West Coast, Left Coast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic festival celebrating the music of California, concludes tonight, after more than two weeks of performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with a celebration of the Beat poets and bebop jazz featuring a number of poets and musicians, including Joshua Redman. This weekend saw performances from Brian Wilson, Kronos Quartet, and multiple appearances by festival curator John Adams.

Kronos joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic Friday night at Disney Hall, with Adams taking a recuperating Leonard Slatkin's place at the podium, in an encore performance of the previous night's program, which featured the world premiere of the orchestral version of Thomas Newman's It Got Dark. Variety's Richard S. Ginell praises Adams and fellow conductor, Jayce Ogren, who split the program, with having saved the show when Slatkin's recovery from a heart attack meant he would be unable to conduct. And, says Ginell, "it was worth saving." Read his concert review at variety.com.

The Quaret was "enthusiastic" in its performance, says Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed. "Newman’s writing is comfortable in many worlds and fun to listen to," says Swed. "He played with various Kronos specialties, such as wild solos and Minimalist grooves." Swed's review calls particular attention to point at which all those worlds came together: "a Steve Reich moment interrupted by something that sounded like it came out of a spaghetti western."

Read his review at latimes.com.

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Adams returned to the stage on Sunday to lead the Philharmonic in a program that Swed, in a separate Times review, describes as "four unrelated samples of musical fecundity and otherness," including Adams's Dharma at Big Sur, works by Paul Dresher and William Kraft, plus a suite from Leonard Rosenman's score to Rebel Without a Cause, which Swed calls "an Adams favorite." (Adams led the London Sinfonietta in a recording of Rosenman's film work, including this score, for the Nonesuch Film Series.) Swed says of this weekend's performance with the LA Phil: "It was wonderful to hear it lovingly played by a great orchestra that Adams had sounding bright and brilliant all evening."

The culminating piece on the program was Adams's own Dharma at Big Sur, a piece Swed calls "ecstatic," and which the evening's featured violinist, Leila Josefowicz, has made "her own." Here, he says, she "played brilliantly, calling up the electric violin’s deep cello drones as if in a peyote ceremony and rising to heights of rapture." Putting it in the context of the festival's larger theme, Swed concludes: "This was an example in music of what we mean when we tell ourselves California is too irresistible to fail."

Read the Sunday concert review at latimes.com.