Gustavo Dudamel began his four-program, 14-concert Beethoven series of the 2025/26 season with what the Los Angeles Times called “a musical, spiritual, and political touchstone.”

On the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage from February 12 to 15, Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic connected past and present, East and West, imagination and reality through the power of music. Joined by Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jeremy O. Harris, and acclaimed soprano Elena Villalón, they brought Egmont to life in a stirring adaptation of Goethe’s play set to Beethoven’s moving score.

“Playwright Jeremy O. Harris—Tony Award-nominated for Slave Play in 2018— fashioned an almost entirely new script for the narrative portions that sounded as if it had been written two weeks ago. After Dudamel and the Phil delivered a scorching rendition of the Overture, a spotlight fell upon actress Blanchett as she name-checked some flash points of present-day tyranny—like Tehran, Minneapolis, and Charlotte— and paraphrased the warnings from pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came.” (“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out,” etc.). She also quoted Renee Good’s last words and the epithets spoken by the ICE agent who killed her.”

— San Francisco Classical Voice

The concerts opened with the world-premiere performances of Ricardo Lorenz’s Humboldt’s Nature, inspired by the cross-Atlantic expeditions of the 18th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

“Dudamel couldn’t have been more at home in this showpiece, happily bouncing up and down to the beat….Humboldt’s Nature is yet another example of Dudamel’s most significant musical contribution during his tenure in LA: punching more irresistible Latin American concert music into the repertoire.”

— San Francisco Classical Voice

Between the Beethoven and Lorenz works, Yunchan Lim “turned on the thunder at the piano” (San Franscico Classical Voice) with a rousing rendition of Robert Schumann’s romantic Piano Concerto.

“[Lim’s playing] was warm, searching, and absolutely certain of itself: Schumann’s famous claim that music can ‘send light into the darkness of men’s hearts’ felt like a factual statement rather than a metaphor.”

— Classical Voice

To learn more about Dudamel’s Beethoven and Lorenz program, read his pre-concert conversation with Blanchett and O’Harris in The New York Times.