The New York Philharmonic doesn’t have a music director.
Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar maestro who opened the orchestra’s season on Thursday evening at David Geffen Hall, is still just the music and artistic director designate; he doesn’t officially take over until fall next year. Until then, California, where he has been the beloved conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, will be waving flags that proclaim “Gracias Gustavo.”
Thursday’s concert was a glimpse of how the not-so-distant future might look. Dudamel appeared settled in at the podium, leading a conventionally assembled program of a world premiere (Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “of light and stone”), a concerto (Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto with the brilliant Yunchan Lim) and a symphony (Ives’s Second).
The pieces were hardly chestnuts, and there were thoughtful links among them, like their relationship to home: Lanzilotti’s Hawaii, Bartok’s Hungary and Ives’s America. And all the works were generously allusive to traditional and folk music; the concerto and the symphony even shared nods to Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”
But overall the program’s construction was rather ordinary, and conservative by the standards of Dudamel, a conductor whose expansive comfort zone includes pop music and evening-length premieres as much as the classics.
Dudamel, though, has a way of elevating the ordinary. He is a performer in every sense of the word. His concerts demand your attention not necessarily through interpretive vision or skill, but through sheer excitement. He bobs and dances, and sculpts sound with large gestures, channeling an infectious energy that emanates from the orchestra to the farthest reaches of the auditorium.
Few conductors can sell contemporary music as persuasively and enthusiastically as Dudamel. But sometimes, particularly in standard repertoire, details get lost in the thrill. He is at his best when he combines discipline with affection, embodying a score and communicating it to an audience directly and viscerally.
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