Can arts festivals matter anymore? LA28 Olympics can prove they do, with Salzburg as inspiration

The well-run 1984 Olympics transformed Los Angeles. Not through the Games, which thrillingly came and went, but through the Olympic Arts Festival, which taught us to dream and inspired us to do. Forty year later, we have added Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Opera, the Getty Center, the Soraya, the Geffen Playhouse, the Hammer Museum, the Wallis, the Nimoy, the Industry, L.A. Dance Project, Wild Up, the Broad museum and the Broad Stage. The Olympic Arts Festival turned us into an arts capital in a remarkably short period of time.

Now that Paris has symbolically handed the Olympic torch back to us, our Games in 2028 no longer seem so far away. By then, we will have added Frank Gehry’s new Colburn Center, a 1,000-seat concert hall with the potential of turning Grand Avenue into an avenue of the arts unlike any in the world. A short Metro ride away will be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries.

This leaves the arts community excited and galvanized but also alarmed after Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA28, the private group putting on the L.A. Games, said following the closing ceremony in Paris: “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower. We do have a Hollywood sign.” Tom Cruise’s motorcycle tour from the boulevards of Paris to the Hollywood Hills in the ceremony’s tacky finale only increased concern. Meanwhile, the death on Sept. 30 of Robert Fitzpatrick, the force of nature behind the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, has reminded us what he accomplished.

Obviously, in a changed city and a changed world, we hardly require a replay of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. But what? Should the ’28 model resemble the current PST Art festival of exhibitions related to science? Funded by the Getty, institutions throughout the region have come up with projects — and we get whatever the cat drags in. Or might the recently appointed chair of the LA28 Cultural Olympiad, Maria Anna Bell, a former Museum of Contemporary Art board chair, and her advisor, Nora Halpern, an art historian and curator based in Washington, D.C., the last two decades, find novel inspiration from Fitzpatrick’s brilliantly curated festival?

The Cultural Olympiad (can’t we go back to the friendlier Arts Festival?) is special. It is the only aspect of the Olympics that needn’t be politicized or commercialized. The budget for 1984 was $20 million. The Times set the festival rolling as the main sponsor with a $5-million donation. Around $6 million came from ticket sales. The Olympics supplied the rest. Fitzpatrick used all of it as he saw fit.

Two days after the closing ceremony in Paris in August, I flew to Austria, where I spent two weeks at the annual Salzburg Festival. Its 62-million euro budget ($67.8 million) puts Salzburg on a similar scale to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival when adjusting for inflation. More important, grand and consequential Salzburg markedly demonstrates what makes festivals matter.

A festival in Mozart’s picturesque birthplace at the foot of the Austrian Alps, a city that attracts hordes of summer tourists along with well-heeled audiences in formal dress, may not exactly suit L.A. But L.A., in fact, serves as an inspiration for Salzburg.

This year, Peter Sellars’ new production of Prokofiev’s opera “The Gambler” and Gustavo Dudamel’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic were among the highlights.

The festival itself needs no contrived theme. Instead, it becomes, as did our 1984 Arts Olympic Festival, an activist lens onto the world. In 1992, while Sellars was the director of the Los Angeles Festival (which grew out of the Olympic Arts one), he began staging opera in Salzburg, helping revolutionize what had become a stodgy music industry event. Indeed, Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s visionary artistic director, told me that Sellars is his most important artistic guide today.

On my first day in Salzburg, I headed for an 11 a.m. concert featuring Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony. The full Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest hall, had a worshipful air. We listened in rapt, reverential awe, cozied by Vienna’s velvet strings, velvet winds and velvet brass woven together in a perfect tapestry of lush sonic textures and instrumental colors.

Peter Sellars, photographed this year in Salzburg.

(Jan Friese / Salzburg Festival)

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That evening, in an again packed Festspielhaus, Daniel Barenboim conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in another monumental Eighth Symphony, Schubert’s “Great,” (confusingly known as Schubert’s Ninth outside Austria and Germany). In place of velvet and luxuriant lushness, there was fixating intensity and raw power. The ensemble was so grounded that the feeling here was of everyone giving everything they had to hold the symphony — and symbolically the world — together.

Both Eighths were occasions for community. The Divan is a training orchestra founded 25 years ago by Barenboim and Palestinian American scholar Edward Said to bring together young musicians from Israel and Middle Eastern Arab countries. The orchestra’s current members had spent the last year during the war in Gaza studying at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, learning to work through their profound differences for a common cause.

To witness them supporting one another musically and showing inspiring devotion to a frail Barenboim, suffering from a debilitating neurological disease, may be the only gleam of hope we have for peace. At the end of what the players clearly knew was a performance of a lifetime, they lingered onstage, hugging one another. Tying the day together, the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster that morning was a 27-year-old Muslim violinist from Nazareth, Yamen Saadi, who who got his start at age 10 in the Divan.

This first day became an introduction to the way that knowing creation can bring together a wide range of sources that result in a brave and profound cultural diplomacy, which is a disastrous lost art. This was furthered in much of what I attended during the festival.

Three major opera productions in Salzburg threw needed light on Russia and Ukraine. Two were Russian operas based on Dostoevsky novels: Prokofiev’s little-known “The Gambler” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s all-but-unknown “The Idiot.” Presented as compelling theater, they brought in-depth insight into our often simplistic attempts to understand the Russian mind, with its complex aspirations, fears and insecurity that can lead to greatness, grandiosity or outright malevolence.

Sellars revealed “The Gambler” as the dazzlement of addictive behavior, a road map for losing one’s mind. In gripping, high-wire performances, American baritone Sean Panikkar as Alexei succumbs to roulette. Lithuanian star soprano Asmik Grigorian as Polina loses her mind to nihilism. Young Russian conductor Timur Zangiev barreled through Prokoviev’s restless score with compulsive and relentlessness virtuosity.

“The Idiot” is a nearly five-hour slog by a Polish-Russian contemporary of Shostakovich about another Dostoevsky outsider who succumbs to visions of grandeur. But Weinberg’s 1985 barely known gloomy opera is also a profound demonstration of how and why misplaced power can destroy society. And thanks to a terrific cast, led by sensational Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov, and the vivid conducting of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s sleekly modern production by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, “The Idiot” turned out to be Salzburg’s hottest ticket.

A scene from Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” at the 2024 Salzburg Festival.

(Bernd Uhlig / Salzburg Festival)

Unfortunately, the night I attended, Grazinyte-Tyla had taken ill and had been replaced by her assistant, Oleg Ptashnikov. But video of the production with the colorful Grazinyte-Tyla can be streamed via stage-plus.com and, as can “The Gambler,” on medici.tv.

What made Salzburg special and a little shocking was its daring belief in cultural diplomacy. This included bringing back Teodor Currentzis to lead a revival of an avant-garde production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The controversial Russian-based Greek conductor has been banished from the majority of Western institutions. While never expressing support for the war in Ukraine, Currentzis is said to have received funding for his Russian ensemble from corporations with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But Currentzis is also controversial because he is, on one hand, an obsessive perfectionist and, on the other, a showy radical with highly original musical ideas. All of that shows up in the “Don Giovanni,” which came close to perfection and extreme reinvention.

The surreal, visually hypnotizing production by Italian director Romeo Castellucci made little effort to make narrative sense. What’s an upside-down car hanging from the ceiling got to do with anything? But somehow the imagery, mostly against a bare stage, focused attention on a performance in which every single note, sung or played, every movement, every physical object, seemed to have been thought through and was riveting.

This international cast, led by striking Italian baritone Davide Luciano as the Don, brought yet more Russians and Europeans together. The marvelous Utopia Orchestra in the pit was composed of leading players from top European ensembles.

There is much, much, much more to the Salzburg Festival. And months later it still influences how I view international relations and political chaos, how I contend with world leaders, how I vote.

Yes, we’ve got the Hollywood sign, a real-estate advertisement-turned-landmark. But Walt Disney Concert Hall is also a landmark.

There is no time to waste. Planning takes time. But Salzburg does it every year, and there should be no reason why we can’t make a festival and mean it.