L.A. invades the New York Philharmonic, Met and Park Avenue Armory

NEW YORK – On a recent trip to New York, it wasn’t easy to escape Los Angeles, despite the obvious differences. Record highs on the West Coast reached 100 degrees, while mid-March lows dipped into the 20s in Manhattan (the wind chill feels like freezing teens). Everyone had a cold or something.

But when you go to Lincoln Center, you’ll see Gustavo Dudamel bringing LA joy to the New York Philharmonic. Although he doesn’t officially take over as music and artistic director until September, Dudamel is making the orchestra more important to Bernstein, Boulez and—arguably many—than it has been since the days of Mehta.

Across the square, the massive Metropolitan Opera was so desperate for funding and excitement that it turned (probably with little luck) to Saudi Arabia for help. Instead, he’s making it the old-fashioned way, with a new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” It may have become the hottest ticket in town thanks to the star singers, but what made it work was the direction of opera magician Yuval Sharon, who created Los Angeles’ experimental opera company Industry.

LA Dance Project was also in town. Benjamin Millepied brings to the Park Avenue Armory the site-exclusive “Romeo and Juliet,” which he choreographed first for the Walt Disney Concert Hall and later for the Hollywood Bowl in collaboration with Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As a reminder, Deutsche Grammophon released the orchestra’s dynamite live recording of Prokofiev’s entire ballet score from the Disney premiere.

We all know Hollywood is in decline due to artificial intelligence, strikes, streaming, the high costs of everything in Los Angeles, loss of talent, greed, you name it. My colleague Charles McNulty warned us about the serious problems facing theater in Los Angeles. We are not alone. Nonprofit live performances everywhere are in a seemingly desperate search for funding. Ticket sales do not cover expenses. The subscription model is over. There may also be government support in this country.

Philanthropy towards the arts is essential but elusive. Even so, there’s a curious, and hopefully not misleading, optimism to Los Angeles-style classical music. We have vibrant leadership at every level. “Accessibility” is not a term that is discussed; It is “adventure”. Full houses are common.

We became the model, and this model, based on Dudamel’s charismatic positivity, was openly adopted by the New York Philharmonic. However, time may be needed to adjust the fit. While the announcement of Dudamel’s first New York season was laudable, it sparked an earful of complaints about him speaking in platitudes from hard-core New Yorkers unimpressed with the rise.

Actions are another matter. The two programs Dudamel ran in March were strong examples of civic awareness. In the first, he led a beautifully played performance of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony; This bodes well for an autumn season that will focus heavily on Beethoven. More importantly, Beethoven’s symphonic essay on leadership and power was followed by the premiere of orchestrations by various composers of selected variations from Frederic Rzewski’s “People United Will Never Be Defeated.” The title of the Chilean protest song largely speaks to our age of divisive issues.

The second program doubled with the premiere of David Lang’s “wealth of nations,” a 75-minute oratorio for orchestra, chorus and two soloists, here the inimitable mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and bass-baritone Davóne Tines. As another work by America’s oldest orchestra to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, Lang takes his cue from Adam Smith. The 18th-century Scottish economist’s treatise on capitalism as a self-correcting process for progress may be a concept on which our nation was founded, but startling excerpts from “The Wealth of Nations” forced a bemused audience to gauge our odds of maintaining a just and equal society by bypassing partisan politics.

Lang, a native Angeleno (albeit a long-time powerhouse in the New York new music scene), allows each word to resonate with an original style of music that is direct, meticulous, and reflective of early American harmonic style and contemporary minimalism, seeming both avant-garde and timeless while speaking to our time and circumstances.

Beyond that, Dudamel’s ambitious (and costly) plans for New York include moving the orchestra out of the concert hall and making it part of the city, including Rockefeller Center, parks and Ground Zero, as he did in Los Angeles, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of September 11. Youth orchestras in every district seem like a fanciful proposition. His big-picture fight for New York is his true rise and a remarkable challenge.

At the Met, Sharon revealed Wagner’s transformative opera to be a series of rituals that hint at the influence of the most influential production of “Tristan und Isolde” of our time. Created by video artist Bill Viola, director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at Disney’s Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2004, “The Tristan Project” celebrates the rituals of life and death. Sharon’s compelling rituals are seduction (communal drinking), communal feasting (at a table resembling a Sabbath meal), and death with the promise of rebirth.

Sharon is our biggest opera advocate. He was the creator of “Hopscotch,” an opera in which audiences traveled in limousines in and around downtown Los Angeles. He performs opera inside, outside, outside every box you throw his way. For the Met, he used the entire stage, right up to the top.

While the actors performed the ritual at the front of the stage, the singers often resided in another area further upstage (as in Viola’s video). This was a beautifully realized and deeply moving consideration of the here and now, not here but still now.

Lise Davidsen’s Isolde, the production’s selling point, was all she was created for (the Met’s ads only showed her). For five hours his voice is solid, steady and confident. He never lets his audience down. It has a steely warmth but very little brittleness, almost too perfect. Michael Spyres’ Tristan counters this vulnerability beautifully, while being vocally strong enough for partner Davidsen, who will give a rare intimate recital April 10 at BroadStage in Santa Monica.

But the Met’s desperation for conventionality (reading accessibility) never fully abates. There’s very little of Sharon’s famous wild ride. Es Devlin’s sets are stylish but powerfully lit. Choreographer Annie-B Parson’s dancers beautifully, if normally, escort Tristan and Isolde to the other side, leaving their egos behind.

In her program note, Sharon cites the doom-ridden philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as the inspiration for Wagner’s masterpiece in which nothing is real. But this ego-satisfying message never reached the Met’s flamboyant music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Still, according to Nézet-Séguin, the Met Orchestra sounds magnificent.

Not everything is imported. The LA Dance Project at the Armory lacked a significant live orchestra, and the noisy recording was a very beautiful rendition of Prokofiev’s ballet by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, not the LA Phil. Millepied uses the entire building, following the dancers with a video camera, but the gloomy Armory is no Disney or Bowl. The only advantage was that the dancers could shine on a mostly plain stage, in a town that knew its dancing.

New York had a message or two for Los Angeles, too. Japan Society presented a dazzling multimedia “assimilation” of avant-garde, multidisciplinary Japanese dancer Hiroaki Umeda; It’s a show that greatly reinforces the Met’s video and movement initiatives. Umeda’s US tour included various cities and, believe it or not, even the Kennedy Center. LA Dance Project also presented Umeda in Paris. LA isn’t paying attention.

New York had a second message for us about a Japanese artist. The Noguchi Museum in Queens has a new exhibit called “Noguchi New York.” Like David Lang, Isamu Noguchi was a native Angeleno who spent his career mostly in New York. But unlike Lang, New York paid little attention to him.

“Noguchi New York” chronicles 20 sculpture projects proposed by Noguchi, beginning with “Play Mountain” in 1933 and continuing by 1984 with “Monument to the Atomic Dead,” which would transform Central Park, Riverside Park, the United Nations, the old Idlewild Airport and more. But visually impaired developers and bureaucrats can’t have that. Even the Museum of Modern Art rejected the great sculptor. Another five projects that were implemented no longer exist. Only five more remain: the last one is the magnificent Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.

This exhibition brings a warning. Will a visionary Los Angeles take notice, or will we one day be subjected to a similarly revelatory display of Frank Gehry’s unrealized projects?

Everyone needs financing and small companies are struggling. Long Beach Opera had a wildly successful season last year introducing Pauline Oliveros, but now faces a budget crunch. We let the Olympic Arts Festival be taken away from us.

And Arts’ April weather report contains an unexpected spiritual chill. If you look at Musica Angelica’s website for details on traditional Easter performances of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” you’ll find only the quiet announcement that Los Angeles’ prominent early music ensemble has canceled the remainder of its season “due to the financial situation of the organization.”

Our optimism remains real, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need regular Schopenhauer reality checks.