The Community Arts Music Association will present the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a special gala concert on Saturday that marks the end of one era and the beginning of another.

The 7 p.m. concert will be the last time Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the L.A. Philharmonic in Santa Barbara. Salonen will step down as the orchestra’s music director at the conclusion of the 2008-09 season to free up more time for composing. Gustavo Dudamel has been chosen as his successor. It also will be CAMA’s inaugural concert in the newly restored Granada Theatre.

The program for Salonen’s swan song will include Johannes Brahms’ Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in B-flat Major, Opus 83, and three selections from Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung/Twilight of the Gods (Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music, Brünnhilde’s Immolation). The piano soloist in the Brahms concerto will be Leif Ove Andsnes, and the soprano who will sing the role of Brünnhilde will be Lisa Gasteen.

In the late 19th century, this program would have been virtually impossible, certainly unthinkable. The Brahms establishment and the Wagner gang would have been – perhaps literally – up in arms if any such heretical scheduling had been attempted.

It would be interesting to know what the two composers really thought of each other. Wagner, the ego maniac he was, rarely spoke of other composers – always excepting Beethoven – unless they joined his fan club and paid dues. Brahms was more free with his discussions of his contemporaries, especially when writing to Clara Schumann, but even then he was on his guard. Without too much ill grace, he admitted to being impressed with Wagner, but: “All the same, I am glad that I have not got to say all I think, quite clearly and loudly … .” (Frau Schumann, herself a composer of note, wrote in her diary, after attending a performance of Tristan: “It is the most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.”)

The Brahms concerto, one of only four that Horowitz committed to vinyl, is a majestic work, full of powerful ideas and soaring melodies. Götterdämmerung is the final opera of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelungs. Everything that was bound to happen, someday, in the previous three music dramas, finally does happen in the last one. Siegfried is killed, Valhalla is destroyed, man is left on his own. In the Norse mythology of this saga, evil wins eventually: What matters is fighting it. In fact, this was the first of the four to be composed. Thinking that the audience might need more background, Wagner then wrote, then Siegfried, then Die Walküre, then the prologue, Das Rheingold.

For tickets to this nonsubscription concert, call the Granada Theatre box office, 1222 State St., at 805.899.2222, or call CAMA at 805.966.4324.