LA Phil Ushers in New Season with Lavish Gala and Yuja
/By Truman C. Wang
10/15/2026
Photo credit: LA Phil
The LA Phil's 2026/27 season opened on October 1, with Teddy Abrams on the podium and Yuja Wang at the piano. By the LA Phil's count, the night raised more than $3 million for the orchestra and its Learning and Community initiatives, including YOLA.
The starry event was billed as "glamour, dazzle, and phenomenal music," and the program came in at about an hour with no intermission. That was a smart choice for an evening with dinner to follow. The pre-concert cocktail reception was held at 6pm in the terrace garden, where guests enjoyed hors d’oeuvres, wines and cocktails specially designed by Hope and Grand Events by Lucques. At 7pm, gala guests and concert attendees then moved into Walt Disney Concert Hall for the concert.
The music started, oddly, not with the national anthem, but with the horn fanfare of Hollywood composer Jerry Goldsmith's Fireworks: A Celebration of Los Angeles. Another Hollywood work arrived midway, Bernard Herrmann's Scène d'Amour from Vertigo received a lush, romantic reading from the LA Phil strings and magical filigrees from the harp.
Yuja Wang's first appearance of the evening, in a sparkling sequined silver gown, was Alexander Tsfasman's Jazz Suite, a four-part piece (Snowflakes, Lyrical Waltz, Polka, Fast Movement) that suits a pianist who can toss off bravura without looking like she's working. The Los Angeles Times once called her "Houdini and Horowitz rolled into one," and the Jazz Suite is built for exactly that mix of sleight of hand and virtuosity. Miss Wang returned for the Canzone and Allegro molto from Barber's Piano Concerto, followed by two crowd-pleasing encores.
The middle of the program was a double tribute: Principal Clarinet Boris Allakhverdyan played Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs and, back to back with it, Michael Tilson Thomas's dog-walking tone poem Lope. Pairing the two works put a former LA Phil figure beside a conductor-composer who defined an American musical style, and it gave an orchestra musician a well-earned spotlight.
The gala evening continued past the concert. At 8:40pm, dinner was held on Grand Avenue under gold-inflected decor by Sequoia Productions. Select guests then crossed the street after dinner to Refik Anadol's DATALAND, the first museum of AI arts, a fitting nod to where Los Angeles culture, and presumably the future of human art, is headed.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.