The sold-out crowd was already well-enamored of Dudamel even before he gave the first downbeat; it's rare to hear a New York audience greet a music director's walk to the podium so warmly, or with such a sustained effort; any skeptics in the crowd were most definitely in the minority.
With their gregarious new rock-star of a conductor leading them, the Los Angeles Phiharmonic wrapped up a US tour on May 22nd with a performance in New York City at Lincoln Center's "Great Performers" series. The concert featured two works that have, in the few short months since Gustavo Dudamel started in Los Angeles this past October, become something of a calling card for the California orchestra: John Adams' City Noir, which Dudamel and his new orchestra played as a world premiere for his first concert in his new position, and Mahler's Symphony No. 1 "Titan." The idea was that the two works contrasted urban grit with bucolic gentility, but perhaps more accurate was the bridge the program created between old Europe, the still-young US, and the burgeoning presence of Latin America in classical music--especially through Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (now called the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela), who rose through the ranks of the now widely lauded, government-sponsored music education program familiarly called El Sistema.
The sold-out crowd was already well-enamored of Dudamel even before he gave the first downbeat; it's rare to hear a New York audience greet a music director's walk to the podium so warmly, or with such a sustained effort; any skeptics in the crowd were most definitely in the minority. (It's also rare to see an audience of such mixed ages at Avery Fisher Hall, or to hear so much Spanish being spoken during intermission--both very welcome, and not at all tangential, results of Dudamel's appointment.)
As readers of his autobiography "Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life" already know, composer John Adams--born and raised aesthetic worlds away in New England--loves his adopted state of California as much as he adores jazz. Adams pays serious homage to both in City Noir, a piece portraying the city of Los Angeles filtered through the cool light of 1950s. Of his work, Adams writes in the program notes: "City Noir is the final panel in a triptych of orchestral works that have as their theme the California experience, its landscape, and its culture"; the other two are El Dorado and the violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur.
| Reviews of this piece have referenced the detective movies of that era, but I heard the plain-spoken inflections of musicians who were integral to the California cool jazz scene | The piece opens with a movement called "The City and Its Double," with a jazz drummer skittering across jittery runs in the winds: the vitality of bebop and a classically dark, symphonic intrigue rolled into one, with the drummer providing the adrenaline-fueled, ennervated heartbeat to the piece, followed by a saxophone solo that comes straight out of cool jazz. (It's hard to forget, at moments like these, that Adams was himself trained as a clarinetist, and that his own father played in swing bands, and that he has a special affinity for wind and brass instruments.) |
Many reviews of this piece have referenced the detective movies of that era, and certainly the piece's title alludes to such a connection, but I heard the plain-spoken inflections of musicians who were integral to the California cool jazz scene, like Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker; Adams himself name-checks the Duke Ellington band trombonists Lawrence Brown and Britt Woodman, both native Angelenos.
The broad lushness of the second movement, "The Song is for You," is a world away from the motoric acuity of what we think of as "typical" Adams, the propulsive energy taken to its limits in such works as The Chairman Dances and smaller-scaled works like Phrygian Gates for piano. But in recent years, there's been a blossoming of full-out, romantic lushness of Adams' work, such as in his shimmering, dreamlike 2006 opera A Flowering Tree or in his epically soulful Doctor Atomic opera from 2004-05, particularly in the shattering aria "Batter My Heart."
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| The test of Dudamel and his orchestra's mettle, however, was most probably Mahler's famous First Symphony; its sudden emotional and textural shifts can confound conductors nearly three times the 29-year-old Dudamel's age. While certainly the bone-dry and infamously acoustically challenged Avery Fisher Hall didn't help their cause, the Los Angeles Philharmonic doesn't have the lustrous sheen of the best Mahler orchestras, such as in the absolutely riveting cycle given in New York at the end of the 2009 season by the Staatskapelle Berlin, with Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez splitting the conducting duties. |
However, Dudamel found ways to make this very familiar work fresh. (Moreover, whether it's entirely coincidental or not, Dudamel shares a passion for Mahler with another charismatic, exciting conductor who burst onto the world stage as a very young man: Leonard Bernstein.) The opening melody was injected with a sense of suspense rather than of inevitability; similarly, the melody of "“Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld” (which Mahler borrowed from his own song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) arrives with a sweetness and wistfulness that belies Dudamel's youth.
Dudamel has found ingenious ways of dealing with some of the most perplexing moments of Mahler: when the two-note cuckoo motif overlaps with the horns' hunting calls and the return of the darker first movement theme, the result is a highly modern, nearly Ives-ian layering of distinctly different musical events. But the conductor also pursues some less fruitful interpretational ideas: the 3/4-time Landler dance (an Austrian precursor to the waltz) lurches along at an oddly disjointed and idiosyncratic pace. Similarly, he lost the architectural momentum at the end of the symphony's third movement when he let a huge climax of momentum stall out rather than deliver it to its subtle conclusion. (Disappointingly gone, too, was any hint of the characteristic klezmer sound in the winds, though the brass managed to coax out that flavor in their own parts.)
Dance, though, is clearly a joy for Dudamel; he is a kinetic presence on the podium, and he actually cleared air at the podium several times over in the fourth movement, which is marked "Sturmisch bewegt--Energisch" ("Stormily agitated--energetic"). And when the mood turns once more from a glorious sunshine to a deathlike pallor, Dudamel had difficulty harnessing the energy of the transition.
Those small moments, however, are the mark of a conductor who is still very young, and who hopefully will have decades ahead of him to articulate and further refine his point of view in the core repertoire. With the kind of incisiveness, energy, and talent Dudamel brings, however, there's little doubt that such matters will evolve as he matures. The audience went absolutely wild at the concert's conclusion, with stamps and cheers and Venezuelan flags being unfurled. For an artist to bring such buzz back into the concert hall is, itself, a marvelous and remarkable thing.
Photos by Richard Termine
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