John Luther Adams: Crossing Open Ground
Directed by Dimitri Chamblas and Christopher Rountree
With musicians from USC Thornton School of Music
Sat–Sun, Apr 18–19, 2026, 6 pm
Elysian Park, Los Angeles, CA
Co-produced by LA Phil and Liquid Music
Part of the Body and Sound Festival
LA Phil Insight presents environmentalist composer John Luther Adams’s Crossing Open Ground, an outdoor work for winds, brass, and percussion. Led by conductor Christopher Rountree and director Dimitri Chamblas and featuring 40 local musicians, the piece offers an opportunity to rediscover and reconsecrate place. Throughout the performance, each performer and listener is free to follow their own individual path through the physical and musical landscape. The New Yorker called Adams “one of the most original music thinkers of the new century.” With Crossing Open Ground, he invites us to listen to the older, deeper natural world beneath our feet.
More details to be announced.
LA Phil Insight is generously supported by Linda and Davis Shaheen.
Additional support for Crossing Open Ground provided by the Hillenburg Family.
About the Artists
John Luther Adams, composer
For John Luther Adams, music is a lifelong search for home—an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and remember our place within the larger community of life on earth.
Living for almost 40 years in northern Alaska, JLA discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces. In the 1970’s and into the '80s, he 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 composers in the world, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and many other honors.
In works such as Become Ocean, In the White Silence, and Canticles of the Holy Wind, Adams brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall. And in outdoor works such as Inuksuit and Sila: The Breath of the World, he employs music as a way to reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be.
A deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity drives Adams 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. This will largely be the work of people who will be here on this earth when I am gone. I place my faith in them.”
Since leaving Alaska, JLA and his wife Cynthia have made their home in the deserts of Mexico, Chile, and the southwestern United States.
Dimitri Chamblas, director
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.
Christopher Rountree, conductor
Christopher Rountree is a three-time Grammy-nominated conductor, composer, curator, band leader, and educator. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the orchestral collective Wild Up, Music Director of Long Beach Opera, co-founder of the Los Angeles Conducting Co-op, and curator of the LA Phil’s Fluxus Festival.
Rountree has become regarded as one of the most iconoclastic conductors and programmers in classical music, his inimitable style leading to collaborations with: Björk, John Adams, Yoko Ono, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alison Knowles, Ragnar Kjartansson, Dev Hynes, Sigourney Weaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Sarah Davachi, Julia Holter, Ryoji Ikeda, John Luther Adams, Allora and Calzadilla, Raven Chacon, and many of the planet’s greatest orchestras and ensembles including the National, San Francisco, Houston, Cincinnati, and Chicago Symphonies, the LA Philharmonic, Roomful of Teeth, Ochestre de Paris, the Washington National, Los Angeles, Omaha, San Diego, Detroit, and Atlanta Operas, and the Martha Graham Dance Company who tours the world with his revival of Graham’s solo Immediate Tragedy.
He has presented compositions and concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Palais Garnier, Mile High Stadium, The Metropolitan Museum, Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Hammer, The Getty, LACMA, The National Gallery, in a grove of old California oak trees, on a basketball court, in a museum bathroom, and at Lincoln Center on the New York Philharmonic’s Biennale.