Conductor speaks out on world stages

Ukrainian-born Dalia Stasevska takes on Philip Glass in her debut with the L.A. Opera

- BY TIM GREIVING

THROUGH HER MUSIC, Dalia Stasevska, seated on the steps of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in L.A., fights for Ukraine.

(DAVID BUROW For The Times)

When Dalia Stasevska heard opera music for the first time, it was a moment of profound self-revelation.

She was 13, growing up in the factory town of Tampere in the south of Finland, and her school librarian gave her a CD of Puccini's “Madama Butterfly” along with a translation of its Italian libretto.

"As a teenage girl, this dramatic story touched my soul,” Stasevska says, adding that she still remembers the experience and thinking, " 'This music understands me, this is exactly how I feel.' And that was ... when I knew that I wanted to become a musician.”

Stasevska recently stepped down as the chief conductor of Finland's Lahti Symphony Orchestra and is a prodigious conductor of orchestral music in all forms. A busy guest baton with companies around the globe, she made her L.A. Opera debut Saturday with a production of “Akhnaten” by Philip Glass, running through late March.

The seminal work by Glass lands at L.A. Opera just a month after the world-famous composer abruptly canceled June's world premiere of Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“While Philip Glass has pulled out of Kennedy Center, his music will be front and center at our production,” a representative for L.A. Opera wrote in an email.

Stasevska, 41, with her razor-sharp appreciation of the power of Glass’ work, is the ideal conductor to bring it there.

She walks from the ornate foyer of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with its emerald green carpets and gleaming chandeliers, to the more ordinary hallways and cubicles of L.A. Opera’s offices. She’s been in town rehearsing for a few weeks and jokes with some of the show’s jugglers in a kitchenette, where she makes herself a machine-pod coffee.