The Dudamel Watch

Having had a successful tour with his own Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel now seems to be making the rounds with American orchestras, building up to his becoming the new Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This week he is the guest conductor at the New York Philharmonic, which Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times has decided to call (in true New York fashion) "the real debut." Those of us in San Francisco will have to wait until March 20 for our "real debut," although, with any luck, XM will broadcast a recording of the New York performance before then.

As a rule, I try to keep my reading confined to reviews, since I have little trust in the authority of those promotional "preview" pieces. Nevertheless, I have as much curiosity about Dudamel as the next music lover; but I tried to keep that curiosity at an objective level. Thus, what interested me the most is the radical difference between the program that Dudamel is preparing in New York and the one he will perform in San Francisco. Wakin's article discussed the rehearsal of two works, the second symphony of Carlos Chávez ("Sinfonia India") and the fifth symphony of Serge Prokofiev. The scheduled program for the San Francisco Symphony concentrates on two other Russians: the first piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff (with soloist Kirill Gerstein) and the complete score for Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird" ballet.

Curious as I am about hearing "Firebird" in an orchestral setting (since one cannot really expect a pit orchestra to do justice to the full complexity and subtlety of the music and since it poses the challenge of making the pas d'action scenes "work" without the dancers), I have to confess a partiality for the New York offering. Much of this has to do with the fact that my ears are still ringing from the performance of the Prokofiev symphony that the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic delivered, and I also realize that I have yet to hear a "live" performance of any Chávez. Back when I first got to know John Cage, I remember his talking (in a rather less-than-Buddhist style) about how Columbia Records had decided to set priorities for which contemporary composers they would promote. Cage claimed that they ultimately had to make a choice between Copland and Chávez; and, of course, Copland came out on top. This may just have been Cage taking a jab at American nationalism (just as Ferruccio Busoni had once done in a letter in which he referred to the United States as the "killer of the Indians"); but it was my first exposure to the extent to which the business of music had more to do with filtering than with promoting. Regardless of any bias, I used to value my vinyl recording of the complete set of Chávez symphonies performed by the Dallas Symphony under Eduardo Mata; and I would give anything to hear a good concert performance of any of them.

This is about as far as the objective account can be taken. Wakin interviewed several members of the Philharmonic after the rehearsal he attended, and all of the observations in his article are positive. The next step will be to see what the critics have to say!