John Adams and Kronos Quartet return to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles tonight for another concert in West Coast, Left Coast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music festival curated by Adams, the festival's director and the creative chair of the Philharmonic. Tonight, they'll join the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a program featuring the world premiere of Thomas Newman's new piece, It Got Dark, led by Adams. An encore performance will be given at the Hall tomorrow night. David Harrington, the Kronos violinist and artistic director, talks about the new piece and what it's like to work with Adams on the podium, in a video at the Kronos YouTube page.

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On Tuesday, Adams and Kronos shared the stage for a West Coast, Left Coast concert in which Adams led the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group in performances of Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes and selections from Frank Zappa's Yellow Shark, and Kronos performed Harry Partch's U.S. Highball.

The Los Angeles Times's Josef Woodard describes Marshall's piece as "mistily mesmerizing" and says Adams, who requested that Marshall write the piece, back in 1981, "readily grasps its dualities of atmosphere and substance, and his conducting  links it to Wagner and Adams’ own ethereal bass piece Harmonielehre."

Yet it was the Zappa pieces, says Woodard, that were the focus of the event, which, at last, gave the late rocker "a long-overdue appreciation as a should-be hometown hero. His music, sharply etched here, soared and scampered, according to design, in this more than proper concert hall."

Read the concert review in the Times music blog, Culture Monster, at latimesblogs.latimes.com.

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For more on the West Coast, Left Coast festival, visit laphil.org.