Things Happening on The Music Center Campus Tickets & Free Events

Through breath, movement, sound and shared listening, Black Planetarium from Ethiopian American artist Kidus Hailesilassie invites audiences into a collective rehearsal for other worlds of Pan-African knowledge-making. Rooted in 6,000 years of African traditions, this new work transforms the Digital Arts Space at The Music Center into a living constellation of textiles, moving image, installation and virtual reality. More than an exhibition, Black Planetarium is a vessel for ancestral memory and a space for rest, connection and imagination. Guests are invited to step inside shaded textile environments, meditative soundscapes and a VR journey that brings centuries of language and dance to life.

At the LA Phil, we believe in the power of music to spark imaginations and shape young lives. Our Symphonies for Youth concerts invite children ages 5 to 11 to soak up the sounds of a world-class orchestra while experiencing the thrill of live performance.

Make sure to come an hour early, at 10am, for a range of exciting activities that change to fit the theme of each performance. Children and families enjoy self-guided art activities and fun for all ages throughout the space. Join us for a morning of musical celebration that will stay with children for a lifetime.

This concert is recommended for children ages 5 to 11.

"A delicious mix of fear and excitement!" —North West End

"Make sure you have someone’s hand to hold." —Yorkshire Times

James and Lou move from Chicago to London to escape their past...

An original story set in the world of the terrifying Paranormal Activity film franchise, this thrilling new play will haunt you long after the lights go out. We can’t say anything else.

A pair of Ravel’s impressionistic masterworks bookend this era spanning concert, led by the prodigious Matthias Pintscher. The enchanting Mother Goose Suite begins the evening amid magical pagodas and fairy gardens. The concert concludes with his dazzling and dizzying La Valse, a masterful juxtaposition of the elegance and violence of 19th-century imperial society.

In between the incomparable Emanuel Ax joins the LA Phil for Mozart’s sublime Piano Concerto No. 25. “I think there’s a grandeur about this piece,” says Ax, from its stately opening to its lyrical slow movement Ax describes as “pure magic” to the finger-twisting finale. Pintscher, one of the most exciting compositional voices of his generation, leads the LA premiere of his work neharot, a search for light in the midst of troubled times.

Concerts in the Thursday 2 subscription series are generously supported by The Otis Booth Foundation.

A speakeasy-style gathering designed to spark imagination to Angelenos with a range of reality-bending projects that showcase where performance and technology meet.

In the fall of 1975, Patti Smith gathered her band in Electric Lady Studios in New York City to record her debut album, Horses. Released on November 10th by Arista Records, it has come to be regarded as a seminal and landmark recording that continues to have resonance and relevance for succeeding generations of musicians and artists.

Horses clarion call was: “three chord rock merged with the power of the word.” A poet and visual artist, Patti had begun improvising her unique blend of song and hallucinatory imagery two years before, appearing on cabaret stages and small clubs with the support of guitarist Lenny Kaye and pianist Richard Sohl. She honed her songs in this live setting, allowing them to develop at will, garnering an ever-growing audience within the Manhattan underground. By the time she launched a seven-week residency at the relatively obscure Bowery club, CBGB, in winter of 1975, her band had grown, adding include guitarist Ivan Kral and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. It was during this time that she was signed by Arista president Clive Davis. John Cale was chosen by the band to produce the album, and it was released on November 10, the death date of one of Patti’s most important influences, the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Opening with an anthemic declaration of personal responsibility – “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” – folded within Van Morrison’s classic “Gloria”, Horses was a return to rock’s primal instincts, seeking to awaken the spirit and promise of the music at a time when it seemed as if this sensibility was at risk of being forgotten. The album’s artistic reach took shape in the free-form flights of “Birdland” and “Land,” where the expansive soundscapes of free jazz and propulsive rhythms and incantatory lyrics intermingled to provide an expansive sonic landscape. “Redondo Beach,” “Free Money,” “Kimberly,” and “Break It Up” presented a worldview both idealistic and romantic. With the album’s final cut, “Elegie,” rock’s past and future were entwined within the “sea of possibilities” that became the present. Infused with poetry, Horses is an uncompromising exploration that helped lay the groundwork for what would become known as the upheaval of “punk,” though Smith and her band always attempted to avoid categorization: “beyond race gender baptism mathematics politricks,” as Patti wrote in the liner notes, adding “...as for me I am truly totally ready to go.”

Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic front cover photograph of Patti with her jacket slung over her shoulder perfectly captured this moment of becoming, and indeed, Horses was the beginning of a long musical career that resonates even greater today. The album has achieved many notable recognitions over the years, notably The Charles Cros Award and included the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. It has been followed by another nine albums the National Book Award winner, Just Kids; world tours and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Now, fifty years later, Smith will honor the longevity and lasting influence of the album with a series of special shows performing Horses in its entirety. She will be accompanied by two members of the original group, Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, along with keyboardist/ bassist Tony Shanahan, a part of her Band for thirty years. Jackson Smith also joins on guitar. Special Horses concerts have been set for eight cities in Europe: Dublin, Madrid. Bergamo, London, Brussels, Oslo and Paris. Nine cities in the U.S.: Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. Please join us to help celebrate the final ride of our irreverent thoroughbred.

Grant Gershon, conductor
Tal Rosner, video
20 singers, Bang on a Can All-Stars

Grammy Award®-winner, Oscar®-nominee, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s before and after nature is a meditation on the natural world, both before human existence and after humans are gone. Lang met closely with scholars, faculty, and students in Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability and with the Doerr-affiliated Environmental Justice Working Group to gain insight and inspiration. He combined what he learned with his own readings from the past 50 years of environmental thinking, and wrote his own texts that explore the different ways we define and understand nature. He set these texts for voices and the groundbreaking musical ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars, and enlisted video pioneer Tal Rosner to invent a way to visualize the meanings of the music in video and projection. before and after nature received its world premiere performance in February 2025 at Stanford University with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Grant Gershon and Master Chorale singers.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson says “John Adams not only writes the most brilliant, amazingly fun music, he also gives that music the most amazing titles.” Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? starts with a bold, groovy statement unlike any other piano concerto, described by Adams as “edgy” with “a good dollop of American funk.”

Adams pairs his concerto with Piazzola’s liberating Two Tangos and two impassioned Russian works—Stravinsky’s lavish and visceral Song of the Nightingale and the suite from Prokofiev’s first film score. Though Prokofiev claimed to not know “what kind of sauce” to put on the music, Lieutenant Kijé is undoubtedly marked with his signature sound that blends satire and sentiment.

Sir John Falstaff finds himself a bit short on cash, so he hatches a scheme: seduce two merry (and wealthy) wives of Windsor and live out his days in luxury. Too bad this bumbling knight happened to send both his targets the same love letter! Now Alice Ford and Meg Page are set on teaching Falstaff a lesson, and it's not long before a long list of his adversaries join in. Audiences are in for a whirlwind of disguises and deceptions, and maybe even an unexpected dip in the River Thames. 

James Conlon conducts one of his personal favorites, Verdi's utterly delightful comic masterpiece. Longtime company favorite Craig Colclough stars as the boastful Falstaff, leading a brilliant ensemble cast that includes Nicole Heaston, Ernesto Petti and Hyona Kim among the pranksters all too happy to take the errant knight down a peg, with Deanna Breiwick and Anthony León as the young lovers desperate to steal a private moment to themselves among the madness. This classic comedy gets an equally classic staging by Lee Blakeley, with atmospheric sets and sumptuous period costumes designed by Adrian Linford.