James Conlon to debut at Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills

James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera, will make his conducting debut at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills this month as part of a music series in collaboration with the Colburn School.

The concert is scheduled for Oct. 28, with Conlon leading a program featuring music by Walter Arlen, the Los Angeles-based music critic and composer who fled Vienna as a young man when the Nazis entered in Austria in 1938.

After emigrating to the U.S., Arlen eventually settled in Southern California and worked for decades as a music reviewer for The Times. Now in his 90s, he is expected to be present during the concert, which will feature musicians from the Colburn School.

SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter >>

The concert is part of the Colburn’s Ziering-Conlon Initiative, a program that the conductor helped to establish in 2013 as way of bringing attention to music by composers whose lives and careers were cut short during the Holocaust.

Prior to that, Conlon initiated the Recovered Voices series at L.A. Opera several years ago to explore similar territory, but the program was put on indefinite hiatus for budgetary reasons in 2010.

For the 2015-16 season, the Colburn will collaborate with the Wallis Annenberg Center on a total five concerts. The second performance on Oct. 30 will feature pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performing music by Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc and Schumann. Other performances are scheduled later in the season.

Twitter: @DavidNgLAT