The Los Angeles Philharmonic's Centennial Concert Premieres On PBS GREAT PERFORMANCES May 8

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel celebrated the orchestra's 100-year anniversary with an historic Centennial Birthday Celebration, October 24, 2019, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The event, held on the very day of the orchestra's first performance 100 years earlier, featured all three living music directors - Dudamel, Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta, and Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen - leading the orchestra.

The recorded event, Great Performances: LA Phil 100, premieres nationwide Friday, May 8, at 9:30PM on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org/gperf and via the PBS Video app. The New York metro area premiere is Friday, May 8, at 9PM on THIRTEEN. The concert will also be released by C Major Entertainment (distributed by Naxos of America, Inc.) on DVD and Blu-ray, April 24, 2020. Both the DVD and the Blu-ray are available for pre-sale at the LA Phil Store and on Amazon.

The celebratory program features works with personal connections to each of the three living music directors - Salonen and Lutosławski's LA Phil-commissioned Symphony No. 4 (Salonen and the LA Phil recorded all four of the composer's symphonies); Mehta and Wagner's Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, as well as Ravel's La valse; and Dudamel leading the Suite from one of Stravinsky's most beloved ballet scores, The Firebird.

For the final piece, Daníel Bjarnason's From Space I Saw Earth, all three conductors took to engraved podiums to lead the orchestra in a work written specifically for them. Capping this once-in-a-lifetime collaboration, 20 YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) representatives - 15 students and five teaching artists positioned throughout Walt Disney Concert Hall - played along on hand-held crotales while confetti drifted from the ceiling onto the audience.

Directed for television by Michael Beyer and produced by Bernhard Fleischer, Great Performances: LA Phil 100 is a production of Bernhard Fleischer Moving Images and THIRTEEN Productions LLC for WNET, in association with WDR / ARTE and C Major Entertainment in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. For Great Performances, Richard R. Schilling and John Walker are producers, Bill O'Donnell is Series Producer and David Horn is Executive Producer.

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