SF Classical Voice readers had a lot to think about in answering our 2025-2026 survey. Fiscal uncertainty or not, the Los Angeles calendar was filled with concerts from the interesting to the brilliant.
You, our readers, were left with the task of sorting out the hosts-with-the-most from the best-of-the-rest. With both nominations and final votes in readers' hands, and hundreds of responses, the Audience Choice Awards are a fascinating peek into the collective preferences of L.A.'s most engaged concertgoers.
Plenty of categories came down to just a few votes, and the winners and nominees definitely reflect the diversity of programming and voices available in the Southland. We hope that the results of this year’s poll encourage even more risk-taking in upcoming seasons, as Los Angeles continues to show why a vibrant arts scene is indispensable to a great city.
Favorite Opera Singer: Stacey Fraser
Los Angeles readers of SF Classical Voice keep things refreshingly local in this category. Stacey Fraser was once again the choice for favorite opera vocalist. The adventurous soprano fronts the Brightwork New Music Ensemble. With them, she was named in SFCV’s critics poll of best concerts of 2025 for her contribution to Brightwork’s “Digital Mixtape.” In April 2026, she was awarded an NEA project grant for a song cycle of new music to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. So SFCV readers are not the only ones who applaud Fraser.
Favorite Chamber Ensemble: Brightwork New Music Ensemble
Large numbers of Brightwork fans weighed in to bring their group victory in this category. Every vote was needed, because Salastina nipped at Brightwork’s heels the whole way, taking second place in a close contest. Brightwork launched a new record label last fall and had a superb season that featured electronic multi-genre artists Nick Norton and Cristina Lord, the “Digital Mixtape,” and “From the Americas,” focused on a multiplicity of Indigenous voices from North America and across the Pacific. We keep having high expectations and they keep justifying them.
Favorite Choral Ensemble: Los Angeles Master Chorale
The only winner in this category since SF Classical Voice began polling L.A. readers, LA Master Chorale won again this year in a walkover. Its concert season is a highlight of the Los Angeles scene every year, and the group often performs with the LA Philharmonic as well. In LAMC’s 2025-2026 season, we were wowed by David Lang’s before and after nature, with the Bang on a Can All Stars and video projections by Tal Rosner, and a deeply felt Mozart Requiem, among other great concerts.
Favorite Early Music/Baroque Ensemble: Los Angeles Camerata
Readers left no doubt about their favorite early music ensemble in L.A.: Los Angeles Camerata, by a mile. Artistic Director Marylin Winkle’s research on women composers was reflected in its exciting 2025-2026 season: “Madwomen (Part 2),” “She Rambled out of Bounds,” and most recently, “MadriGALS.” Tesserae Baroque claimed second place in this category.
Favorite New Music Ensemble: Brightwork Ensemble
Los Angeles has no shortage of contemporary music specialists, but Brightwork has contributed more of the city's new-music infrastructure than most. Pianist Aron Kallay founded the ensemble in 2013. It now runs Tuesdays @ Monk Space, the underground series that has become a fixture of the LA new-music scene, as well as Project Beacon, which brings residencies and composer readings to young musicians across Southern California. And it has a label of its own.
Favorite Orchestra: Los Angeles Philharmonic
No surprise here — though the circumstances are worthy of note. The LA Phil takes this category for the fifth year running, in the season that ended Gustavo Dudamel's 17-year tenure. (He becomes music director of the New York Philharmonic in September.) Daniel Harding was named as his successor in May but doesn't arrive until 2027–2028, so the orchestra will spend next season without a music director. But that's fine Esa-Pekka Salonen will returning as creative director, with John Adams contributing as creative chair, and hotshot young conductor Anna Handler coming in for three concerts as conductor in residence.
Favorite Conductor: Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic
The conductor goes out after 17 seasons, having won this category five years in a row. Dudamel arrived in 2009 at 28, and built an adoring constituency — founding YOLA, making memorable Hollywood Bowl appearances, conducting the Latin American music he made standard programming in a city that loves him for it. He isn't gone, either. The Phil has made him its artistic and cultural laureate and YOLA its founding director and conductor laureate. He returns to Disney Hall in December for Beethoven with pianist Rudolf Buchbinder.
Favorite Instrumental Soloist: Aron Kallay, piano
Kallay finished ahead of Yuja Wang and Anne Akiko Meyers, who had won the category the previous two years with Kallay as her runner-up. Kallay is a different kind of soloist. A specialist in microtonality and new music, he founded Brightwork newmusic and is board president of People Inside Electronics, which he co-founded. He co-directs MicroFest, and teaches at Chapman, Pomona, and USC. His recording of Cage's The Ten Thousand Things earned a Grammy nomination. Kallay’s work in educational outreach has given him an honored place in the larger Los Angeles music community.
Favorite Opera Performance: Los Angeles Opera, Akhnaten
Ten years after LA Opera first brought Phelim McDermott's English National Opera staging to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Glass's Akhnaten came back to win this category. Countertenor John Holiday sang the pharaoh, with Sun-Ly Pierce as Nefertiti and So Young Park as Queen Tye, led by Dalia Stasevska in the pit. Sean Gandini's jugglers returned too, throwing their mesmerizing arcs through the air. Pacific Opera Project took second and third place, with productions of The Abduction from the Seraglio and Zorro.
Favorite Chamber Performance: Anne Akiko Meyers, Grant Gershon, and members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale — “A Day of Healing & Renewal”
On Jan. 7, a year after the Palisades and Altadena fires, St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades held a day of prayer and music for a neighborhood that had lost so much of itself. Anne Akiko Meyers, who used to live there, planned and performed the program. Admission was free; donations went to four local arts organizations that the rampant fires had damaged. Voters made this one of the tightest races on the ballot.
Favorite Choral Performance: Anne Akiko Meyers, Grant Gershon, and members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale — “A Day of Healing & Renewal”
That same concert takes a second award here, this time by a wider margin. At the concert that followed the noon prayers, Grant Gershon conducted members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in Bach, Morten Lauridsen — a composer who has spent his career in Los Angeles — and Eric Whitacre's “Seal Lullaby,” with Meyers as soloist. It was that piece, years earlier, that had made her want to commission Whitacre in the first place. Hearing it in a still-healing neighborhood on the anniversary gave it added meaning.
Favorite Dance Performance: Invertigo Dance Theatre, Siren Songs at the Harpy Café
Picture a battered diner on a cliff edge, a storm that never lets up outside, coffee always brewing… a room full of both saints and demons. That was the premise of Siren Songs at the Harpy Café, which Laura Karlin directed and built with her performers, and which Invertigo brought to the Renberg Theatre at the Los Angeles LGBT Center on Nov. 15. Diana Lynn wrote the score, created the sound design, and danced in it, too.
Favorite Early Music/Baroque Performance: 46th Baroque Music Festival, Corona del Mar — “A Spanish Salón”
Four votes. That was the whole margin between this concert and L.A. Camerata's “Madwomen, pt. 2,” the tightest race on the ballot. The winner was the chamber night of the 46th Baroque Music Festival, Corona del Mar, on June 26 at St. Mark Presbyterian in Newport Beach. Four votes. That was the whole margin between this concert and L.A. Camerata's "Madwomen, pt. 2," the tightest race on the ballot. The concert featured music by 18th-century cellist/ composer Luigi Boccherini who rewrote his own string quintets for a guitar-playing nobleman, with a guitar in place of the second cello. One of them ends in a fandango scored with castanets, a street dance carried indoors by an Italian who made his life in Madrid.
Favorite New Music Performance: Brightwork Ensemble, “Voices Rooted from Southeast Asia”
Brightwork wins again here, for the season finale it played at Monk Space on June 9. Cellist Maggie Parkins curated the program around composers with roots in Southeast Asia: three works by the Cambodian American composer Chinary Ung, alongside Vivian Fung's Corona Morphs and Ania Vu's Strange Birds. Ashley Walters, Brendan White, and Genevieve Feiwen Lee joined the ensemble for the evening. There was pizza, wine, and beer on the patio beforehand, as is the custom there.
Favorite Orchestra Performance: Los Angeles Philharmonic, “Gustavo Dudamel: Celebrating 17 Years”
For his last program at Disney Hall, on June 5 and 7, Dudamel chose John Adams's Harmonium and Antonio Estévez's Cantata Criolla — the Venezuelan cantata in which a plainsman out-sings the devil. He had programmed the same Estévez work in his first season, back in 2009. Seventeen years later it has bookended his tenure in Los Angeles, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, tenor Anthony León, baritone Eliomar Cuello, and soloists from YOLA. Bach Collegium San Diego's Messiah was the runner-up.
Favorite Large Venue: Walt Disney Concert Hall
Disney Hall has won five years running now. The Frank Gehry-designed hall opened in 2003, and by this point its hold on the category says as much about the programming inside as the steel sail-like structures outside. Readers weren't voting on architecture. As iconic as this building is, set against the downtown Los Angeles skyline, what LA loves is the music — and community — that happens within.
Favorite Small Venue: Monk Space
Behind an unassuming white door with a keypad, is a garage-like room in Koreatown with exposed brick, folding chairs, and space for about 80 people, which for more than a decade has been where a good deal of the city's most vibrant new music actually comes to life. The space opened in 2013, and Brightwork's Tuesdays @ Monk Space series has been based there since. The win ends Zipper Hall's five-year hold on this category, after the two tied here last year.
Favorite Festival: Ojai Music Festival
The 80th Ojai festival ran June 11–14 with Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director. Salonen programmed it by building connections that few others might think to draw — teachers, students, colleagues, all in conversation across four days. Leila Josefowicz played György Ligeti's concerto from memory. The Attacca Quartet gave the premiere of John Adams's Iron Jig. Stravinsky's Pulcinella closed it. This was also Ara Guzelimian's last festival as artistic and executive director; conductor/ composer Teddy Abrams has been named to take over.
Favorite New Discovery: Los Angeles Opera, Hildegard
Sarah Kirkland Snider first thought about writing this opera 25 years ago, after reading psychiatrist Oliver Sacks’s observations on migraines and recognizing something of Hildegard von Bingen's visions in it. She spent eight years on the research, then wrote her own libretto. Eleven players and four singers carry the whole interior life of a medieval mystic whose music continues to enchant modern listeners. LA Opera gave the world premiere at the Wallis on Nov. 5, with Nola Richardson as Hildegard and Mikaela Bennett as Richardis, Gabriel Crouch conducting, and Elkhanah Pulitzer directing. It played at the Prototype Festival in New York in January. Gilgamesh: The Opera finished second.
