Dudamel and His Critics
by Sedgwick Clark
It seems self-evident to me that Gustavo Dudamel has what it takes. He walks onstage—diminutive, with a mile-wide smile, a colossal mop of brown, curly hair—and audiences go wild. He has charisma to beat the band and conducts to the manner born. But his critics?! He was on a 12-city, cross-country tour the past two weeks with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and you’d think most of them were defending the art form from The Thing from Another World.
To read the tastemakers in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York (chief Times critic Anthony Tommasini on Thursday), it’s a less than felicitous match. I don’t recall ever seeing so many “buts” in reviews. On the positive side were the Washington Post‘s Anne Midgette and, reviewing on Saturday, the New York Times‘s Allan Kozinn. Maybe the naysayers’ reactions were due to music-director envy or to their realization that whatever they said didn’t matter. (See the selection of quotes below.)
Dudamel’s first program featured Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety (his second symphony, but actually a piano concerto, played impressively by Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”). The second coupled the New York premiere of John Adams’s City Noir and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.
Interpretive gaucheries—and they were plentiful in the Mahler First—didn’t matter at all to the rapt Saturday night audience. Granted, the conclusion of the work is as foolproof a crowd-pleaser as any ever composed, but I haven’t seen an audience leap to its feet with such a sustained roar since Solti/Chicago’s 1970 Mahler Fifth at Carnegie, the beginning of that team’s extended reign in New York.
The orchestra is in fine fettle, with former Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s cool clarity replaced by a heat wave—less refined but more overtly communicative. String sound is notably warmer, with excellent solo principals—especially violist Carrie Dennis, whose rich tone projects with dynamite temperament. Winds, brass, and percussion were on risers but never overwhelmed the strings, a frequent problem in this hall. Most impressive, no matter how loud Dudamel urged his players on—and Tchaikovsky’s triple fortes were quite bracing, thank you—there was not a single strident moment in either concert.
In The Age of Anxiety on Thursday night, Dudamel and Thibaudet proved themselves worthy successors to the Bernstein-Foss recordings on Sony Classical (1950) and Deutsche Grammophon (1977), which remain the interpretive touchstones still. Dudamel invested Bernstein’s catchy tunes with impetuous swing and character, while Thibaudet rose to Foss’s mastery in all but the jazzy Masque.
Whatever questionable moments cropped up in Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” they were overwhelmed by the impassioned commitment from all concerned. But as the end of the quiet fourth movement died out, Dudamel’s attempt to hold the applause boomeranged. The audience had already exploded at the end of the third-movement march, as usual, and it could barely wait for the end of the ten-minute finale to do so again. After a few seconds of—gasp!—silence, several audience members began to applaud nervously and were shushed by other listeners. The conductor held his pose for another 20 seconds and then let his hands drop slowly, but the spell had dissipated. The applause was anticlimactic.
Saturday night’s concert replicated Dudamel’s opening-night concert last fall as LA’s music director, which was broadcast on PBS and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon. John Adams had composed his City Noir for the occasion, commissioned by the orchestra. He envisioned, writes Adams in the program note, “an orchestral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films, might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of that era.” There’s certainly a lot of hustle and bustle in this half-hour score, and I didn’t catch any musical references to classics of the era’s film scores by the likes of Rózsa, Herrmann, Raksin, or Webb. It’s a fun piece, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and two minutes later I could only recall a fleeting moment that sounded like Bernstein.
I took loads of notes on the Mahler Symphony No. 1, but who cares? Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed tells me that Dudamel’s performances are different every night. He did a great Mahler Fifth with the New York Philharmonic back in January 2009, and he’ll do a great Mahler First someday without my detailing every grotesquerie in the second movement or inaudible ppp viola pizzicati eight bars before the end of the third.
The fact is, I walked out of Avery Fisher Hall with a smile on my face, having heard an exciting young conductor and his orchestra stop time for two hours. Who can ask for anything more?
The Critics
“There were readings marked by phenomenal power and inventiveness, and others dragged down into a morass of ostentatious mannerism. At times Dudamel and the orchestra seemed utterly in sync, only to turn the page and come to grief on a simple question of ensemble or instrumental balance. The orchestra itself struggled in parts (the brass was particularly unpredictable) while excelling elsewhere (especially the strings).”—Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 2010
“There’s no question he is inordinately talented, a brilliant and inspiring podium dervish who can get an orchestra to do anything he wishes while lifting an audience out of its seats. Even so, there sometimes appears to be a disconnect between the musical ends and the means he employs to achieve them. Half-formed interpretative ideas betray a lack of musical depth. The problem is not so much one of faulty instincts as where and how he channels those instincts.”—John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2010
“[O]ne could find plenty to carp at if one was so inclined: balance issues, shaky entrances, lackluster moments from the brass. Frankly, though, that didn’t matter, because Dudamel and the orchestra also offered one of the most involving and compelling performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony I’ve ever heard. This was music played by someone who loves music, someone who had an idea where he was going with the piece. And the orchestra opened its collective heart and went right along with him. Perfect? No. Gorgeous? Yes.”—Anne Midgette, Washington Post, May 19, 2010
“[N]o single aspect was spectacularly missing from this performance [of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6]. But lots of small and moderate deficits added up to a lot. Phrases passed from one instrumental section to another did so without deft handover skills. The loudest sections had more edge than power. From the sound of things, Dudamel isn’t big on tuning chords or balancing sections. As for interpretive insight, there was little in the way of a personal stamp that, if you weren’t exclusively charting the currents of the dark curls, would have made you realize that this was the artist said to be the fiery savior of an endangered art form.—Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 2010
“Mr. Dudamel is a phenomenally gifted musician with the potential to change the public perception of what an American orchestra should be…. But Mr. Dudamel has to tend to the technical maintenance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and may need to spend more time, as the Tchaikovsky performance suggested, immersing himself in the repertory.”—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, May 22, 2010
“But Mr. Dudamel conducted with an assurance that made even the oddest twists seem a convincing alternative vision, and the Los Angeles players responded to his kinetic podium technique with a beautifully burnished, perfectly balanced performance. Though it was hard to judge the state of the orchestra in the sometimes chaotic Adams work, the Mahler—and an account of the Intermezzo from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, offered as an encore—left no doubt that it was in superb shape.”—Allan Kozinn, New York Times, May 24, 2010
The Trouble with Volkswagon
Heard on a Volkswagon TV commercial bed: Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s black comedy, and Shirley MacLaine’s first film, The Trouble with Harry.
Looking Ahead
My week’s scheduled concerts:
2/27 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert. Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre.