Publicado originalmente en Boston Phoenix el 08-11-07

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

By JEFFREY GANTZ  

Gustavo Dudamel, in case you hadn’t heard, is the 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor who’s going to save classical music. He’s the product of the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, the fabulously successful initiative that’s enrolled some 250,000 youngsters, most of them from poor backgrounds. In 2004 he won the Gustav Mahler International Conducting Competition in Bamberg. He’s been taken under the wing of Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle. In August 2006, he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. (The program was Bernstein’s Candide Overture, Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat.) Now he’s been tapped to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting in 2009. In his New York Times Magazine profile (“Conductor of the People”) two weeks back, Arthur Lubow wrote, “There was a sense that she [LA Philharmonic president Deborah Borda] had snaffled the Man o’ War or Secretariat of the classical-music racetrack.”

Last night at Symphony Hall, under the joint auspices of New England Conservatory, the Celebrity Series of Boston, and the BSO, Dudamel made his Boston debut at the head of his own Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which is touring the US. Back home, this orchestra is (or was) known as the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar; its members are all young, but putting the word “youth” in its title smacks of apology, or of inviting modest expectations. If, on the other hand, the idea is simply to attract young audiences, it’s working: Symphony Hall was packed (what’s the last time you saw people holding “Need tickets” signs outside?), the crowd younger than usual, and more Hispanic. It was also quieter than usual, and, glory be, there was no applause between movements.

The originally announced program was Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (a BSO commission that made its debut in Symphony Hall back in 1944), the Orchestral Suite from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, and “selections from Latin American music,” but someone must have decided that it needed more ballast: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (which the orchestra performs on its first Deutsche Grammophon release, along with the Fifth) was added, and the Latin American music relegated to the encores. That made for a three-hour-plus evening. Dudamel didn’t take the podium till 8:15, and the second half of the concert was preceded by 15 minutes of acknowledgments, proclamations, and presentations, much of it delivered through a malfunctioning mic.

What’s immediately striking about the Simón Bolívar, apart from its youth, is its size — more than 100 strings in the program, and close to that number on stage. The violins were deployed in the “traditional” 20th-century fashion, massed on the conductor’s left; this worked out fine for the Bartók, where at one point in the third-movement Elegia the violins are pitted against the violas, less well in the Beethoven, which was written for an antiphonal arrangement of first and second violins. Dressed, like the male orchestra members, in a suit, Dudamel conducted with a baton but no score.

Dudamel’s virtues and shortcomings were palpable throughout the Concerto for Orchestra (his live performance of this with the LA Philharmonic is available as a DG digital download), and so were the players’. This is young people’s musicmaking. Shaking his hair and jumping up and down, Dudamel offered cogent phrasing and a powerful rhythmic impetus; the orchestra responded with a big, full, visceral sound. Attacks were ferocious, balances were mostly pellucid (with some great lower-string moments), and there were delicious woodwind solos like the agrodolce oboe in the Introduzione opening movement. The players swayed in their seats, every bit as animated as their conductor. It was all fresh but not always wise. The snickering chatter of winds in the second-movement “Giuoco delle coppie” (“Game of Couples”) should sound like a murder of crows; this was an exaltation of larks. (Dudamel did observe Bartók’s not-at-all-intuitive phrasing in the brass chorale that followed.) Slow openings meandered (the beginning of the Elegia should recall the beginning of Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle); transitions didn’t always register. The parody section (Bartók is making fun of the opening march movement of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony) of the fourth-movement “Intermezzo interrotto” was very parodic, but after the tuba raspberries the fffcrashing cymbals made a parody of the parody. The loud, hectic Finale had almost too much energy, with the ideas all bouncing off one another — you couldn’t hear the grinding allusion to Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in the cellos and basses. Plenty of bang for your buck, but not much nuance.

Live, the Beethoven Seventh had the frisson that the DG recording lacks, and a golden Viennese tone, and revolution was, rightly, in the air, but it kept disintegrating into random violence. The reading was high-strung, high-octane (concertmaster Alejandro Carreño kept rising out of his seat), passionate but not always poetic, at times bombastic in its tub-thumping timpani. The transitions didn’t improve; textures clotted, and long-term logic was lacking. The Allegro con brio finale was a blur. I doubt any orchestra this size can play so loud and so fast and realize Beethoven’s intentions. I reveled in the noisy ecstasy right along with Dudamel, the orchestra, and the audience, but by the end I felt bludgeoned.

Worse was to come. You wouldn’t think any outfit could mess up West Side Story — particularly a Latin one, with the players snapping their fingers and shouting, “¡Mambo!” — but this was Day-Glo Bernstein, all coarse, assaultive brass, and too fast for the girls (or the guys) to swivel their hips. I kept thinking I was at a David Mamet play. At the end, Dudamel posed motionless with his baton, keeping the audience suspended, before letting it drop ever so slowly.

For the encores, the lights dimmed and the orchestra members hastily donned zip-up jackets with a replica on the Venezuelan flag on the front. Huge applause, and why not? They played a Latin dance suite, and then a less classical, more uninhibited take on West Side Story’s high-school high jinks, and then more dance music. The strings twirled their instruments, the girls jumped up and shimmied, the brass waved from side to side, everybody started popping up. By the end, they were all marching around, even launching an assault on the podium; Dudamel disappeared and the players took command.

Is this the future of classical music? Making Bartók and Beethoven sound more spontaneous and less fixated on the score — more like jazz — is good. Making them sound like rock in order to appeal to young people is not so good. As for Dudamel, at 26 he can hardly be expected to possess the maturity of a Fritz Reiner or a Carlos Kleiber. But after the Times has touted you as “the most-talked-about young musician in the world” and you land a great job in LA (as opposed to the old-fashioned European slog of rising through the provincial opera houses) and get to hang out with Tom Cruise and David Beckham and Joe Torre, does the hype get in the way of the hard work?