Dudamel in New York

Now that Esa-Pekka Salonen has left the San Francisco Symphony, I find that my orchestral allegiances have shifted from the West Coast to the East. There is no surer sign of this than the fact that this fall I have requested more tickets from the New York Philharmonic than from any other organization in New York—including Carnegie Hall, which usually dominates my autumn schedule.

This year the New York season began with a bang, with two successive Gustavo Dudamel concerts at the grandly refurbished Geffen Hall. I have seen and heard this charismatic conductor in numerous settings—at Carnegie Hall, long ago, leading the Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the group that originally formed him; at UC Berkeley’s intimate Hertz Hall, rehearsing and speaking to the members of the undergraduate student orchestra; and with his own longtime Los Angeles Philharmonic, both as visitors at Carnegie and in their native Disney Hall. I never tire of him, this bundle of energy who cares so much about musicians, audiences, and the state of the world. His commitment to bringing forth both new and old music shines through in every program, and his connection with his players, whoever they are, is tangible. He is always fun to watch—and to those carpers who snobbishly insist that he is too popular, I would answer, “And the problem is…?”

A full year before he is due to take over as the New York Philharmonic’s artistic director, Dudamel is already drawing sold-out crowds and over-the-top applause. Some of this is just the trendiness of a new thing, but a lot of it can be attributed to what he delivers. In these two September concerts, he offered us a world premiere (Leilehua Lanzilotti’s of light and stone), a stellar soloist in a great concerto (Yunchan Lim in Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3), a twentieth-century symphony by a dead American composer (Charles Ives’s Second, from around 1910, though it didn’t premiere until 1951), a twentieth-century symphony by a living American composer (John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, from 1988), and Beethoven’s monumental Fifth Symphony.

The world premiere, the Bartok, and the Ives (in that order) constiututed the first of Dudamel’s two programs. Like most commissioned premieres, the Lanzilotti piece struck me as inoffensive yet not compelling; I didn’t mind sitting through it, and I won’t mind terribly if I never hear it again. But with its range of modes and moods, it set the stage, anyway, for the other two pieces on that program.

Charles Ives is an oddball composer to begin with—a secluded talent, with a belated exposure to the world, and a highly melodic modernist, if he was a modernist at all. I have to admit that I still don’t know what to make of his Second Symphony, with its frequent digressions into phrases from familiar tunes, its explorations of musical highways and byways, its overall inexplicability. What is he trying to say here? I found myself thinking, which is not necessarily a useful musical question, but one that often comes into my narratively literal mind. But the rendering of this piece by the Philharmonic under Dudamel was certainly as powerful a presentation as that strange symphony could have wished for.

And the Bartok! Yunchan Lim turns out to be one of those astonishing piano prodigies whose musicianship and depth of feeling are as remarkable as their technical ability. The concerto itself shows the Gershwin-like side of Bartok rather than the more esoteric, prickly side one finds in, say, the quartets. In this case, the music seemed to want to sweep us away with both its brash and its tender moments, and Lim made the most of every one of them. The fact that we could hear every note of the pianist’s absolutely accomplished yet somehow modestly rendered performance can be attributed not only to Dudamel’s conducting skill, but also to the alert responsiveness of the orchestra under him.

I attended the second program as a matinee this past Sunday, and due to a mild and soon-resolved emergency, I unfortunately had to miss the Corigliano symphony, with which Dudamel concluded the performance, his final one of the series. But I streamed a recording of the piece afterwards (the Barenboim recording, with the Chicago Symphony) and I could tell exactly how wonderful it would have been to hear this moving, expansive, vigorous tribute to those who died of AIDS played in Geffen Hall. It’s a fitting piece for this concert hall, this orchestra, and this city, and its forty-five minute length—which is sometimes wrenching but never boring—would have passed like a dream in that setting, not to mention in the company of all those avid listeners. Already, during the concert’s first half (which was devoted to Beethoven’s Fifth), I was impressed by the degree of attention and silence around me, and I’m sure the obvious devotion of the audience would have come into its own in the second half.

Sometimes I worry that I have heard too many performances of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in my life. I know this blasphemous idea occurred to me briefly a few years ago, when I heard the Vienna Philharmonic do it as part of the whole cycle. Maybe I was just tired then, or maybe Dudamel’s version this past Sunday was just uniquely good. In any case, that perfect performance of a perfect work—in its waverings between delicate peacefulness and overwhelming vigor, in its carefully speeded up and slowed down passages, and in its iconic refusal to let go—was splendidly served by the hyper-sharp but in this case just-right acoustics of the renovated Geffen Hall. Listening to those final repeated themes and crashing chords, and watching Dudamel go all-in with his characteristically contagious yet controlled enthusiasm, I was reminded of what he had told the Berkeley students about his origins as a conductor: how, as a little boy, he had arranged his stuffed animals in a circle around him and then “conducted” them to recorded music. Last Sunday afternoon, sitting happily in Geffen Hall, I imagined I could still see that little boy.