Dudamel’s Motto: “Nothing Succeeds like Excess”

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel (photograph by Danny Clinch, courtesy of SFS)

Gustavo Dudamel made his debut conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in March of 2008. The program was an ambitious undertaking. The first half consisted entirely of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 1, his first piano concerto in the key of F-sharp minor, performed with piano soloist Kirill Gerstein. This was followed in the second half by the complete score that Igor Stravinsky composed for Michel Fokine’s ballet “The Firebird.” This coupling of very early works by two of the leading Russian composers of the twentieth century was a bold move in programming, but the realization of that program left the attentive listener filled with admiration for Dudamel’s skilled approaches to interpretation.

Sadly, by November of 2016, when Dudamel returned to Davies Symphony Hall, this time leading his “own” ensemble, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, any previous sources of admiration had been dispersed. There was no sign of any of the nuances that had breathed life into his accounts of both Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky until the encore selection, the first-act waltz from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score for the ballet Swan Lake. All that preceded was little more than an abundance of sound and fury true to the empty signification that had inspired that phrase from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Last night Dudamel returned to Davies, once again taking the SFS podium. The primary offering on the program was Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony in C-sharp minor. This is, without a doubt, the most intricately structured symphony in the Mahler canon. At the center is a Scherzo movement long enough to be a composition unto itself. On either side of the Scherzo are “matched pairs” of movements. The two opening movements reflect on the genre of the funeral march. The Scherzo is then followed by the shortest (and most serene) movement of the symphony, and Adagietto scored for only strings and harp. This is the calm before a viciously furious Rondo movement, in which each return of the rondo theme is more ominous than its predecessors.

Many regular SFS followers probably know that Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) gave this symphony considerable attention during his tenure as Music Director. What I remember most about those many performances was that, each time MTT returned to the score, he found new perspectives in interpreting all those marks on paper. Sadly, last night I would be hard pressed to say that Dudamel approached this symphony with any perspective at all. It almost seemed that the only signification that mattered was his decision to conduct without a score. Once again the result was all sound and fury, leaving Shakespeare to remind the listener of the teller of that particular tale.

If anything saved the performance, it was the collective memory of those musicians that had internalized much of what they had learned under MTT’s baton. They could then guide the “newcomers” through the many twists and turns in Mahler’s score. Meanwhile, Dudamel was up there on the podium; and it seemed as if his only concern was that the ensemble was not playing loud enough.

The audience was prepped for their Mahler experience with a Mozart symphony in the first half of the program. Dudamel selected K. 504 in D major, often known as the “Prague” symphony. If the audience was prepared for anything by this performance, it was Dudamel’s ability to seek out excess even where it did not belong. He led an ensemble with reduced string sections, but the numbers themselves never quite found the sweet spot between too thick and too thin. K. 504 is one of Mozart’s most engaging symphonies, but anyone encountering it for the first time through Dudamel’s interpretation would be hard-pressed to believe that claim.