Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to Walt Disney Concert Hall this month for a series of concerts marking his first appearances since being named the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s creative director — and his program made room for more than music.
Hanging in front of the hall’s iconic organ was Radiance, a light installation by Grimanesa Amorós: a curtain of tendrils that draped and curled, as The New York Times described it, “like plants at the mouth of a cave.” The work framed the organ console with an opening at its center, transforming the architectural backdrop of one of America’s great concert halls into a living, luminous environment.
The installation was part of Salonen’s first program, which assembled rarities by Sibelius and Debussy alongside a new work by Gabriella Smith and Scriabin’s “Prometheus” — an evening designed as an event rather than a standard orchestral night, with choir, vocal soloists, and Amorós’s light woven into the whole.
The commission places Radiance at the center of a major cultural moment: Salonen’s homecoming to the institution he defined for nearly two decades, in the hall that opened under his tenure.