It’s a season of change for classical music in California.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the revered conductor and composer, announced on Thursday that he would step down as musical director of the San Francisco Symphony next year when his contract expires. Salonen, 65, has been a leading force in trying to redefine the modern symphony orchestra.
Just the day before, James Conlon, music director of the Los Angeles Opera, said that he would step down in 2026. In his nearly 20 years on the job, Conlon, 74, has led more performances of the opera company than any other conductor.
The departures do not appear to be connected. Salonen had a rift with his orchestra’s board, and Conlon said he was ready for his next chapter.
But they’re serious losses nonetheless, as California’s classical music scene struggles to rebuild in-person audiences. And they are not the only ones.
The most prominent impending departure of all is that of Gustavo Dudamel, who will leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the New York Philharmonic in 2026.
Dudamel, who came to Los Angeles in 2007 as a little-known 26-year-old conductor from Venezuela, helped elevate the Philharmonic into one of America’s top orchestras. The announcement last year that he would be moving on was “a strike at the soul” of Los Angeles, my colleagues Adam Nagourney and Javier C. Hernandez wrote. And shortly after Dudamel’s announcement, Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, resigned to take a post running the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
All this upheaval in California has, of course, revived a long-standing coastal rivalry.
“One way to think of life in American classical music is as a seesaw between the coasts,” Daniel J. Wakin, a New York Times Opinion editor, wrote last week. “That plank just rocked upward to the West Coast’s detriment with the announcement of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s departure.” He added that with Dudamel relocating to New York in two years, “the tilt — or at least a potentially juicy rivalry in New York — will be in the East Coast’s favor.”
Still, many people are hopeful that the California orchestras will be able to find suitable replacements for their acclaimed leaders. Dudamel pointed to the Philharmonic’s decades-long history of finding talent and said he was certain it would do so again. “I’m not even zero percent worried — even zero percent,” he told The New York Times.
Conlon, who has said that it was coincidental that he and Dudamel planned to leave the same year, told my colleague Robin Pogrebin that he planned to continue as a guest conductor at the Los Angeles Opera, and that he wanted to focus on music education, which he believes is necessary to keep developing audiences for classical music. Throughout his tenure, Conlon tried to make opera less intimidating by talking showgoers through each opera’s key moments before performances.
“The most important crisis facing classical music is we’re all fighting for an audience,” Conlon told Pogrebin, adding that he “can be very persuasive in enticing people who feel afraid of classical music not to be inhibited by these big buildings that look like fortresses.”
