Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time.
The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid with his family. You could call that home. In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, though, he said that he would always think of his native Venezuela as home. And, after 15 years of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Southern California is home, too.
“I am going to New York, of course,” Dudamel said, “but L.A. is home.”
Comments like this are a reminder that, for now, New York has little claim on Dudamel. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is still very much his home orchestra: where he has led the premieres of some 300 pieces, founded an immense youth orchestra program and achieved celebrity status in a city of celebrities.
There are, perhaps, clues to Dudamel’s New York future in his Los Angeles present, which was on exhilarating display over three evenings at Carnegie Hall this week. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concerts that reflected his gift for must-hear programming and his open-minded disregard for genre, his welcome belief that at a high enough level, all music can be art.
But Dudamel is not without his weaknesses. While he can be brilliant off the beaten path, he is less distinct and perceptive in the classics. In that sense, his visit to Carnegie is both a sign of promise and a warning.
He has always been a bit uneven. His early Beethoven recordings, with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, hardly rise in a crowded field. Two years ago, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Carnegie in a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that lacked vision and precision.
Still, on that same Carnegie program was the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s violin concerto “Altar de Cuerda,” which was played with the kind of vigorous commitment many living composers can only dream of.
Ortiz, the resident composer at Carnegie this season, was on the program again on Wednesday, with another new concerto: “Dzonot,” written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Once more, Dudamel brought a premiere to life with energy and care.
Care enough, especially, to commission big pieces. “Dzonot,” like “Altar de Cuerda,” is about a half-hour long, and Ortiz rises to the assignment. She seems both interested in, and capable of, writing concertos bound to become classics: easy to love and exciting to play.
“Dzonot” is the Mayan word for a naturally occurring abyss, or cenote, the guiding image of Ortiz’s evocative piece, which across four movements conceives of the orchestra as a kind of ecosystem, inspired by nature and constantly in reverence of it. The first movement, “Luz Vertical,” begins with upward runs in the orchestra and a fluttering trill in the cello before settling into plush, flowing phrases pierced with soft, Debussyan light.
This is a much different concerto than “Altar de Cuerda,” an agile showpiece. Then again, the cello is a much different instrument; where the violin is nimble and bright, the cello thrives in warm-blooded resonance, which Ortiz exploits in “Dzonot” with brooding double-stops and expressive melodies. But, in addition to calling on the cellist to shoot to “the highest note possible,” she also writes for the soloist to play col legno, percussively hitting the strings, in the opening of the fleet-footed second movement, “El Ojo de Jaguar,” and to rock out with sul ponticello sawing, bowing on the bridge of the cello, in the cadenza of the third movement, “Jade.”
Weilerstein was characteristically undaunted and passionate, adapting to each sound environment with ease: the soaring strings over slurred, rolling notes in the celesta, harp and piano that turned “Jade” cosmic; the chaotic chirping that follows in the opening of the finale, “El Vuelo de Toh.” The final cadenza, though, is elegiac more than spectacular, leading to a suddenly quiet, ghostly ending of evaporating harmonics, a glimpse of the mournful politics behind environmentally inspired music.
The next night, Dudamel led Ortiz’s “Antrópolis” (2018), a 10-minute exclamation inspired by Mexican dance halls; its orchestral sophistication and grooving joy would make the Leonard Bernstein of “West Side Story” jealous. This was part of an evening of pops-like works by Roberto Sierra and Arturo Márquez in the first half, followed by purely pop music performed with the singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade and her band.
That an evening like this was overseen by Dudamel is encouraging; rather than relegate pops fare to a ghetto, and outsourcing the podium to another conductor, he embraces and elevates it. I hope he continues to do the same with the New York Philharmonic.
But what of the so-called canon? Dudamel is good at getting people in seats, and at entertaining them, but in his excitement, he can create peaks that doom their complementary valleys. Thick, unbalanced sound can overwhelm the intricacies and inner voices of a score.
That was the case at Carnegie’s season-opening gala on Tuesday, where Dudamel led the complete score for Ginastera’s ballet “Estancia,” a Coplandesque, Stravinskyan score by way of Argentina. The galloping start was so rousing that the idyllic middle sections sagged by comparison, punctuated by the declamatory interludes and arias by the sonorous baritone Gustavo Castillo.
That program opened with Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, featuring Lang Lang, one of the few classical musicians with more star power than Dudamel and a gala favorite. On the surface, this performance resounded with muscularity, especially in stirring strings that prefigured the soundtracks of Hollywood’s golden age.
Theatricality, however, is not the same as musicality. Lang, sometimes too talented for his own good, bulldozed through and blurred phrases. At one point, his right hand flew across the keyboard to play a note that the left hand could have done just as well; often, he flung his hands upward, a gesture more for the audience than the score. In a failure of both soloist and orchestra, the finale’s flash of delicate, Bach-like counterpoint was entirely absent, a muddled transition between Romantic outpourings.
Similarly indelicate was Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed on Wednesday with narration by the Spanish actress María Valverde, Dudamel’s wife, and video art by Alberto Arvelo that, aside from a clip from Max Reinhardt’s delirious 1935 film of “Midsummer,” came off like paintings put through an A.I. filter that animates images.
The brisk runs in the strings at the start of the piece, fragile and entirely reliant on precision, evoked gnats more than mischief. And the orchestra’s enormous sound later, including a Wagnerian wedding march, robbed the music of its, forgive me, puckishness.
And yet it was difficult to resist the whole presentation. Few people will rush to hear an hour of Mendelssohn’s music. Throw in an actress dancing around like a sprite, and minimally distracting video, and you have the vision of a maestro who at least wants to try, who isn’t content with the base line of a symphony concert. And that is something to be excited about.
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