Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra names transformative new music director

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Set us as preferred SALZBURG, Austria — With the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel heading off on a brief tour to London and Edinburgh, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra steps in Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl with an all-Mozart program.Mozart has long been a specialty of LACO.And it so happens that the orchestra is using the Mozartean occasion to announce that its next music director will be German composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher, who has been busy conducting in Mozart’s birthplace, Salzburg, where I caught up with him.Pintscher, who will succeed current music director Jaime Martín beginning in 2027-28 season, augurs a new era for LACO.

The orchestra will have a part-time residence when the Colburn Center opens next fall.The innovative 1,000-seat hall for concert, opera and dance looks to be Frank Gehry’s last music-meant masterpiece certain to usher in a new era for the Grand Avenue cultural district.It also means a sort of homecoming for LACO, which gave its first concert in 1969 in the then-new Mark Taper Forum, the last of the Music Center’s initial three venues.

The orchestra had been founded as an outlet to Hollywood studio musicians, and its first music director was the lively Mozartean, Neville Marriner.LACO’s first nine seasons included a Monday night series when the theater, originally meant to be a chamber music hall, was otherwise dark.A little odd, perhaps, but the Taper remains until now the most intriguing venue of the peripatetic ensemble that has roamed through the years from Santa Monica to Pasadena, and that helped give the ensemble a distinctive image.That is still the case.

Once the Colburn Center opens, LACO will continue its series at the Wallis as well as at various chamber music programs around town.Pintscher made his LACO debut in 2016 and already there was...