in the evening, the Dances of Galanta flew by; the sudden mid-piece speedups and retreats in tempo were judiciously prepared, and González-Granados released the restraints in a mad dash to the finish line. Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegía Andina (Andean Elegy) — seemingly the sole outlier to the concert’s “Movement(s)” theme — is an early piece of hers in which, after a dramatic introduction, a flute conjures the Peruvian portion of her mixed heritage and the use of fizzing violins echoes a passage in Simon’s piece. Different timbre, similar idea.
The hour-long, intermission-less program ended on a strong note as González-Granados traced the curves of Falla’s phrasings in El Sombrero with a totally simpatico idiomatic flavor, sweeping the LACO right along. With a performance like that, I could have heard much more than just this 10-minute suite.
