The piano bench

The pianist who played the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, jammed with Metallica at the Grammys, and performed for Pope Francis returns to Walt Disney Concert Hall for a solo recital spanning Mozart, two Beethoven sonatas, Spanish showpieces from Albéniz and Granados, and two Liszt works he calls his own "whispered prayer."

The Icelandic pianist revisits his 2020 recording pairing Debussy and Rameau, weaving in Philip Glass etudes alongside harpsichord suites by the composer Ólafsson calls "the bad boy of the French baroque." The Times of London compared listening to him to "riding a magic carpet."

Soloist Francesco Piemontesi tackles a concerto once considered unplayable, backed by conductor Joana Mallwitz and the LA Phil. The program opens with Kodály's folk-inflected Dances of Galánta and Hindemith's 1934 Mathis der Maler Symphony, written the year after the Nazi Party seized power in Germany.

The Grammy-winning Russian pianist Martha Argerich once described as having "tenderness and also the demonic element" returns for a wide-ranging recital: Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Stravinsky's sole piano sonata, and a set of Latin American music.

A piano sensation since the 1980s devotes a full evening to Beethoven, pairing early and late piano sonatas with the Diabelli Variations, a set Beethoven himself dismissed as "a botched piece of cobbling" but which is now ranked among the genre's greatest works.

"The most famous pianist in the world" (The Observer) returns to the hall where the Los Angeles Times once said she displayed "degrees of speed, agility and strength that may have been in violation of gravity's laws."

Sumino, who broke through as a semifinalist at the 2021 International Chopin Competition, reunites with the LA Phil after his Hollywood Bowl debut to play Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1, a piece he says "sounds like it's written on the spot." Conductor Louis Langrée opens the program with Mozart's Gran Partita.