Dudamel falls short of his hype
"What are we supposed to do now? I've never been here before," wondered the woman at the end of Wednesday night's visit from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
"What are we supposed to do now? I've never been here before," wondered the woman at the end of Wednesday night's visit from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
"Sometimes they do an encore," said the man next to her.
They didn't. But with Verizon Hall packed with newbies, you had to believe that to want survival of orchestral music in America these days is to be at peace with internalized bouts of complexity and contradiction.
Here was a slightly unkempt performance of John Adams' City Noir, a signature piece of this orchestra penned by its own creative chair, and an unremarkable Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6. But classical music was winning friends. Did it matter that many came for something other than the music?
With a rags-to-riches story and a media presence of perhaps unprecedented proportions, Dudamel, as leader of a major orchestra at a relatively young age, represents everything right classical music is doing today. Or wrong.
It depends entirely on what you think the field should be banking on as its future. The most cynical listener figures that the Los Angeles Philharmonic has recalculated aspects of the job once considered ancillary (community relations, education, fund-raising) as primary now, and a winsome persona is more important than revelatory interpretations.
I'd rather think that the Los Angeles board, administration, and players really believe they have a great musical thinker on their hands. But that's not who Dudamel is - not now, at 29, not Wednesday night in Verizon Hall.
City Noir, the third and final piece in Adams' triptych on the California experience, is structured somewhat like a three-movement symphony. You can hear strands of the "Chairman Dances" in it, and the third movement starts with a Hovhaness-like mysticism. The primary mood enhancer, however, comes from cool jazz of the 1950s (perhaps Chico Hamilton, the Los Angeles drummer and band leader). The instrumental solos, which weave in and out of conspicuousness, were played ably, but sections whose success hinged on intra-ensemble communication fared less well. Dudamel was able to snap tightness back into place near the start when one of the fast, slithering passages went fuzzy.
A quality you want to hear in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (other than a hall silenced from cell phones) is a depth to the string sound, which this orchestra does not have. Other than that, no single aspect was spectacularly missing from this performance. But lots of small and moderate deficits added up to a lot.
Phrases passed from one instrumental section to another did so without deft handover skills. The loudest sections had more edge than power. From the sound of things, Dudamel isn't big on tuning chords or balancing sections, and for all the talk of his energy, a certain limpness set in the phrasing of the second movement's main 5/4 theme. A marchlike monotony took over the end of the third.
As for interpretive insight, there was little in the way of a personal stamp that, if you weren't exclusively charting the currents of the dark curls, would have made you realize that this was the artist said to be the fiery savior of an endangered art form.
