On Feb 19, 2013, three of LA’s most powerful cultural assets (Dudamel, Colburn Orchestra, and the WDHC) will join together for a night of magical musical performance (Photo: Discover LA)
Next Tuesday evening on February 19 at 8pm, three of Los Angeles’ most powerful cultural assets will join together for a night of musical performance: the passionate conductor of the LA Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, will conduct one of the country’s top 10 conservatories, the Colburn Orchestra, at the beautiful and acoustically superior Walt Disney Concert Hall. These three amazing elements — all based in Downtown LA along Grand Ave, which has become the cultural mecca of the West Coast — have elevated the world of music and culture in Los Angeles.
The Colburn School, located across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, began as just a small music prep school in 1950 for USC. However, with the financial backing of businessman and benefactor of the arts, Richard D. Colburn, in the 1980s — for whom the school is named after — the Colburn School became an independent, non-profit institution and has become the West Coast’s answer to the prestigious Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia.
Once known more for the vapid car culture, suburbia, and freeways, Los Angeles is shedding its tired cliché as a town without “real culture.” As Downtown LA continues to strengthen as the region’s dominant urban center and cultural hub, more and more Angelenos are beginning to discover that culture is as much about interacting with people outside their cars as it is about music, art, and food. There’s no better place in Southern California to experience all of those elements (outside your car) than Downtown LA where the highest concentration of LA’s best cultural venues reside.
For more info and to purchase tickets for this amazing performance, click here.
Downtown is definitely a cultural mecca. Between the music center, the Concert Hall, Colburn, the MOCA, Redcat, and the upcoming Broad, it’s hard to beat all that. It’s our Lincoln Center. For someone like me who is into the arts, it’s awesome to be able to walk to all this stuff.
The sound quality in that hall is so remarkable that just about any other major concert facility out there, including the historically great ones in Vienna, Amsterdam and Boston, lose a sense of their original standing. Disney’s acoustics are evident even on recordings, making all other recorded concerts out on CD, video, cassette, itune, etc, not quite up to the same level.