Gustavo Dudamel’s 16th and penultimate winter season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic has not been quite as ambitious as others. No big opera. Two full symphonies in his “Mahler Grooves” festival, unlike his unprecedented full nine-symphony Mahler festival in 2012. Over the next five-plus months, Dudamel’s only appearances here will be two weeks in August at the Hollywood Bowl.
Has the grand exit from L.A. begun?
On the surface, it might appear that way. Between now and the beginning of his final L.A. Phil season in late September, Dudamel has newsworthy gigs elsewhere. In his runup to becoming New York Philharmonic music director in 2026, he closes that orchestra’s 2024-25 season next month in Lincoln Center, launches its summer series in Central Park and opens its new season in September. He has upcoming tours leading the London Symphony in Spain and the Berlin Philharmonic at the World’s Fair, Expo 2025, in Osaka, Japan. This summer Dudamel conducts “West Side Story” in Barcelona with a starry cast that includes Nadine Sierra, Juan Diego Flórez and Isabel Leonard.
But not so fast. Dudamel made bigger and better news with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last weekend. Friday night he premiered Carlos Simon’s stirring, gospel-inspired “Good News Mass,” creating a near frenzy in Walt Disney Concert Hall. The next day the L.A. Phil hopped on a bus for the second of its trailblazing appearances with Dudamel at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where the week before its concert ended with thousands of fans chanting, “L.A. Phil! L.A. Phil! L.A. Phil!”
Dudamel’s mission all along has been to leap genre boundaries. So he has. “Maybe these have been the best weekends of our lives,” he told the Outdoor Theater crowd at Saturday night’s Coachella love-fest.
The top orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, New York, Munich and elsewhere play popular concerts in parks, often awaking new audiences to their wares. But this felt a historic reach, the L.A. Phil having become under Dudamel an essential part of L.A. culture in a broader sense. It will be difficult to top, however successful Dudamel becomes in his efforts to spread the word that some 300 years after Elector Karl Theodor hired 90 musicians to form an ensemble for his court in Mannheim, Germany, the orchestra still matters.
Good news, however, remains seemingly in short supply at many struggling American orchestras, just as it does in many uncertain aspects of American life. Simon — who happens to be composer-in-residence at the newly troubled Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. — noted in a preconcert talk that his initial idea for a “Good News Mass” came from his awareness during the pandemic of the essential need for community. The L.A. Phil told him that he could write anything he wanted and for any instrumental and vocal forces he wanted as long as he kept the length to 30 minutes.
Telling composers that they can think big inevitably means they will think even bigger. “Good News Mass” incorporates a very large orchestra, a jazz combo, a narrator, R&B and gospel soloists, a gospel choir and a film. It lasts nearly 50 minutes. It is all over the map.
Simon partially follows the traditional Catholic mass liturgy with new texts by Courtney Ware Lett and Marc Bamuthi Joseph that work through doubt and oppression, ultimately celebrating life. Bamuthi Joseph leads the service as a ferocious prophetic preacher. The soloists, alto Samoht and tenor Zebulon Ellis, rock the room. Jason White and the Samples become the collective voices of affirmation.
Stylistically, Simon smoothly moves from charismatic symphonic writing through a wide range of African American musical styles, leaving improvisational room for the vocal soloists. But the film by Melina Matsoukas, beautifully stark slow-motion street scenes in black-and-white, steals attention to little musical purpose and makes following the meaningful mass itself (no text is projected) needlessly difficult.
“Good News Mass,” which seems inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s eclectic “Mass,” written for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, could, like it, effectively expand its presentation theatrically and choreographically rather than cinematically. And the good news is that Simon’s mass will, indeed, be performed at the Kennedy Center by the National Symphony, assuming there are no further attempts to undo programming by the center’s new administration. The Boston Symphony and Chicago Symphony are additional co-commissioners.
Dudamel, who joyfully held Simon’s diverse musical styles together, began the program with Bernstein’s “Divertimento,” a collection of short, popular-styled bagatelles, including dances and blues numbers. It may be generally dismissed as trivial, but Bernstein conducted it with characterful nostalgia and Dudamel has found in it vibrant new spirit.
He followed this with the first L.A. Phil performance of Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2, with Randall Goosby as the eloquent soloist. In this, her final score, written in 1951, she moves into a more impressionistic realm in the short, single-movement concerto. Here it felt more like a beginning than an ending.
At Coachella, everything felt like a beginning. Dudamel led TikTok-sized bits of orchestral bonbons — “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, John Williams’ “Imperial March” and the opening of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” — each generating excited whoops from the crowd. So did principal cellist Robert deMaine’s solo offering from the prelude to Bach Cello Suite No. 1 and associate concertmaster Bing Wang’s solo from the beginning of the Max Richter arrangement of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”
Both weekends, as witnessed on the livestreams, featured Icelandic singer Laufey, who called herself an orchestra girl, and the spectacular Argentine hip-hop duo Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, who entered into a virtuoso dialogue with the orchestra. Maren Morris, Becky G and Zedd were on hand the first weekend along with LL Cool J, who closed out the set with an arresting medley. The festival’s second weekend brought Natasha Bedingfield, Dave Grohl and Cynthia Erivo, who ended with “Purple Rain.”
It might seem as though this were but the next step for Dudamel, who regularly invites pop stars to join him and the L.A. Phil at Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. He’s taken the L.A. Phil and YOLA to the Super Bowl. But in most cases, they have been more like orchestral accompaniment.
Many a pop star, moreover, has turned to orchestral writing lately. Esa-Pekka Salonen, for instance, conducts a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner of the Nationals next week with the L.A. Phil.
Coachella, on the other hand, not only put the L.A. Phil front and center in a pop arena but also made the orchestra an equal partner in exhilarating music that discounted differences. For an hour each weekend, the L.A. Phil became what few others in the arts or entertainment remain — conveyors of authentically good news.
The post How did Gustavo Dudamel end his L.A. Phil season? By saving the best for last appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
