Latest news with #GustavoDudamel
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Waiting for Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic Is Doing Just Fine
The New York Philharmonic is flying free. Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler's Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn't officially start until fall 2026. Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones. That certainly hasn't been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall's acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened. The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok's fairy-tale ballet 'The Wooden Prince,' a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart's 'Turkish' Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili's sensual flair. But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart's overture to 'The Magic Flute,' a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed. The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn't how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion's share of attention and applause. It's how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that 'Magic Flute' overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Dr. Gustavo Dudamel leads the New York Philharmonic, with L.A. style
New York — After triumphantly bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Coachella, Gustavo Dudamel is taking his biggest bite so far out of the Big Apple. He is in town for a three-week New York Philharmonic residency. He has devised two ambitious programs to close the orchestra's season in David Geffen Hall and will then be the big attraction for thousands of New York picnickers at free New York Philharmonic parks concerts throughout the boroughs. In the meantime, Dr. Dudamel picked up an honorary doctorate Saturday from the Juilliard School. A welcome mat doesn't get more welcoming than that for a conductor, and this is someone who has yet no official title with the orchestra. The three main 'People of the New York Philharmonic' featured on the orchestra's website are pianist Yuja Wang (artist in residence), Matías Tarnopolsky (newly appointed president and chief executive) and Alec Baldwin (radio series host). In September, Dudamel becomes music and artistic director designate. A year later, having completed 17 seasons as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he takes charge of the country's oldest and most celebrated orchestra. But who's counting days, months or years? From the moment Dudamel walked on stage at Geffen Hall to begin the dress rehearsal of his first concert of the series last week, there could be no question that it's his show. The orchestra has become fully Dudamel-branded, his image plastered everywhere you look. The talk of the town is that a music-director-designate-to-be has already transformed one of the world's great orchestras, which is said to be playing at a new level and with a new sound. New Yorkers still take pride in not being easily hoodwinked. The press glorifies Dudamel as the next Leonard Bernstein one minute and looks for flaws anywhere it can find them the next. But there is something in the air that even an outsider could feel at the rehearsal, which was open to donors and press interlopers. Dudamel simply seemed, without ostensibly trying, to belong. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it. When he asked the players for something, an orchestra famed for being difficult responded instantly. But Dudamel was doubtlessly trying to belong. The program, composed of nothing he has performed elsewhere, was meant to be a tribute to the New York Philharmonic. He began by pairing the first work the 183-year-old orchestra had ever commissioned with a premiere of a startling new commission. After intermission, he introduced the largest and most robust of the recent symphonies by the city's best-known composer, a veritable icon — Philip Glass — to an orchestra that had done its best to ignore for half a century. With orchestra and audience in his hands, Dudamel had yet another triumph. The New York Times called this program a love letter to New York. If so, the love letter had a postmark from L.A. Stravinsky composed his Symphony in Three Movements, written during and reflecting World War II, while he lived in West Hollywood. Like Schoenberg before him, the Russian émigré composer tried but failed to get a lucrative contract scoring a Hollywood film. Instead, Stravinsky reused bits he had meant for the 1943 epic 'The Song of Bernadette' in his war symphony. The newly commissioned work that followed was Kate Soper's 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,' a sensationally witty and profound monodrama about the meaning of music for amplified soprano and large orchestra. Soper herself was the talented soloist, as she had been a few weeks earlier when she appeared at the L.A. Phil's Green Umbrella concert in a far riskier early work, 'Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say.' A favorite of operatic progressives, Soper has had three operas staged by Long Beach Opera, including the premiere of her astonishingly fanciful 'Romance of the Rose,' perhaps the most original American opera of the decade. When it came to breaking the New York Philharmonic's Glass ceiling, Dudamel brought an L.A. Phil hammer. The first concert work by Glass that the New York Philharmonic ever performed was Concerto for Two Pianos in 2017, conducted by Dudamel's predecessor, Jaap van Zweden. It was Dudamel, however, who had given the premiere of the concerto and the L.A. Phil that commissioned it. Dudamel's performance of Symphony No. 11 thus became the first New York Philharmonic attempt at a Glass symphony. (He's written 15, and the L.A. Phil commissioned the 12th.) The 11th has everything audiences and orchestra players are said to dread. It is long (40 minutes), orchestrally big-boned in the manner of Bruckner and echt-Glass in its repetitions and romantic effusions. But in an act of remarkable conductorial persuasion, Dudamel emphasized Glass' talent for orchestral go-with-the-flow magnificence to blow the audience away. The crowd stood en mass and cheered the frail 88-year-old composer seated on the first tier. For all that, the performances were nonetheless on the stiff side, the famously virtuosic orchestra effortfully coming to terms with the unfamiliar. But the needle has moved. What felt unfamiliar was a general feeling of acceptance in Geffen Hall. The audience-friendly renovation during the pandemic helps with a powerful acoustic that encourages openness. This is no longer the uptight atmosphere where John Adams was angrily booed and where people noisily walked out as Zubin Mehta premiered major new works by Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis. The New York Philharmonic, moreover, has many younger players. And Geffen Hall has found novel means of reaching new audiences, particularly with its large video screens in the lobby, where every concert is streamed for free for passersby or those who want to take in the whole event. The video work is the most creative I've encountered. The sound system is not high-end and there are plenty of distractions. But I watched a matinee and found the experience compelling and the sound good enough to tell that by the second performance of the program, the orchestra had already gotten tighter. All this bodes well for Dudamel, who now has the West Coast support team he wanted. Deborah Borda, who hired Dudamel at the L.A. Phil and poached him at the New York Philharmonic, remains as an adviser to the orchestra. When Tarnopolsky ran Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, he became close to Dudamel. Adam Crane, the orchestra's vice president of external affairs, worked under Borda in L.A. when Dudamel made his U.S. debut at the Hollywood Bowl and was hired by the L.A. Phil. It is too soon to tell where this may lead. By now New Yorkers should know that Dudamel will not be the next Bernstein. He may well change New York, but he is not likely to be a New Yorker. Bernstein lived in New York, walking distance from Carnegie Hall and, when it was built, Lincoln Center. Bernstein raised his family at the Dakota and was, day and night, at the center of New York cultural, intellectual and political life. Dudamel says he still thinks of L.A. as home and the L.A. Phil as family. The New York Philharmonic is a new family. But Dudamel, in fact, now lives in Madrid and has Spanish citizenship. Yet for whatever reason, an L.A. mindset does seem to have reached the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. The orchestra follows Dudamel's appearances with 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' in concert and then heads off on an Asian tour with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. L.A. opera directors Yuval Sharon and Peter Sellars, nowhere to be found in L.A. at the moment, are prominent at the Lincoln Center. Sharon's production of 'The Comet/Poppea' he created for the Industry in L.A. last year will have its New York premiere here in June. Sellars' collaboration with composer Matthew Aucoin, 'Music for New Bodies,' is in July.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Dudamel Unveils a Love Letter to the Philharmonic
'Is there anything like that first strike of the bow?' Kate Soper asks at the start of her new piece for the New York Philharmonic. 'A hundred players moving as one! All that splendor, all that might!' She is describing the wonders of an orchestra, and you don't have to take her word for it. In Soper's sweet, clever 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,' which had its premiere at David Geffen Hall on Thursday under Gustavo Dudamel's baton, the ensemble illustrates her words as she says them, 'Peter and the Wolf' style. 'The highs got higher, the lows got lower,' she says, explaining the development of instruments, and we hear ethereal pitches, then loud rumbles. 'Wood was lacquered,' she goes on, to delight in the oboe and clarinet. 'Metal bent' elicits a horn fanfare and trombone slide. Soper soon proclaims, with disarming plainness, 'That's right everyone: I'm Orpheus!' In this half-hour monodrama for a mostly speaking, sometimes singing soprano, she offers a tender retelling of the legend of the great musician of Greek mythology. Her story blends into a poetic reflection on music's meaning, what it can do (offer glimpses of the sublime) and what it can't (most anything else). Soper does all this in quirkily postmodern style. Her eclectic, quick-shifting sounds, including touches of memorably ancient-feeling bass flute, are woven into a quilt of quotations from famous settings of the Orpheus myth by Monteverdi and Gluck, as well as lesser-heard ones by Sartorio, Landi, Campra and others. There are also flashes of Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart and Grieg in the mix, and the text, mostly original, interpolates passages from Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus.' Modern music lovers may be reminded of Luciano Berio's more chaotic collage 'Sinfonia.' For fans of Soper, especially in her composer-performer mode, 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus' will recall brainy, winsome works like 'Ipsa Dixit' (2016), which she began by posing the spoken question, 'What is art?' and attempted to answer through snippets of writers like Aristotle, Lydia Davis and Freud. Creating her first big orchestral piece, Soper has clearly understood she's writing for a broader audience; 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus' is more immediately accessible than the fascinating but abstruse 'Ipsa Dixit.' Philharmonic programs don't tend to feature a lot of humor — certainly not of Soper's winking mash-up variety — and her voice is a whimsical change of pace as the season draws to an end. Dudamel, who becomes the Philharmonic's music director designate later this year before fully taking the reins in fall 2026, preceded the orchestra's latest commission with its first: Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, conducted by its composer at its 1946 premiere. It's better known at Lincoln Center these days as the score for one of George Balanchine's classic leotard works, regularly danced by New York City Ballet. Played by the Philharmonic on Thursday with confident panache, it, like the Soper piece, offered a love letter to the orchestra's range, from burly power to graceful delicacy: 'All that splendor, all that might!' Too bad those qualities were missing from the program's closer, Philip Glass's dreary 11th Symphony (2017). Glass's listlessly chugging symphonies are nowhere near his greatest achievements, but the 40-minute 11th is finding its way to major orchestras; Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony did it a few years ago. A grumbling beginning yields to characteristically swirling Glassian figurations in the strings — well played by the Philharmonic, the arpeggios precise yet warm. After mild lyricism in the second movement, the third unleashes a battery of percussion. In Glass's 1984 opera 'Akhnaten,' that kind of raucous drumming is an arresting evocation of antiquity. Here, it's busy bombast, without real thrill or power.
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
LSO/Dudamel/Rebeka review – relentless orchestral fireworks and bright moments
Launching a concert with Strauss's Don Juan makes quite a statement: those madcap opening seconds, the music scrambling from the bottom of the orchestra in a bravura sweep before blooming into an irresistibly cavalier and heroic melody. It seemed a very Gustavo Dudamel way for the starry conductor to begin his first London appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra, after concerts in Spain last week. Dudamel drove the music hard and fast: it was full of firework explosions that dissolved into sparkling blurs of light. On one level it was thrilling. On another, it soon began to feel a little narrow. Dudamel let the brightest moments scythe through the texture – an ear-splitting glockenspiel, a brief but brazen trumpet solo – and yet the general orchestral sound was so thickly blended as to be almost homogenised. There was little sense of the music bubbling with detail, and a limited depth to the sound. This might not have mattered so much had the concert not been entirely of music by Strauss and Ravel, two of the 20th century's most meticulous musical colourists. At least the opening of Ravel's Shéhérazade showed that the orchestra could still play quietly. The soprano soloist was Marina Rebeka. Spinning out long, fluid lines, she captured the languid quality of these songs beautifully but was less convincing in conveying the wordiness of their poetry or the sense of wanderlust that drives the first song in particular. Instrumental highlights included Gareth Davies's flute solos in the second movement, first energised, then returning quiet and distant at the end. The orchestral palette broadened after the interval for Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole, with a beguiling softness to the mesmerising repeated figure in the first movement, and a sultriness in the Habanera that put the taut, shiny finale into relief. Finally there was the orchestral suite from Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier, in which the central waltz was full of character but the climactic music was pushed onwards relentlessly. The whole concert was pacy and entertaining, but it left the impression that the LSO is a huge paintbox, the darkest and softest colours of which Dudamel has only just begun to explore.
Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
LSO/Dudamel review — an inspired conductor finds his mojo again
★★★★★Churlishly I considered knocking a star off the rating for this gloriously exuberant fiesta of a concert because the Barbican audience weren't really given anything profound or meaty, dark or foreboding, to ponder. But honestly, who needs soul-baring symphonies when you have Gustavo Dudamel guiding, galvanising and coaxing the London Symphony Orchestra through a succession of Ravel and Strauss scores that shimmered with sensuality and showcased virtuosity all round the band? You can sometimes tell what a concert is going to be like from the first bar of music. This one was launched by a surge of notes so exhilarating yet so precisely co-ordinated that you forgot for a moment how difficult it is for some conductors to start Strauss's Don Juan at all.
