LOS ANGELES, CA (January 13, 2026)— The LA Phil, Liquid Music and the USC Thornton School of Music today confirmed program details for the final program of its 2025/26 Body and Sound festival–John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground. The performance will take place in and around historic Elysian Park on Saturday, April 18, and Sunday, April 19, 2026 at 6pm.

In a co-production between LA Phil Insight and Liquid Music and in partnership with the USC Thornton School of Music, conductor Christopher Rountree and director Dimitri Chamblas will lead 40 local musicians, including 30 from the USC Thornton School of Music, in Luther Adams’ outdoor work for winds, brass and percussion. This program will conclude Insight’s 2025/26 Body and Sound: Music in Five Senses festival, which offers opportunities to experience music in multisensory encounters (in complete darkness, augmented by visual elements, paired with food, and more). 

A Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winner dubbed “one of the most original music thinkers of the new century” by The New Yorker, Luther Adams has an oeuvre that is animated by threads of environmental contemplation and advocacy. In this staging of Crossing Open Ground, he invites Los Angeles performers and listeners to rediscover and reconsecrate their sense of place. 

Luther Adams remarks in Crossing Open Ground’s program note, “From religious pilgrims to refugees seeking asylum around the world, from the freedom marchers of the civil rights movement to present-day marchers against autocracy, walking is an expression of devotion and an assertion of freedom—a transgression of the borders we construct to separate ourselves from one another and from our shared status as citizens of the earth.”

“USC Thornton is incredibly excited to extend our historic, decades-long relationship with the LA Phil through our partnership in Crossing Open Ground,” says Jason King, Dean of the USC Thornton School of Music. “This collaboration brings together the LA Phil’s boundary-pushing artistry and Thornton’s commitment to educating musicians who are fluent in experimentation, collaboration, and creative risk-taking.”

In a performance of Crossing Open Ground, each musician and each listener is free to follow their own individual path through the physical and musical landscape of the work. Out of the experience of walking and listening together, a renewed sense of community and place emerges.” Elysian, the city’s oldest park and a site of civic import complicated by legacies of displacement, will be activated through this immersive, musical consideration.

Co-produced by Liquid Music, this iteration of Crossing Open Ground arrives in Los Angeles following a multiyear development period—including a preview concert, residency, and staging at the striking Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, made possible by Kayenta Arts in partnership with Utah Tech University. The Los Angeles presentation precedes an additional upcoming appearance at Tanglewood on August 13 and 14, a collaboration between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute produced by Liquid Music artistic director Kate Nordstrum.

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Program

John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground

April 18–19, 2026 at 6PM

Elysian Park

Christopher Rountree, conductor

Dimitri Chamblas, director

Musicians from the USC Thornton School of Music & Los Angeles Philharmonic

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS — Crossing Open Ground

Tickets

Tickets for the 2025/26 season are now available online at laphil.com or via phone at 323-850-2000.

Press Contact:

Lev Mamuya, lev.mamuya@laphil.org

Leah Price, leah.price@laphil.org

ABOUT THE LA PHIL

Under the leadership of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, the LA Phil offers live performances, media initiatives and learning programs that inspire and strengthen communities in Los Angeles and beyond. The Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra is the foundation of the LA Phil’s offerings, which also include multi-genre, multidisciplinary performances and such youth development programs as YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles). Performances are offered across three historic stages—Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and The Ford—as well as through a variety of media platforms. In all its endeavors, the LA Phil seeks to enrich the lives of individuals and communities through musical, artistic and learning experiences that resonate in our world today.

ABOUT INSIGHT

Bringing together a diverse range of guest artists and partner organizations with intellectually curious audiences, Insight takes the LA Phil’s concert programming as a starting point for thematic exploration. Insight activities—ranging from panel discussions and performances to exhibitions and publications—are typically offered in conjunction with festivals and special projects.

ABOUT LIQUID MUSIC

Liquid Music is a leading producer of special projects in contemporary music, an internationally recognized laboratory for artists from across genre and disciplinary spectrums. This creative institution nurtures and realizes bold ideas from performers and composers, inspiring audiences to discover, learn and be transformed. Founded at The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2012, Liquid Music became independent in 2020, owned and operated by artistic director Kate Nordstrum who has been widely praised for her programmatic vision, panoramic tastes and “storied matchmaking” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Learn more at www.liquidmusic.org. 

ABOUT THE USC THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC

Founded in 1884, the USC Thornton School of Music is the oldest continuously operating arts institution in Los Angeles and one of the premier music schools in the world. Combining the rigor of a top conservatory with the expansive opportunities of a leading research university, USC Thornton prepares students to excel as performers, composers, scholars, producers, educators, industry leaders, and innovators across classical, contemporary, popular, and screen-based music. A long-standing pioneer in music education, the school launched some of the nation’s first programs in recording arts and music industry, built one of the world’s most comprehensive screen scoring programs, created groundbreaking master’s degrees in arts leadership and community music, and reimagined classical training for 21st-century artists. Located in the global creative capital of Los Angeles, Thornton offers unmatched access to the entertainment industry, world-class artistic partnerships, and a dense ecosystem of cultural institutions that allow students to build professional careers before graduation. Ranked among the top music schools globally, Thornton is further strengthened by its place within the University of Southern California, one of the world’s leading research universities.

With more than 1,000 students across over twenty disciplines, Thornton’s programs are supported by internationally renowned faculty, exceptional student ensembles, innovative research centers, world-class facilities, and distinctive assets such as the Polish Music Center’s globally recognized   collections. Alumni include Grammy, Emmy, Oscar, and BAFTA winners; leaders in performance, production, education, scholarship, and the music industry; and culture-defining artists across generations. Guided by its mission to cultivate “beyond category” musicians in the spirit of Duke Ellington, USC Thornton fosters a supportive, inclusive, and creatively liberated community where students develop multiple artistic identities and engage Los Angeles as both a laboratory and a launchpad for their careers. For more than 140 years, the school’s blend of tradition, experimentation, collaboration, and excellence has shaped its reputation as a place where music is not only studied and mastered, but lived.

Learn more at https://music.usc.edu.

ABOUT CHRISTOPHER ROUNTREE

We see Lady Macbeth in a dozen crooning silhouettes washing blood out of rags over bright porcelain sinks; hear Stravinsky pouring out of an abandoned warehouse; see dozens of watermelons fly off of Walt Disney Concert Hall; hear a black and white overture imploring against hatred; parse a chorus singing Haydn’s “Creation” backwards; watch a violinist cutting himself out of duct tape with a razor as his amplified violin sits gathering feedback; celebrate with rituals joyous for the end of the world; witness a long lost John Adams suite come alive; and hear the sound of rose-petal jam making as music. Conductor and composer Christopher Rountree, is standing at the intersection of classical music, new music, performance art and pop.

Whether presenting his beloved chamber group Wild Up in a museum bathroom, directing a series of interdisciplinary ambient concerts called SILENCE in an oak grove, or leading renowned ensembles through new music freshest works at the world’s greatest concert halls, Rountree has distinguished himself as one of classical music’s most forward-thinking innovators in creativity and community building. 

“I think of scenarios that will awaken people’s hearts or change people’s minds about something, then set them up, and see what happens,” Rountree, 36, says of his approach. “If I can imagine how a program will live in a space and that thought makes me smile, then I’m ready to start.”

Rountree, is the founder, conductor and creative director of the pathbreaking LA chamber orchestra Wild Up. The group’s eccentric mix of new music, pop and performance art quickly jumped from raucous DIY bar shows to being lauded as the vanguard for classical music by critics for the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, public radio’s Performance Today, and The New York Times, where Zachary Woolfe called the group “…a raucous, grungy, irresistibly exuberant…fun-loving, exceptionally virtuosic family.” Wild Up started in 2010 with no funding and no musicians, driven only by Rountree’s vision of a world-class orchestra that creates visceral, provocative experiences that are unmoored from classical traditions. 

In 2019 he curated and conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s FLUXUS Festival, the experimental music component of the LA Phil’s 100th season in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute. The 16-concert FLUXUS Festival united icons of contemporary art with classical music for the first time, placing Yoko Ono next to Ryoji Ikeda and Luciano Berio; La Monte Young next to Steven Takasugi next to John Cage. Ragnar Kjartansson’s “Bliss,” an ecstatic 12-hour rendering of Mozart, stood next to Alison Knowles’ “Make a Salad,” performed by 1,700 people. David Lang’s “crowd out” took over Downtown LA, as orchestra musicians launched the watermelons of Ken Friedman’s “Sonata for Melons and Gravity” off the top of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“I envision the audience first: their experience watching and listening to whatever it is that the band is doing up there on stage, and I think of the audience’s conversations when they leave the hall, What will they be interested in? What will they remember?” Rountree says. “Then I see the space the way I want it to be: the light, the air, the taste of the room. Then the band: I see all the challenges, fights and elation we’re going to have in rehearsal and I imagine the way that we’ll all feel when the time is right and we make that choice to walk on stage to start the show.”

As he’s become regarded as one of the most exciting and iconoclastic conductors and programmers in the field, Rountree’s inimitable style has led to collaborations with: Björk, John Adams, Yoko Ono, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mica Levi, Alison Knowles, Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ashley Fure, Julia Holter, Claire Chase, Missy Mazzoli, Ryoji Ikeda, Du Yun, Thaddeus Strassberger, Ellen Reid, Ted Hearne, James Darrah, and many of the planet’s greatest orchestras and ensembles including: the National, San Francisco, Houston, Cincinnati, Colorado, San Diego and Chicago Symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, Opera national de Paris, the Washington National, Los Angeles, Omaha, San Diego, and Atlanta Operas, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. He has presented compositions and concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Palais Garnier, Mile High Stadium, the Coliseum, the Echoplex, Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, ACE Hotel, National Sawdust, MCA Denver, The Hammer, The Getty, a basketball court in Santa Cruz, and at Lincoln Center on the New York Philharmonic’s Biennale.

In the coming year Rountree begins recording a four-volume set of the music of Julius Eastman. Tours the country with Wild Up, ending in an Eastman portrait at the National Gallery. Starts a multiyear project, resurrecting old work, with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Collaborates with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Four Larks. Plays with filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer Alex Somers at the ACE Hotel. Conducts part of a viola festival at New World Symphony. Starts an ambient series at Descanso Gardens with co-artistic director Anna Bulbrook. He’ll return to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Houston Symphony. Make debuts at Florentine Opera in Milwaukee, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston, and with the Sacramento Symphony. He’ll work on two operas about love and technology with librettists Royce Vavrek and Roxie Perkins. Do Jury Duty. Sing. Dance. Do yoga. And drink beer.

“I don’t have enough tattoos to be the badboy provocateur of classical music,” Rountree jokes. “But is the goal to dismantle the barriers to the artform, and to build something entirely new—something bursting with life, contemporary relevance, equity and deep mindfulness? That is exactly what we’re doing.”

ABOUT DIMITRI CHAMBLAS

From the À bras-le-corps duet created with Boris Charmatz in 1993 to the one with Kim Gordon in 2018, Dimitri Chamblas' career reflects a taste for encounters that he never ceases to develop. He has worked with a diverse array of artists, including Bret Easton Ellis, William Forsythe, Glen Keane, Benjamin Millepied, Mathilde Monnier, Alex Prager, Nile Rodgers, Claire Tabouret, and Virginie Viard. 

In 2015, he founded and ran the 3e Scène at the Opéra national de Paris, then became Dean of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2017. Dimitri Chamblas defines his own cartography of creation, moving dance to places where it is least expected, such as inside high-security prisons, as witnessed by Manuela Dalle's documentary Dancing in A-Yard. 

His work has been presented at the Tate Modern (London), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Opéra national de Paris, Performa New York, NYU Skirball (New York,) and the Musée du Louvre (Paris).

Today, it's through his Studio that he develops his projects: takemehome, a piece for 9 performers in collaboration with Kim Gordon, the staging of Crowd Out, an opera for 1000 voices by David Lang, or Slow Show, a performance for fifty participants that slows down time and gives rise to an eponymous installation made up of a series of video portraits. As a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and artistic director, dance is the vehicle that allows Dimitri Chamblas to travel through various geographical and social contexts around the globe.

ABOUT JOHN LUTHER ADAMS

For almost forty years, John Luther Adams made his home in the boreal forest of interior Alaska, where he discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces.

In the 1970s and into the ’80s, JLA worked full-time as an environmental activist. But the time came when he felt compelled to dedicate himself entirely to music. He made this choice with the belief that, ultimately, music can do more than politics to change the world. Since that time, he has become one of the most widely admired and influential composers in the world, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and many other honors.

In works such as Become Ocean, Become Desert, An Atlas of Deep Time, and Canticles of the Holy Wind, JLA brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall. His outdoor works such as Inuksuit, Sila: The Breath of the World, and Crossing Open Ground invite us to remember and reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be.

Now in his 70s, JLA’s deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives him to continue composing. As he puts it: “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being.”

Since leaving Alaska, JLA and his wife Cynthia have lived in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, the Atacama Desert of Chile, and the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. They now make their home in the Red Centre of Australia.