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James Conlon has served as LA Opera ’s music director since 2006. Under his leadership, the company mounted its first Wagner Ring Cycle, a monumental four-opera masterpiece. Conlon has staged dozens of operas, from classics (Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Verdi’s Rigoletto) to new groundbreaking ones (Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ Omar, which won a Pulitzer Prize). This season will be his last with the company.
Conlon tells KCRW that he wants to hand the baton to younger people — but will not retire, and instead continue guest conducting and pursue other activities that he’s put off.
LA Opera’s 2025-2026 season includes West Side Story, La Boheme, The Magic Flute, and Falstaff. Conlon says he chose from composers who’ve been fundamental to both himself and every opera company — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner.
Verdi’s La Traviata was the first opera Conlon saw at age 11. “I fell in love that night, never to fall out of love again, changed my life on the spot. And within four months, I had totally changed just my vision of what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to become a musician. Then I asked for piano lessons. I pursued every avenue I could, and within two years, by the time I was 13, I knew I wanted to conduct.”
He continues, “Suddenly, I felt I could conduct. I felt it in my body. I felt it in my bones. … I announced that to my parents, they looked at me very affectionately and say, ‘Well, be sure to do your homework.’”
No musicians were in Conlon’s family, so he had to find his own way. Growing up in New York, there were lots of opportunities, and he learned everything he thought would be relevant to conducting.
How is Conlon trying to draw on younger audiences now and make this art form more accessible? “I think we have to do everything in every avenue to bring back the classical arts. I mean music. I mean ballet, dance — into the schools everywhere in the country.”
The arts fell out of many school budgets starting in the 1980s, he notes. However, classical arts are not for elite people, and “the spiritual space that classical music represents is there for everybody, and everybody is capable of enjoying it,” he says.
Another commitment of Conlon’s is the Recovered Voices program, which spotlights work that was buried due to prejudice. During the COVID pandemic, Conlon honored the work of mixed-race composer Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), whose compositions were deliberately erased by Napoleon.
Conlon says Bologne’s mother was a slave from Guadalupe, and his father was French. He was born in Guadalupe, then brought to Paris because he was “precociously talented, multi-talented” (he was also a master at fencing). He knew Mozart and Joseph Haydn (they knew him too). But after the revolution, he was sidelined because of his background.
“This is one of the many tragedies that composers get sidelined because of some form of racism. … Some were murdered in concentration camps. Many came to the United States. We benefited from the brain drain out of the German-speaking countries. That was brain gain for us. We should be looking back at this time, at composers, and I want to include, very importantly, also women composers who just did not have a chance or a forum to be played. So I think it's time that we look and listen carefully to those composers who we may not know, but who are very definitely worth the effort of acquaintance.”
Artists perform in “West Side Story.” Credit: Karli Cadel and Glimmerglass Festival.
LA Opera’s 2025-2026 season begins Saturday with West Side Story. Conlon says that before he even took a piano lesson, he absorbed this work as a child through an LP record that his mom or aunt brought home.
“It's been in my soul and my body and my consciousness all of my life,” he says of West Side Story. “But I've never conducted it. … This work … has a very special meaning, particularly because I grew up in New York. I was born in southern Manhattan, but I grew up in Queens, but as of the time I was 14 and 15, I started going to the west side, and it became where I went to school.”
Conlon attended The High School of Music & Art, which he says was fully integrated, competitive, and talent-based. “We all worked together. … We loved each other together. And Leonard Bernstein wrote on the title page of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, his copy: ‘This is an out and outcry for racial tolerance.’ And that's what he wanted to say to us. We lived in times of strife. … The strife has always been with us in many forms. And at the same time, the desire to connect through love, through compassion … is universal. So [West Side Story] is as important today as when it was written. … I am very happy that it is not only the 70th opera that I'm conducting at Los Angeles Opera. But also I will conduct my 500th performance at LA Opera, and it will be West Side Story.”
Artists perform in “West Side Story.” Credit: Todd Rosenberg and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Artists perform in “West Side Story.” Credit: Todd Rosenberg and Lyric Opera of Chicago. |
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