Conductor Gustavo Dudamel came to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, and in the years since then both he and the orchestra found fame as he rose to eventually be both its musical and artistic director.
But things change, and after 17 years, Dudamel will leave the LA Phil for the same roles at the New York Philharmonic at the end of the Los Angeles orchestra’s 2025-26 season.
On Thursday, Dudamel sat down at Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles to talk with Kim Noltemy, the LA Phil president and CEO, about his plans for that 17th and final season, which kicks off in September. The LA Phil has dubbed the season “Gracias Gustavo,” but to Dudamel, the thanks are all his to give.
“It is an overwhelming moment, you know, to see all of this journey, all of this beautiful, deep, wonderful journey,” Dudamel said from the stage of the BP Hall inside the orchestra’s home on Grand Avenue. “The privilege that I have for all of these years to lead this wonderful orchestra? I feel blessed. You know, I think it’s not ‘gracias, Gustavo.
“This orchestra embraced me since the very first moment that I came here to Los Angeles when I was a young conducting animal,” he said to the laughter of reporters and LA Phil staffers as he referenced the way some described him in his earliest days.
And while Dudamel may be leaving the LA Phil, the LA Phil will remain a world-class orchestra long after his departure, Dudamel said.
“I have to say we have created a wonderful artistic human environment to make beautiful music for Los Angeles,” he said. “This is the great thing of this institution. I came here in 2009 and people ask me, ‘What has changed?’ or ‘What you have done?’ Nothing. It has been a natural path. We have created our own style, our own mission.
“I cannot take (credit for) that as an individual,” Dudamel continued. “It has been a work of our team, the administration, the artistic team, and the orchestra, who is on the stage and play all of this wonderful music. So this is something that will never end.
“We are closing a chapter, and we are opening a new chapter. I think it’s very important for art institutions to evolve and to be flexible to new things. You know, we cannot be so selfish and say, like, Okay, I’m the one.
“It’s beautiful to see that we are closing a chapter in such a beautiful state of our relationship,” Dudamel said. “It’s not closing a chapter because it’s not working anymore. It’s working perfectly, and it’s wonderful because in this case it will be a beautiful path to the next person that will lead this orchestra.”
In the final season, Dudamel will lead 14 different programs from the podium in front of the orchestra, most of them over a handful of days and nights.
His season opens in September with the world premiere of a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid for orchestra and choir co-commissioned by the LA Phil and New York Philharmonic. It is paired with Richard Strauss’s “An Alpine Spring.”
In October, Dudamel will conduct a pair of Stravinsky ballets, “The Firebird Suite” and “The Rite of Spring,” both of which he is closely associated, and pairs them with the United States premiere of “Frenzy” by John Adams, the LA Phil’s creative chair. Later in that month, he’ll conduct the orchestra with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in Mahler’s Second Symphony, and also take the philharmonic for a two-week, three-country tour of Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei and Tainan, Taiwan.
After a winter break, Dudamel returns in February for several programs focused around Beethoven, one featuring his music for the play “Egmont” as well as pieces by Ricardo Lorenz and Robert Schumann, and the other his first-ever time leading the LA Phil in Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis,” a piece he described as one of the most difficult a conductor can take on.
“This is a piece some conductors are afraid to do because it has such a dimension,” Dudamel said of the work for orchestra and chorus. “It goes beyond the architecture, the technical part of the music, which is huge. To study that score is fascinating. Every time that I open the score, I discover a new room in that beautiful building that is this piece.
“Generally, conductors wait until they get to an age, old age especially, to do this piece,” said the 44-year-old conductor. “Because it’s like a sacred kind of unique place.
“I believe this piece is about faith,” he said. “It makes me really believe, you know, in this other dimension of greatness and beauty that Beethoven was trying to put in this music. With this difficult score, insane, you know, request for singers, for orchestra.
“I said, ‘Look, at least I have some gray hair,’” Dudamel said, laughing. “I’m looking forward. I’m afraid.”
At the end of February into March, he’ll first do an LA Phil commissioned ballet score, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Revolución diamanatina,” written in response and in support of Mexican women’s uprising against violence in 2019. That also features the world premiere of the ballet by dance company Grupo Corpo. Next comes another Beethoven, his “Pastoral” symphony, matched with Thomas Ades’ “Inferno’ from Dante, another commissioned ballet score, this one a 2024 Grammy winner for best orchestral performance.
March also sees the world premiere of an LA Phil commissioned piece by a variety of L.A.-based composers in celebration of the Judy Baca mural “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” which Dudamel described being blown away by when his friend the movie director Alejandro González Iñárritu introduced him to.
“He said, ‘We’ll get some dinner, but I want to show you something very special that you will not believe that is there,’” Dudamel said of Iñárritu, who is contributing an original film component to the work. “So we went to this area of the city, and we started to walk on the street, and then suddenly we saw this mural with all the history of Los Angeles. I said, ‘Like, how is this beautiful thing there?’
“So we were dreaming,” he said. “We were sitting there in the grass watching all of these beautiful (images) that Judy Baca created together with a wonderful group of young people, which she worked with. And we say that we have to do something. We have to show this to the world. To Los Angeles, too.”
In May, Dudamel, director Alberto Arvelo, and architect Frank Gehry, who designed the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, reunite for Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” with an elaborate production Dudamel suggested surpasses what they created for Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
“We are like the three amigos,” he said of his close friendships with Arvelo and Gehry. “We have a little bit of tequila, and I say, ‘It’s gonna be expensive.’ It’s going to be very expensive. So there’s something special happening next year.”
Also in May, star cellist Yo-Yo Ma is coming to work with Dudamel for the world premiere of a new concerto by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón, and later that month, a combination of Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” and one more world premiere of an LA Phil commission by Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra.
After an evening of concertos on June 4, designed to showcase many of the soloists Dudamel has worked with in the orchestra over the years, he completes his work at the LA Phil with “Gracias Gustavo: Celebrating 17 Years,” with works that honor his Venezuelan and American identities, and close this chapter of his career.
Asked by Noltemy what he hoped audiences will take from this final season, Dudamel said his hope is a simple one.
“That they enjoy it,” he replied. And then came a flash of the humor and charisma that has made him so beloved here.
“I hope I am not doing the concert and people are like, ‘Why did he pick this?’ Come and suffer with the LA Phil!’” Dudamel finished as he and the room burst into laughter.