Veteran conductor James Conlon laughs as he recalls the day in 2004 when his phone rang with someone claiming to be Plácido Domingo. A longtime fan, Conlon has the performer’s autograph from when, as a youngster, he attended Domingo’s debut of Don Rodrigo at the City Opera in New York.
“My wife picked up the phone and she said, ‘It’s somebody joking around saying they’re Plácido,’” Conlon remembers during a recent interview in his office. The space is awash with books, opera scores, and ephemera, including a photo on the wall of Domingo and Conlon attending a Dodgers game. “But it was Plácido,” he continues. “And I said, ‘Wow, Plácido, you’re really surprising me!’” Domingo offered Conlon the position of LA Opera’s music director.
Conlon had then recently finished simultaneous tenures in Cologne and Paris; he was looking forward to some rest. And now, after 519 performances of 70 operas over roughly 20 years in Los Angeles—about half of the company’s lifetime—he’ll get it. His final performance will be Mozart’s classic The Magic Flute on June 21, after which he will hand the baton to incoming music director Domingo Hindoyan.
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One of five children born to a freelance writer and a city employee, Conlon is originally from the Douglaston section of Queens, New York. At age 11, he attended a production of La Traviata by the local North Shore Opera with his best friend, whose mother was the founder of the company.
His early interest in classical music isolated him from his peers. “I felt very lonely, but I didn’t care ’cause I was adamant,” Conlon says. “It was what I loved and what I wanted to do.” In 1964, Conlon enrolled in the High School of Music & Art (now commonly known as LaGuardia High School) in Manhattan. “I remember the weight that fell off my shoulders within the first week of starting classes ’cause there were two thousand kids like me.”
While studying at Juilliard in 1972, Conlon was recommended by legendary soprano Maria Callas, then teaching master classes at the conservatory, to fill in for Thomas Schippers after the conductor suddenly withdrew from a production of La Bohème. “She said, ‘Take that kid. He’s going to have a great future,’” Conlon says. “That was the beginning.”
Within months, Conlon had his first paying job, as a conductor on Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff, which he revisited for his penultimate show this May. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1976, followed by positions at Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
At LA Opera, Conlon aligned with the organization’s efforts to make opera accessible—offering affordable ticket prices and a relaxed dress code. “There’s nothing elite about me, and I reject the idea that music is for an elite,” Conlon says. “I think we have to do everything we can to continue to chip away at that because it makes people inhibited about entering an arena where they feel inadequate.”
For his part, Conlon gave free preperformance lectures that shed light on the history and musical context of a production. Beginning in 2007, his annual production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s Flood was staged free of charge at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, incorporating singers of all ages and student musicians from the Greater Los Angeles community.
“He’s evangelizing, really using his personal history as an incredible test case of the transformative power of the art form,” says LA Opera CEO Christopher Koelsch. “He led with expertise but tried to embody the idea of, if you had never had any exposure to the art form, this was a magical portal that you could pass through.”
Also in 2007, Conlon initiated the LA Opera’s Recovered Voices series, reviving neglected operatic works composed by artists who were persecuted, many of them during the Holocaust. Included in the series were the U.S. premieres of composer Viktor Ullmann’s The Broken Jug in 2008 and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Stigmatized in 2010. William Grant Still’s Highway 1, USA, staged in 2024, gave the Jim Crow–era composer his first production by a major opera house nearly 50 years after his death.
The company’s mission of inclusion expanded in 2012 with its Off Grand series, highlighting contemporary voices like composer Ellen Reid, whose Prism won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019. Co-commissioned by LA Opera that same year, Omar made its West Coast premiere in 2022, before it, too, went on to win a Pulitzer for newcomer composers Michael Abels and Rhiannon Giddens.
“We have to be an environment where you can do new works,” says Conlon, though he’s concerned whether audiences attending contemporary productions will also be interested in the classics. “If you do Philip Glass here, which is very popular, that’s great. But how many of those people will then equally come to a lesser-known Verdi opera, or a Mozart opera like Idomeneo or La Clemenza di Tito, or will they listen to Wozzeck?”
Like theatrical venues citywide, LA Opera has faced cuts over the years, reducing its record of 10 main-stage productions in the 2006–07 season to 5 in 2025–26. While the decrease might indicate waning interest, the numbers are deceptive. Last spring, the main-stage revival of Glass’s Akhnaten was profitable enough to add performances, as was the current production of The Magic Flute by director Barrie Kosky, returning for the fourth time since its 2013 U.S. premiere at LA Opera. According to Koelsch, ticket sales before opening night exceeded budget for every show this season except Falstaff.
“Attendance is not the problem. It’s just that earned revenue is a tiny piece of the pie,” he says. Sixty-seven percent of LA Opera’s income is from contributions, donations, endowments, and corporate sponsorships, with this year’s goal set at $34 million. “I remember before the pandemic we figured out that if we actually charged every person in the auditorium the cost to just run that performance, every ticket would be $2,100.”
Beginning in October, the new season will include five main-stage productions under Hindoyan’s baton, including solo concerts by sopranos Renée Fleming and Sondra Radvanovsky.
“I’m not going to break anything, but I’ll try to expand and develop,” says Hindoyan, who, like Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, is a product of the renowned music program El Sistema in Caracas, Venezuela. As the former conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Hindoyan conducted his wife, star soprano Sonya Yoncheva, in Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer. He hopes to collaborate with her again in L.A.
“If we can provide excitement, then the audience and donors will grow,” Hindoyan says of his hopes for LA Opera. “I will try to get to know the community and see what can be done. But I heard from two friends that if I want to set my imagination free, Los Angeles is the place to do it.”•
Veteran arts journalist and four-time LA Press Club winner Jordan Riefe is a former West Coast theater critic for the Hollywood Reporter and covers such topics as performing arts and fine arts. His writing on books, film, and travel can be found in the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the New York Post, the Robb Report, and other publications.
