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Seven years ago, shortly after Jaap van Zweden was appointed Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, I listened to as many of his commercial recordings as I could get my hands on them, in order to get a better sense of his conducting sense. I listened to it all. I don’t exactly remember it as a pleasant experience, but when I have to recall it at all, I’ve never flattered him that much.
Now that the next music director of the Philharmonic Orchestra has been decided, it’s Gustavo Dudamel’s turn.
This exercise is a different proposition and thankfully it’s not exhausting. Van Zweden wasn’t very well known when the Philharmonic Orchestra hired him, and even avid collectors may be forgiven for not knowing his latest releases. Dudamel is a Hollywood star celebrity who enjoys a longstanding relationship with the Deutsche Grammophon label. On May 19, he will appear with the Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time since his appointment, effective in 2026, to conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
The Philharmonic has high hopes for the 42-year-old Dudamel, who will make a record anyway, but probably didn’t hire him first and foremost to give him the agenda of putting Beethoven and Brahms on disc. I don’t think so. The Society hopes that he will become a greater figure, a talisman to delight and enthuse audiences that the orchestra has not yet enraptured.
His conducting has always been somewhat overshadowed by the dizzying hype surrounding his vision of making music as a transformative force. Claims that he was the “classical savior” are no longer as common as they once were, but other clichés have persisted since his rise to stardom in the mid-2000s. So, musically, he’s in favor of impulsive fervor, or in favor of eternity. youth. As he told The New York Times in February, he still has to say, “I’m no longer a young conductor.”
Dudamel himself has often suggested that he never was. When he was 26, 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon asked if he was too young to be a conductor. He replied that he has been conducting since he was 12, adding that he still has a lot to learn. “I’m not that old. I’m 30,” he told critic Mark Swed in 2011. “But I feel old.” Likewise, many critics over the years have described Dudamel’s approach as that of a much more senior musician. Alex Ross of The New Yorker recently suggested that “in some ways he was too mature to begin with.”
So perhaps you listen to Dudamel’s recordings not only to hear the rising child prodigy, but also to the way he grew up so quickly, the rich experience of being blessed with star-studded mentors for most of his career. It would be best to hear that he became a musician laden with music. , and has performed with the world’s finest orchestras for nearly 20 years. With that in mind, his discography should attract more than reasonable support.
I’m not saying it’s bad. Most of Dudamel’s recordings are perfectly listenable, and some, like Ives’ symphony set with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, which he has conducted since 2009, are impressive. Few people are outraged or appalled, but they tend to disapprove of Dudamel’s ideas. All-star energy. Some of his reading is frankly pretty solid. On the whole, he appears to be a very capable musician, but he has yet to acquire the brilliance of his flair for detail and imagination that would mark him as an extraordinary conductor.
it’s hard now Remember perfectly the overheated hysteria Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela caused when they began playing mambos in concert halls in Europe and North America wearing yellow, red and blue jackets. I was just a teenager when I went to see their near-mythical concert at the Proms in London in 2007 without a doubt. A grown man snatched the jacket from my hands as the players threw it into the euphoric crowd. That same year, one critic called Dudamel and Bolivar “the greatest show on earth.”
El Sistema, the educational program from which the Bolivar family was born, later found itself caught up in the darkness of Venezuelan politics. Dudamel’s public opposition to President Nicolás Maduro’s government in 2017 was prompted by the shooting of a young viola player on the show, Armando Cañizares, during a protest. Mr. Dudamel is still the music director of the Bolivar family, but they are aging and the young orchestra has no income. And last November, I felt that I was able to visit my hometown again after a long time. In August, he will conduct Bolivar for the first time in six years at the Edinburgh Music Festival. He sounds at his freest in this ensemble he calls ‘my family’, and the synthesis of their records reveals a basic sense of his musical personality.
At the heart of Dudamel’s psyche is musical joy, and nowhere is it more evident than in “Fiesta,” his infectious recording of Latin American music. Early on, he succeeded in heightening the emotional content of his scores, which made his Tchaikovsky (“Francesca da Rimini” and another of Shakespeare’s fantasy Fifth Symphony releases) It explains the extreme tempo that makes it so thrilling and explosive when it’s finally finished. to simple things. Since then, he has softened that trait, but a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic commentary on Dvořák’s symphony “New World” suggests that he did not abandon it entirely. .
Other elements of Dudamel’s style are present and accurate. He prefers to emphasize the melodic forms of his works rather than the harmonic foundation. Therefore, the “Tristan” Prelude and Lie Bestst in the dubious Wagner Collection are beautiful, but loose. There is also a certain rhythmic fluffiness, and a reluctance to give the rhythm a precise character. That means the frenzied Rite of Spring is far from barbaric, and the same problem weighs on the very different repertoire of the 2017 New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic. . Many waltzes and polkas are fascinating, but they often lead the way as well. I got my feet.
A lot of it has to do with what Dudamel likes, or at least grew up with, that sound. The Bolivars were a huge orchestra, a spectacle not only musically but visually, their sonic masses dull and overwhelming. No wonder their conductors prefer full sound. It doesn’t necessarily matter. But the fact is that his sound picked up by the mic can appear flat.
In some cases it doesn’t matter that much. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra has a patient Bruckner Ninth that is satisfying despite its long tenure with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which had Dudamel as a trainee as chief conductor from 2007 to his 2012. But there isn’t enough sonic differentiation to make it lively. Mussorgsky in Vienna, Strauss with the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the same problem creeps into some of his Mahler pieces, including his Fifth Symphony with Berlin, which is lovely and carefree. More deliberate and less interesting than the magnificent No. 5 with Adagietto. A third from Berlin is similar: lucid, but no more.
Then Dudamel’s Beethoven. His first recording with the Bolivar family was a combination of a shaky No. 5 and a spirited No. 7 that still has a surprising drive to listen to today. Unfortunately, the subsequent “Eroica” is not. Nor is there a series of self-published symphonies dating back to a concert in Venezuela in 2015. Slow and not entirely steady, this is Beethoven so futuristic that it might have felt conservative a couple of generations ago. I wouldn’t mind if many of those readings, like his satisfying fourth, had the formal safety and dramatic tension this aesthetic demands.
For the Los Angeles Philharmonic As New York Times critic Zachary Wolfe wrote in 2017, during Dudamel’s tenure the orchestra did indeed become “America’s most important orchestra”, but its success was partly due to its recordings. I can’t hear anything. The dire economic realities of the streaming age are such that even Dudamel, despite his fame, doesn’t get the chance to tinker with his own interpretations in the studio like his previous generation of conductors.
Also, Dudamel has not been able to fully maintain the loyalty to the new music he and his players have shown in their performances. His recordings of Andrew Norman’s ‘Sustain’ and Thomas Adès’ ballet ‘Dante’ are invaluable, but I have heard Adès conduct some of his scores more boldly. there is. Most of all, Dudamel’s Los Angeles discography is significant as evidence of his endorsement of John Adams. There are great productions, as are the pioneering expositions of “Another Mary’s Gospel” and “Does the Devil Have All the Good Songs?” “Slonimsky’s ear box” full of energy.
The caveat is justifiably lamented, but it’s still enough to continue here. Dudamel’s early years at the Walt Disney Concert Hall are well documented. Highlights include the exhilarating yet softly focused Bartok Concerto for Orchestra from his January 2007 debut and the ambitious and powerful Brahms No. 4, which won the Grammy Award. However, most concert broadcasts at the time were routine, and the smooth Mahler No. 1 from the 2009 Inaugural Gala was mainly heard as a baseline to improve Mahler’s later recordings in Los Angeles. Worth it. A warm and caring 9th of 2012 is okay with more snapping and chewing, but a tightly controlled 8th of 2019 is effective.
But what’s still strange is that what should have been an easy home run record isn’t. It took Deutsche Grammophon five years to release Dudamel’s “The Nutcracker” after the 2013 concert. It was pleasant enough on the first listen, but on the second it became clear why: rhythmic shyness and colors a few tones darker than before. Bright like a fairy. Similar reservations lurk in every poignant moment in Dudamel’s 2019 tribute to his friend John Williams. When Williams conducts the “Imperial March,” he can either scare the people with the full-fledged fighting power of the Empire, like the Berliner Philharmoniker, or ridicule its vanity, like the Vienna Philharmonic. . Dudamel has not commented on it at all.
I’m curious about this kind of thing. The New York Philharmonic hailed Dudamel as a resurrection of Leonard Bernstein, a figure who would actually restore the orchestra to a position it had only enjoyed periodically in its history. But whatever Bernstein was, he was a unique conductor. who knows? Maybe Dudamel could do the same. But he has work to do.
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