Perhaps the youngest audience the Los Angeles Philharmonic has welcomed this year squirmed and fidgeted alongside their parents and guardians at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday morning for “Symphonies for Youth: Sensory Symphony,” the second concert in the Body and Sound Festival.
The concert marked the first iteration of the “Symphonies for Youth” series in 2026, which aims to both provide access to and familiarize the children of the Los Angeles community with classical music performance.
Accommodations for the intended audience replaced the norm of a typical LA Phil experience: Art activities for families were available before the show, and the programs were replaced with activity books featuring drawing, word scrambles and sensory-grounding activities to prepare them for the terminology and subject matter of the show.
Saturday’s concert focused on engaging the senses thoughtfully, experiencing the performance with more than just ears, but also by feeling the vibrations of the soundwaves and watching the accompanying visuals projected onto a screen hanging above the orchestra.
The atmosphere before the show was lively, children running through the halls and chattering loudly to their parents and to each other — not quite the reserved, introspective environment a typical trip to the symphony calls for, and all the more pleasing for it.
While it’s often preferable for an evening at the symphony to be rather sophisticated and polished, a morning at the concert hall filled with laughter and curiosity offered a refreshing start to the day.
The program for the concert promised a slate of five brief, punchy songs with only 45 minutes worth of music to accommodate an audience of ages 5 to 11, though the pieces were complex enough to be inviting for adults in attendance.
The first piece, “Finlandia” by Jean Sibelius, is the second piece to open a concert in the Body and Sound festival so far, thanks to Sibelius’ synesthetic relationship to sound and color being a major driving force in his music. After a brief excerpt from the piece, the playing paused, and an animated soundwave aptly named “Soundwave” explained to the audience in a colorful and engaging video, how music is made of vibrating air moving at different frequencies.
The music then resumed in full, reflecting the colorful and playful relationship between the composer and his music as the timpanist powered through the composition with excitement, and the cellists kept the music rooted with their bass rumblings.
The conductor, Salonen Conducting Fellow Aleksandra Melaniuk, was an asset to the performance, her energy permeating the delivery of the music. As she signaled for the end of “Finlandia,” another animated video introduced the next song, “Sky with Four Suns” from “Canticles of the Sky” by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams.
The video explained that the piece was inspired by Luther Adams’ sensory experiences in nature and led the audience through a grounding exercise to further encourage them to listen with all of their senses.
The lights dimmed, and a spotlight illuminated the string quartet, whose first note initiated colorful visuals projected onto the screen. Children in the audience gasped as the houselights shifted to match the visuals, a thoughtful choice to keep them engaged during the more mature and subdued piece.
The musical agenda showed balance with an excerpt from Steve Reich’s minimalist and lively percussion piece, “Marimba Phase,” to counterbalance the somberness of “Sky with Four Suns.” More than any other piece of the concert, “Marimba Phase” silenced the audience for a moment with its urgent opening notes and the accompanying flashing horizontal lines of color on the screen.
The pair of percussionists’ precision was massively effective in maintaining the attention of the audience; with so minimal a piece, there was no room for error and no errors perpetuated — just a series of repeated and colorful notes filling the concert hall.
Moments that might have been distracting at a regular show were charming and apt on Saturday: Proud optimist Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” followed, much to the delight of many of the older children who recognized the piece and mimed waking up by stretching and yawning. Despite being such a famous piece and ubiquitous, it was a warm and impressive performance made new by the excitement and authenticity of the children’s reactions.
After a final video explaining how an organ creates sound, the screen retracted to reveal the sublimely constructed organ for the finale: “Symphony No. 3, ‘Organ’” by Camille Saint-Saëns. It’s a tumultuous, mischievously unpredictable piece that was stimulating and exciting for the children, partly thanks to Melaniuk’s skill with the baton and infectious energy.
However, rather than watch the performers, watching the audience was the most engaging part of the show — parents signaled to their children when big moments were on the horizon, middle schoolers pretended to ascend to heaven during the extended organ chords.
The children’s engagement during the finale personified the event’s effectiveness: It didn’t shy away from the fact that it was for kids, but it didn’t dumb classical music down for them. It met them where they are in life, introduced them to an environment normally reserved for adults, and allowed them to learn with no judgment.
Gone was the pretense of a stuffy evening at the symphony, welcoming instead a new generation of classical music fans with the sun high in the sky.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source dailytrojan.com ’
