Posts tagged Carnegie Hall
Youth Handles the Serving, in Large, Robust Portions
Nov 14
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: November 14, 2007
Publicado originalmente en The NY Times
Simon Rattle leads the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in an encore performance of "Mambo!" - Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Inevitably, the Sunday afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela became an occasion to assess the work of the ensemble’s talked-about and fast-rising music director, Gustavo Dudamel, making his New York debut.
But the orchestra itself was the center of attention on Monday night in the second and final program at Carnegie Hall. The news was the technically astonishing and powerfully communicative playing of these dedicated and accomplished young musicians, who range in age, roughly, from 15 to 25.
Of course, Mr. Dudamel, just 26, who began the concert conducting Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, deserves enormous credit for the high level and intensity of this youth orchestra, which he has led since 1999. And the players proved that they could adapt and work with a master in the second half of the program, when Simon Rattle conducted Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor. Yes, amid these young Venezuelans, the youthful Mr. Rattle, all of 51, still looked like an elder statesman of music. Context is everything.
Gustavo Dudamel leads the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in a performance at Carnegie Hall - Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
The orchestra’s appearances were officially part of Carnegie Hall’s Berlin in Lights Festival. Mr. Rattle and members of the Berlin Philharmonic, which he directs, have been mentors to Mr. Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar orchestra. The link may have been a stretch. But who cares? The audience that awarded both performances frenzied ovations would have been there under any circumstances.
Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra was partly fashioned to show off virtuosity. The piece brought out the best in Mr. Dudamel and his players. There are some 200 musicians in the orchestra, and most seemed to be crowded onto the stage for this performance. In climactic fortissimo passages of both scores, the sheer richness and visceral power of the sound was awesome.
Typically, the more players involved, the harder it is to play together. But these musicians perform with such discipline and well-honed precision that they can go for maximum expression and follow the lead of their impetuous conductor.
Mr. Dudamel has a keen ear for instrumental coloring and musical character. In the opening of the first movement the hazy tremolos in the high strings had an eerie allure. When the clarinet played a sultry melody over a quietly restless orchestral backdrop, the ensemble gave the music an undulant, almost Latin American tinge.
The third movement, an elegy, was transfixing and nocturnal, at once calming and unsettling. The perpetual-motion fifth movement often seems the least substantial music in the score, a toss-off, high-energy finale. But it was the highlight of this performance, played at daring tempos with rhapsodic fervor, even in the intricate fugato outbursts, where it’s easy for overlapping lines to go astray.
In Shostakovich’s daunting 10th Symphony (1953), Mr. Rattle empowered the players to take risks and play all out, leaving matters of control to him. And there was control in this formidable performance of Shostakovich’s 60-minute score. The brooding and moody first movement, with its long passages of ruminative counterpoint, unfolded with grim yet inexorable force. In the second movement — brutal, driven, full of raucous bursts of dissonance, thought by some to be a parodistic portrait of Stalin, who died while Shostakovich was composing this score — Mr. Rattle proved every bit as wild and daring as his exuberant young players.
When it ended, Mr. Rattle, with not a trace of British reserve, dived among the players and engaged in a hugfest. Not to be outdone by Mr. Dudamel, he led the orchestra in a reprise of the hit encore from Sunday afternoon, the “Mambo” from Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” Mr. Rattle kept turning to the audience to lead shouts of “mambo!” as the Venezuelan musicians played and danced their hearts out.
Berlin in Lights? I don’t think so.
Berlin in Lights festival, Nueva York
Nov 11
Gustavo Dudamel dirige la Sinfónica de la Juventud Venezolana Simón Bolívar en el “Berlin in Lights festival”, Nueva York
Sala: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium. Nueva York, Estados Unidos.
Página del programa en el sitio del Carnegie Hall
Programa:
Hector Berlioz: Le Carnaval romain Overture
Frédéric Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
Arturo Márquez: Danzón No. 2
Leonard Bernstein: Mambo from West Side Story
Alberto Ginastera: Malambo from Estancia
Frédéric Chopin: Waltz in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2 (played by Mr. Ax just before intermission)
Fecha: 11/11/2007
Berlin in Lights festival, Nueva York
Nov 10
Sir Simon Rattle dirige a la Sinfónica de la Juventud Venezolana Simón Bolívar en el “Berlin in Lights festival” Nueva York
Sala: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium. Nueva York, Estados Unidos.
Página del programa en el sitio del Carnegie Hall
Programa:
Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
Dimitri Shstakovich: Symphony No. 10
Encore:
Leonard Bernstein: Mambo from West Side Story
Fecha: 12/11/2007
