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- The symphony was scheduled to rehearse the night of the Palisades fire.
- The orchestra’s first concert of 2025 was scheduled for just weeks after the fire.
- Sixteen members of the all-volunteer orchestra and the Brentwood Palisades Chorale lost homes in the fire.
When Denisa Hanna opened the text and saw images of the flames and smoke of the Palisades fire advancing from the highlands, she knew she had to cancel rehearsal.
She was safe in her home, Mid-City, but the pictures had come from the secretary of Palisades Lutheran Church, who was evacuating. The roads were jammed and the wind was howling.
“Please stay safe and say prayers for our friends near this horrible disaster,” Hanna, the president of the Palisades Symphony Orchestra, wrote in an email to its members.
They had planned to gather that night at the church on Sunset Boulevard, their first practice of the new year. For almost 60 years, the all-volunteer orchestra — together with the Brentwood Palisades Chorale — had served the community with a series of annual programs, and their first concert of 2025 was just a few weeks away.
Both improbable and inspirational, the 70-member orchestra grew from a fledgling adult education program at the local high school into a beloved institution through the hard work of its founder, Joel Lish, and Eva Holberg. Lish died in 2024 and Holberg two years earlier, but still the symphony played on.
But now its future had grown dark as embers turned to flames and flames ran through neighborhoods to the sea, and the music they loved fell silent.
The next day Hanna, who also performs with the orchestra on bass, sent another email. Even though Palisades Lutheran Church had not burned down, their community — and members’ homes — were in ashes.
“Due to the devastation,” she wrote, “I am not very sure about rehearsing. We may not even be able to get into the Palisades for quite a while.”
The scope of the disaster grew clear as the orchestra began to reconnect.
“We lost our house,” wrote first violinist Helen Bendix in a brief email to musical director and conductor Maxim Kuzin.
Bendix was one of the 16 members of the symphony and the chorale who had lost their homes. Between the Palisades and Eaton firestorms that week, more than 16,000 structures were lost and at least 29 people killed.
In the aftermath of such a tragedy, the musicians wondered how — even if — they could continue.
The violins and violas had to be saved. On the morning of the fire, Bendix grabbed them and headed with her husband to their car. The instruments were a connection to her mother, who had played the cello and died in 2020. At 72, Bendix was not about to lose that.
The impulse was as close to an instinct as she had ever felt, even though she assumed their home would be safe. Left behind were a portrait of her grandmother, photographs of her family, jewelry, wardrobe and the less sentimental essentials of life, glasses for reading music, tax records, medicine, passports and car.
Seven miles west from where the Palisades fire started in Temescal Canyon, Ingemar Hulthage didn’t grab his violin. With the fire advancing, he and his partner, Melinda Singer, caged their cats, loaded them in the car and drove away from their cul-de-sac home west of Topanga, hoping they would return.
He too never thought the flames would travel as far as they did. He had lost his home in the 1993 Malibu fire — along with his most prized Fagnola violin — but he returned and rebuilt, installing a sprinkler system and purchasing another violin.
Taken in by a friend in Van Nuys, Hulthage hoped history wouldn’t repeat itself. But a video from a neighbor taken a day later confirmed the loss. There had been no water for the sprinklers.
Like hundreds of families in Los Angeles who had lost everything overnight, lives upended, Hulthage and Bendix were soon tallying losses and searching for a place to live, a modicum of stability.
When Maxim Kuzin began to receive emails from orchestra members asking when rehearsals would resume, he wasn’t certain how to answer. He had been with the orchestra for just a year and had always felt strength in the dedication of its members.
He lived in Gardena, far from the devastation, but knew how disorienting loss can be. He had emigrated from Ukraine in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea but felt as if he had never really left. So when news came last year that his childhood home in Kyiv had been hit by a missile, he was stunned.
Maybe music could help. He thought of the program he had planned back in December: the Taras Bulba Overture by Mykola Lysenko, a concerto by Edvard Grieg and César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor. Maybe like the musicians who endured the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 and still performed on the front lines, they too could shake their fists at the universe, at the forces of chaos and destruction.
“Recognizing the power of music to comfort and heal, we have decided to resume rehearsals as early as this Tuesday, January 14th,” he wrote in an email to the orchestra.
When Bendix read these words, she felt a feeling of relief. Moving forward sometimes means no looking back.
“We need to get together,” she replied, hoping she wasn’t too rusty.
Without his violin, Hulthage wondered if he’d even be able to play. He joined the orchestra almost 25 years ago. As second violin, he considered himself an amateur, but he had always felt at home in the company of musicians.
Hanna knew she could help.
Many of the other musicians had saved their instruments. A friend, who played bass and owned a few electric basses — and who had lost his home — even joked about it. “I’ve got more basses in this motel room than I have underwear,” he said.
As a luthier — skilled at repairing stringed instruments — Hanna had a violin she could give Hulthage, and when the orchestra gathered on Jan. 14 to rehearse in the small meeting room of a senior living facility in Westwood, she presented it to him. He was overcome.
“This was the most normal I’ve felt since the fire,” he said.
Now they had a month to get ready.
Four weeks later, on the day of the concert, Hulthage purchased a tuxedo but had yet to change as he helped set up chairs for the strings in the transept of Westwood United Methodist Church. Though their performance space, the Lutheran church in Pacific Palisades, was still intact, months of cleaning soot and ridding the smell of smoke lay ahead.
Guest soloist Alexander Wasserman practiced the Grieg concerto, chords like thunderclaps resonating from the grand piano, a gorgeous black-lacquer Shigeru Kawai donated for this performance.
Two men wrestled three large timpani drums up the steps to the space before the altar. Another maneuvered the harp into the choir. In the vestibule, Katie Rudner folded programs for arriving guests and handed out envelopes for checks and helped with Venmo charges. Donations would be set aside to help the musicians and members of the community.
At 7 p.m. Bendix arrived, dressed in a black sequined skirt, jacket, scarf and earrings her children had presented to her after the fire. She found her seat in the second row and began warming up on the violin that her mother gave her 25 years ago.
Kuzin, dressed in embroidered Ukrainian shirt, greeted friends and well-wishers. More than 200 visitors slowly filled the sanctuary, and at 7:30 Hanna addressed the audience, beginning with her gratitude for the use of the church and closing in appreciation of the many who had helped make the evening possible. Then she stepped down and walked to where her bass stood.
Kuzin lifted his baton.
With two ascending notes, then two more and two more, the orchestra began Lysenko’s heroic overture, its lyrical grandeur slowly emerging as the strings and horns gathered strength and its momentum soon swelling to its rousing close.
As the applause ebbed, Kuzin took a moment to address the audience. The piece by the Ukrainian composer, rarely performed in the United States, elicited the conductor’s pride.
“I hope you can understand why Ukrainians cannot lose the war. A nation with such music cannot simply lose,” he said before welcoming Wasserman, who delivered a dramatic and sweet interpretation of the Grieg concerto.
After intermission, Kuzin appealed to the audience for its financial support, briefly speaking about the fire and those who lost everything.
“I hope that some of us will get that idea that they live now in a different world than all of us did in this period of time,” he said, hoping to re-create community with music, a bond of empathy, so that in the aftermath of this tragedy, “eventually, hopefully, some kind of meaning will be revealed to those of you who suffered.”
The D-minor key of the Franck symphony set a somber mood as violins tried to lift the melody up from the darker, deeper notes, and out of the score rose memories of the fire, the gusting wind, the smell of smoke and the heat. Crescendos broke like an overwhelming force over musicians and audience alike.
The second movement was the respite, opening with the harp and plucked strings. The English horn issued a plaintive, simple melody, as if trying to evoke older memories of a nearly forgotten time.
The third movement was reclamation. In point and counterpoint, the musicians delivered a feeling of possibility that maybe one day they may all return to the homes they had lost and to the community that had embraced them almost 60 years ago.
The audience clapped and cheered. Kuzin mopped his brow, and Hulthage, Bendix, Hanna and rest of the orchestra stood and bowed.
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