Our streets are garlanded with “Gracias, Gustavo” banners and billboards. The Walt Disney Concert Hall shop has become a Dudamel-torium, aisles bursting with Gustavo T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, refrigerator magnets and this and that. Not everything is tacky. The extra-large “Die Walküre” T-shirts sold out early, unfortunately.
In the past week, Gustavo Dudamel’s sort-of penultimate week as Los Angeles Philharmonic music and artistic director (he’ll have a Hollywood Bowl grand finale in August), he officially handed the baton to his successor as the orchestra’s music director at a news conference on the Disney Hall stage. First, though, he gave Daniel Harding a proper L.A. initiation by taking the British conductor and soccer fan to a Dodger game.
Dudamel followed that with premieres by Puerto Rican composers Angélica Negrón and Roberto Sierra. The former offered a cello concerto, “Mundillo (Little World),” with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist; the latter’s “Estudios Sinfónicos” is an effusive large orchestral work. Each was given twice on alternative days, along with a roof-raising performance of Richard Strauss “Ein Heldenleben” at all four programs. On Saturday morning, Dudamel led his beloved YOLA orchestra at Disney.
The world may have looked grim in what was also a penultimate week before elections, when the focus becomes necessarily not on joy but misery, the political premise being the winning candidate is the one who makes the electorate the angriest. But the ongoing Dudamel final fiesta, which concludes this weekend at Disney, operates on the other, insistently upbeat extreme. Yes, joy. A love-in.
Negron’s “Mundillo,” which she calls “a work of radical optimism,” thinks big by looking at small places. She celebrates domesticity with gobs of glitter. Mundillo, the Puerto Rican craft of weaving intricately patterned lace, becomes for her a metaphor for networks of interconnectivity, be it, she writes in her program note, climate justice or social dreaming. In so doing, she honors Ma’s own efforts toward humanitarian and environmental causes.
This is meant not as a concerto in which the soloist stands as an individual against the masses but, rather, as a partner. The three movements include “an invocation to hands that weave”; “a meeting of foams, needles, songs, threats and pulsations”; and what Negrón calls “an archipelago of resonances and possibilities.” The orchestra becomes a chirping color wheel, helped by percussion of all sorts, including seashells, water containers, MIDI keyboard, music boxes and much else. There is amplification.
Ma’s greatest challenge, which he meets with wonderful musicianship, is to make Negrón’s engaging melodies, grand swaths of arpeggios, and simple patterns alluring. In the homey second movement, he carefully lays down his cello, picks up a music box and sits at the foot of the podium. Dudamel joins him with his music box, and, sheepishly trying not to look embarrassed, they cutely cuddle.
Sierra, who has had a long history with the L.A. Phil going back to the Esa-Pekka Salonen era, has written here five colorful etudes that show off the orchestra’s virtuosity. His rhythmic language is Latin, as is Negrón’s, but in Sierra’s case that is used not so much for its own sake but to draw you into his overlays of complex counterpoint and sensuous Ravel-like colors.
In the first etude, strings play on open strings, which creates a sense of harmonic healing by leaving nature well enough alone. The second asks solo instruments to try a bit of salsa-style improv. The third, “Bolero,” is an expression of darker and deeper ballad-inspired songfulness. The fourth becomes a sophisticated lesson in arpeggios and the last, a fanciful passacaglia. Each movement is arresting.
With “Ein Heldenleben” (A Hero’s Life), Dudamel simply let go. Strauss’ self-portrait is on one level tongue-in-cheek. The composer shows himself a cartoonish James Bond-type, battling with his prissy critics, while also dallying with his seductive wife, who is represented in opulent violin solos. After 50 minutes of self-satisfaction, the hero fades serenely into a sunset that Dudamel made miraculously mystical.
The exaggerated ridiculousness of “Heldenleben” is its glory. There are conductors who take it seriously and get away with it. The orchestra is huge, the musical invention, irresistible, and the sheer scale of orchestral writing is downright heroic. For Dudamel, orchestral exuberance equals heroism.
Strauss regularly goes off the rails in his exaggerations, but with Dudamel there are no railing critics or anything thing else, not that he doesn’t have cause. He does not necessarily get universal sanction from the press. But the big battle with the critics, percussion bombing away, remained playful rather than violent. The orchestra is trying out candidates for the vacant position of concertmaster, and Marc Rovetti, who is assistant concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, delivered them with clean reserve.
After nearly an hour of exalted bombast, Dudamel theatrically held the silence of the quiet ending for around a half minute as though letting the air out of a balloon as he transferred Straussian contentment to everyone in the room.
Joy was predictably on the plate at the annual YOLA Spring Concert. Dudamel started the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with a small number of school children in 2007, as soon as he was appointed music director and almost two years before he assumed the position. At an early rehearsal he told the kids, some playing cardboard violins, that if they practice hard enough he promised he would bring them to Walt Disney Concert Hall.
It is a promise he kept and continues to keep. The Spring Concert is now a a massive affair. On Saturday there were nearly 400 student instrumentalists and vocalists one time or another on stage at Disney, members of a large symphony orchestra, a concert orchestra, a big band, a mariachi ensemble and the Titan Banda Oaxaquena.
Dudamel led but one work, Gabriela Ortiz’ “Antrópolis” with the YOLA Institute Symphony. One of Mexico’s best-known composers, Ortiz is also one of Dudamel‘s favorites — he has given seven world premieres and will add an eighth on Thursday nightat a concert paying tribute to the orchestra players. “Antrópolis,” which was written in 2019, may not seem like child’s play. The 10-minute score, with begins with a virtuosic timpany solo, is meant to evoke the libidinous atmosphere in Mexico City dance clubs in the 1980s. But this is exactly what kids get, and everything else Dudamel conducted over the weekend was, in some ways, tame by comparison.
The performance had an uninhibited spice. The kids were wild kids and disciplined kids. They danced as they played. Knowing better than their elders, they get the vote not just for what they promise but for what they already do with greatness.
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