Anna Handler to become the Los Angeles Philharmonic's conductor-in-residence

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With Gustavo Dudamel’s final season as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic reaching its homestretch, the orchestra has announced the appointment of its latest not music director.Anna Handler, a former Dudamel fellow and rapidly rising young conductor, will be given the new title of conductor-in-residence for the next three seasons.She will spend three weeks each season conducting the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as working with students at the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood.

In a phone call from Boston, where she serves as assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony, she says she is also strongly driven by technology and wants to explore all kinds of projects with the latest devises.“The sky is the limit,” Handler exclaims with the boundless enthusiasm that is said to have won over the orchestra and the administration.That might include, she further fantasizes, a technology tool you don’t even notice but that focuses your attention to sound vibrations the way glasses give clarity to blurry vision.

“Why not glasses for the ears?” she excitedly asks.Kim Noltemy, the L.A.Phil president and chief executive, says Handler’s appointment does not necessarily imply the orchestra won’t ultimately find a music director who can oversee the bigger picture of the world’s most artistically diverse, expansive and wealthy orchestra.

But the L.A.Phil has so many fingers in so many pies that no one person can do it all.Meanwhile, the L.A.

Phil now adds what it has been missing in what the institution calls its team of creative collaborators.As creative director, former music director Esa-Pekka Salonen will spend six weeks a season helping envision what a 21st century symphony orchestra might look like.

John Adams continues his role as creative chair as do early music specialist Emmanuelle Haïm (artist collab...