Phenom from Venezuela

The phenomenon of conductor Gustavo Dudamel is advancing on the symphonic world and all parties involved with speed and inevitability. Don't worry. You're going to love it - at least for now.

The 26-year-old Venezuelan - who is the Los Angeles Philharmonic music director-designate and is making the rounds guesting with many of the world's great orchestras - arrived at Carnegie Hall this week with the group with whom he has become famous: the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. For two concerts on Sunday and Monday, the hall was full and cancellation lines were long. Extravagant audience response to often-volcanic performances had the feel of a rock concert.

Dudamel arrived onstage in formal dress, looking younger than his years, like a kid going to Sunday school. The members of this youth orchestra are his age or younger, which carried the unique intrapersonal dynamic of kids conducting kids. See what I mean Jan. 7 when PBS telecasts the concert I caught on Monday with Dudamel (pronounced DU-da-mel) conducting Bartok's

Concerto for Orchestra

and Simon Rattle (a big champion of the group) taking Shostakovich's

Symphony No. 10

.

The event marked more than the decisive emergence of a young conductor and an interesting ensemble now making a claim to international prominence. Whether or not any given listener liked what went on, the concerts may represent a new chapter in orchestra history - as did Leopold Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra string sound and Georg Solti's marvelously eruptive Chicago Symphony.

Though represented on two Deutsche Grammophon discs of Beethoven and Mahler plus a famously high-spirited live video of the

"Symphonic Dances" from

West Side Story

on YouTube (

» READ MORE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6q7RCAcaBk

), Dudamel and Co. insist on being encountered in the flesh. How else can you perceive the musical heat of 200 or so young Latins playing classical masterpieces? There's really no prior context for it.

The orchestra represents the triumph of a 30-year-old self-propelling music-education system in Venezuela, with kids training younger kids in a state-supported network that's said to now include 300 youth orchestras at various levels, and even a chorus for the blind that reads music in braille while singing Handel's

Messiah

.

What that means from our music-consumption standpoint is the dawn of the monster orchestra - made possible by nonunion youths who play at an extremely high level. I foresee major American conservatories combining their student resources at the likes of Madison Square Garden, welcoming the kind of enthusiastic audiences that couldn't get a ticket to Carnegie Hall. Such concerts are likely to stay special occasions, but with any luck, won't be infrequent.

Were big automatically better, you might have seen this long ago. But the Simon Bolivar orchestra gains much of its artistic legitimacy from sonorities that never sound unwieldy. Fugal passages were clean and audible. Though you'd expect an orchestra of this size to roar like no other, its soft playing is unlike anything I've heard elsewhere. Let's vaguely compare it to something that feels like gauze but is as impermeable as concrete.

Just as masterpieces are different experiences when scaled down in historically informed performances, music speaks differently when writ not necessarily larger but in a sound envelope of greater amplitude: The music, to borrow a photography term, is given an extraordinary depth of field. There are gains and losses.

Bartok's humor was broader on Monday, though Dudamel's witty juxtapositions of the fifth movement's disparate elements - which emerged so well in his Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of the piece - were somewhat lost amid such outsized sonorities. But those sonorities have an emotional impact that felt almost three-dimensional when the strings initially entered in Bartok's first movement. Also, slowish tempos didn't feel that way thanks to the solidity of sound.

"When they play this music," one BBC commentator observed after a Dudamel/Bolivar performance of Shostakovich's often-depressive

Symphony No. 10

, "they have to feel things they don't know." And, in fact, the Dudamel-conducted performance of that symphony, to judge from a recent telecast from Royal Albert Hall, lacked continuity and emotional depth. However, the Shostakovich Tenth the orchestra played Monday under the 52-year-old Rattle had those qualities in abundance. In music, youth can channel adult emotions with the proper guidance.

One has to ask, though, can Dudamel be his musically ebullient self outside the orchestra that nurtured him? The answer from monitoring broadcasts of his guest engagements around the world is a resounding yes. In an Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France Webcast from Paris last month, he surpassed his Simon Bolivar Beethoven

Symphony No. 7

in an even more electric fusion of excitement and insight. On that program, Dudamel's first outing with Brahms' huge

Piano Concerto No. 2

with Leif Ove Andsnes was a model of sound judgment. The pianist echoed others when he remarked that Dudamel "has everything that cannot be learned."

Pinchas Zukerman calls him the greatest young conducting talent since Zubin Mehta, who was also appointed to the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 26. The comparison is apt but worrisome. Though Mehta evolved into a conductor capable of considerable grace with the classical-era repertoire, his animalistic ability to excite audiences has always been his fallback - and at the expense of his long-term credibility.

Similarly, Dudamel's Webcast of Schubert's

Symphony No. 9

with the Philharmoneschen Orchester vum Radio NDR, a piece well outside his core repertoire of big-orchestra showpieces, shows a depth of insight not heard elsewhere. But will his public want that? As he becomes a popular music hero, the more likely emblematic moment is his frenzied

Symphonic Dances

from

West Side Story

.

Dudamel has many moments of genius, in which instincts, energy and analytic insight into the music fuse into an expression that makes the music sound fresh-minted but with an etched-in-stone monumentality. But let's keep him off a pedestal. His Mahler

Symphony No. 1

with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra showed his mastery isn't yet consistent: Unorthodox tempo changes represented not an alternative logic, but no apparent logic at all. One hopes this was just a matter of momentary bad decisions.

Dudamel's main problem is that nobody - not Mehta, not Leonard Bernstein - grew up in the global media fishbowl at such an early age. You'd need the spiritual constitution of Mother Teresa to survive it. But maybe he has that, too.