James Colon to retire as Los Angeles Opera music director after 2025-26 season, finish 20-year tenure
James Conlon will retire as music director of the Los Angeles Opera on the finish of the 2025-26 season, ending a 20-year run that can have spanned half the corporate’s historical past.
Conlon made the announcement Wednesday, 5 days earlier than his 74th birthday. He’ll grow to be conductor laureate in 2026-27 and intends to return to the LA Opera as a visitor conductor.
“It is going to be my twentieth anniversary because the music director. It is going to be the fortieth anniversary of the corporate. We wished to do this collectively,” Conlon mentioned in a phone interview. “I’m not retiring. I’m not stopping conducting. I’ve plenty of different actions I’m going to do. However I’m a sure age. I’m going to be 76 years outdated by then.”
The LA Opera started performances in 1986 and Kent Nagano grew to become principal conductor in 2001-02, then was promoted to music director in 2003. Conlon changed him for 2006-07 and has led greater than 460 performances in LA of 68 operas by 32 composers.
“He’s made a titanic impression,” firm CEO Christopher Koelsch mentioned. “It felt like the fitting time for generational change.”
Conlon anticipates his efficiency complete will attain 500 by the point he steps down.
“I wish to commit myself extra urgently to different issues about American musical life that I feel are greater and extra essential than any particular person orchestra or opera firm and that’s training, gaining again the viewers,” Conlon mentioned. “I keep in mind how issues have been in New York public college system once I grew up within the ’50s and ‘60s. … Everyone knows that that disappeared a very long time in the past, and we’re seeing the results within the viewers in our nation. We didn’t create this drawback — orchestras, opera corporations, chamber music sequence — however we have now to repair it.”
Conlon was principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 1983-91, basic music director of Cologne, Germany, from 1989-2002, principal conductor of the Paris Opéra from 1995-2005 and principal conductor of the RAI Nationwide Symphony Orchestra in Italy from 2016-20. He additionally was music director of the Cincinnati Could Competition from 1979-2016 and the Ravinia Competition, summer season house of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from 2005-15.
In LA, Conlon launched a Recovered Voices challenge to carry consideration to works of composers suppressed by Nazi Germany, together with Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Eine Florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy)” and “Der Zwerg (The Dwarf),” Viktor Ullmann’s “Der Zerbrochene Krug (The Damaged Jug),” Walter Braunfels’ “Die Vögel (The Birds),” Franz Schreker’s “Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized).” He plans to proceed with the challenge in LA and elsewhere.
“Recovered Voices is part of my life that goes past Los Angeles Opera and can proceed, and you’ll be certain you’ll see extra of that sooner or later,” Conlon mentioned. “I’ll by no means reside to see the tip of that mission. It takes time. And it’s an instance of how simple it’s for humanity to destroy and the way tough it’s to rebuild.”
Conlon carried out the corporate’s first manufacturing of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” a whole cycle in 2010 staged by Achim Freyer, and in addition led “L’amant anonyme (The Nameless Lover)” by Joseph Bologne, a Black composer from 18th-century France. This season contains “Freeway 1, USA” by William Grant Nonetheless, a Black American composer who confronted prejudice.
Koelsch will appoint a search committee that features musicians and hopes to have a successor begin in 2026-27.
“There’s so many terribly thrilling conductors which can be rising,” he mentioned, “Involving musicians in that course of, I feel that’s essential that they’ve a voice within the number of their new chief.”
