Over the first three concert weekends of 2026, LA Phil’s conductor laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen and creative chair John Adams fill Frank Gehry’s soaring Walt Disney Hall with the sort of musical thrills that won them their honorifics in the first place. The marquee work on the first of Salonen’s two programs (January 9-11) is Alexander Scriabin’s delirious fantasia Prometheus: The Poem of Fire—which the composer wished to enhance with lighting from a “color organ” that has never been successfully realized. But Debussy’s Wagnerian cantata La Demoiselle Élue (after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel) and the irrepressible Pekka Kuusisto fronting the world premiere of a new violin concerto by the ultracool Gabriella Smith, are by no means warm-up acts. Salonen’s second program (January 17, 18) is devoted entirely to Ferruccio Busoni’s stupendous five-movement Piano Concerto, which in the finale features a male chorus singing passages from the play Aladdin, by one Adam Oehlenschläger, a Dane. (For the record, Busoni meant the singers to perform naked and unseen—a directive ignored as routinely as Scriabin’s call for that color organ.) The soloist is Busoni’s staunch champion Igor Levit, who has described the concerto as “a piece to widen your curse-words repertoire” (whose curse-words repertoire?) Next, make way for Adams (January 23-25) with an all-American bill of fare that includes Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question), Roy Harris, (Symphony No. 3), and Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring). Then comes what everyone’s waiting for: the LA premiere of the new Adams piano concerto After the Fall, written for the Icelandic superstar Víkingur Ólafsson, the man of a billion-plus downloads. The world premiere of After the Fall in San Francisco exactly a year ago, conducted by David Robertson, blew listeners away with its breadth and dazzle. But no one conducts Adams like Adams. Hold on to your hats! (Does anyone still wear hats?) —Matthew Gurewitsch