Mark Swed reviews Conlon’s revival of Recovered voices featuring the works of William Grant Still and Alexander Zemlinsky. Read the full piece here. here

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When James Conlon arrived as Los Angeles Opera’s music director in 2006, he immediately discovered that the city might prove the ideal backdrop for what has been one of his key missions, what he called “recovering” the voices of composers silenced by the Second World War and then mostly forgotten.

L.A., after all, had been a refuge for artists fleeing the Nazis, just as the city had been earlier for those persecuted in Russia and Eastern Europe. We’ve now heard a number of obscure operas and concert works by the likes of Alexander Zemlinsky, Erwin Schulhoff, Walter Braunfels and Viktor Ullmann. The names may not be familiar, their music unknown, but they are kin.

Zemlinsky, for instance, was the mentor and brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg, whose music and whose teaching at USC and UCLA had a huge influence on 20th century composition, reaching as far as film music, jazz and the avant-garde. Other emigres were of the same generation and background, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who created the orchestra soundtrack at the dawn of talkies.

Los Angeles Opera brought back, after 15 years, one of Conlon’s early successes from his “Recovered Voices” initiative on Saturday night, Zemlinsky’s “The Dwarf.” That it has taken so long reminded us that we are still recovering these voices. But it also reminded us that recovering these works has in recent years also taken on a new urgency.