Here, with cuts restored, is the full version of my Friday May 14, 2010, Chicago Sun-Times preview piece on Gustavo Dudamel's Chicago appearance tonight at Orchestra Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The concert has been sold out for some time.
Dudamel, man on a mission
PREVIEW | L.A. Philharmonic leader, 29, says music not a job but a way of life
BY ANDREW PATNER
At 29, the immensely popular and charismatic orchestra conductor Gustavo Dudamel already carries himself slightly hunched forward.
That posture is often credited to his excited focus on the musicians arrayed before him onstage or in rehearsal. It also could be due to so much being piled on the shoulders of this young Venezuelan dynamo at such an early stage in his international career.
[Gustavo Dudamel, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performs Friday night in Chicago.
(Getty Images)]
Dudamel, who started his music studies at age 4, has been music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the apex of that country's astonishing El Sistema music program, since he was 18. He has led operas at Milan's famed La Scala and took up the music director's post in Gothenburg, Sweden, several years ago. And during a hugely successful debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in April 2007, he was named music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
He took over that post last fall and is now on his first national tour with the L.A. Phil, which stops here tonight at Orchestra Hall.
With his energy, ambition, humor and magnetism, Dudamel is on a mission. He speaks often of his mentors, esteemed maestros Claudio Abbado and Daniel Barenboim, and their shared goal: "You see, for these men, for us, this is not a job. This is our life."
All of this would be plenty for any conductor of any age and background. But Dudamel's career and the expectations placed on him are about much more than just a gold-plated résumé. Through his work with El Sistema in Venezuela (and elsewhere), which involves thousands of children and young adults in instrumental studies and performance, Dudamel is regarded by many and promoted by others as a savior of classical music and a general in the fight against poverty, inner-city crime, and the neglect of children. No small tasks for anyone.
With his many obligations and an array of advisers/boosters who range from the leadership at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to a high-powered London management agency to the top classical public relations counsel in New York to his teacher and El Sistema’s founder and leader José Antonio Abreu to Venezuela’s controversial strongman Hugo Chávez himself, the question arises whether he will have the full opportunity to develop in the role that allows him to inspire audiences and artists worldwide: conducting symphonic repertoire at the highest level.
In fall 2007, I had dinner in Paris with Dudamel, his very savvy wife, Venezuelan journalist and former ballet dancer Eloísa Maturén, and a few others in the classical world. The enterprising conductor was ready to give up his post in Gothenburg -- the one that allowed him, out of the spotlight, to develop experience with auditioning, hiring musicians, learning about boards and fund-raising, experimenting with repertoire and the like. The conversation got heated. Had no one else argued that this might be the most important job he held in terms of his long-term artistic development?
The next year, it was quietly announced that he had extended his contract in the small Swedish city through 2012; in January 2009, he discussed that decision on my WFMT-FM (98.7) program Critical Thinking.
"You all were right," he said. "And those oysters at dinner were very good!"
(Dudamel, who calls himself "a lover of the culinary art," likes to seek out new restaurants wherever he travels. He's also a sports fan, especially of baseball. On his first visit here in 2007, he told me, "to meet Ozzie Guillen -- to have my name mentioned with Luis Aparicio's -- this is exciting! These men are real personages in Venezuela. So what I really want to say to Chicago is: 'Hello, Ozzie! And good luck with the baseball season!'")
Dudamel’s current tour with Los Angeles elicited a mixed review this week from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman who called the two concerts on the first stop of an eight-city itinerary “a head-spinning mass of puzzlements.”
“There were readings marked by phenomenal power and inventiveness,” Kosman wrote, “and others dragged down into a morass of ostentatious mannerism. At times Dudamel and the orchestra seemed utterly in sync, only to turn the page and come to grief on a simple question of ensemble or instrumental balance. The orchestra itself struggled in parts (the brass was particularly unpredictable) while excelling elsewhere (especially the strings).
“Where are they now? Where are they heading? Your guess is as good as mine.”
Other observers, including the New Yorker's Alex Ross and Los Angeles-based David Mermelstein writing in The Wall Street Journal, have expressed concern that Dudamel needs to probe music more deeply or not spread himself so thin.
In the meantime, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Scotland, El Sistema-type programs are taking shape. Locally, members of the Civic Orchestra and Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra received major boosts when Dudamel worked with them here. Audiences who experience his concerts with the Bolívar orchestra, the L.A. Phil, or as a guest conductor with their own orchestra get the bug to hear more. Perhaps this is enough at this stage for a man who sees no limits on the horizon and is not yet 30.
Chicago audiences will hear only one of the two L.A. Phil programs that Dudamel is touring with: a new work by John Adams, City Noir, which the conductor led in its world première at his inaugural concert in October at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and another recent addition to his repertoire, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique).
Other cities will hear Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2,The Age of Anxiety, with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Dudamel's usual calling card, Mahler's Symphony No. 1.
He regards the tour, which concludes his first season with the L.A. Phil, as a milestone. "It demonstrates what we have been together," he told the Los Angeles Times. "You learn a lot about each other from a tour, musically and humanly."
Hear Andrew Patner's exclusive Dudamel radio interviews at www.wfmt.com/criticalthinking.
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