LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel began his farewell season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sept. 25 with a resounding premiere by Ellen Reid, along with Richard Strauss’ bracing assault on the Alps in An Alpine Symphony.
The concert was perhaps a harbinger of what Dudamel hopes for when he takes the reins of the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2026. As in LA, he’ll also assume the title of the orchestra’s artistic director.
Performing contemporary and new music must be counted among Dudamel’s strengths, and it’s no secret that during his 17-year tenure he’s been fortunate to lead an orchestra with a fast learning curve in often-challenging music. Case in point: Reid’s Earth Between Oceans, an LA Phil commission, which required coordinating both a large orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, directed by Grant Gershon.
From its ear-grabbing opening bass chords on piano, Earth Between Oceans eases into a more lyrical section interrupted by a blast from the brass that also subsides. Then timpani build to a percussive climax as the wordless Chorale kicks in. And that covers just the first six minutes of Reid’s lively score, which unfolds in four movements: Earth-Air-Fire-Water.
Reid, 42, empathetically uses extreme psychological states for her music as inspiration. Her harrowing 2018 chamber opera p r i s m dealt with PTSD after a sexual assault. It received its premiere at REDCAT, the black-box theater located elsewhere in the Disney Hall complex, as part of LA Opera’s “Off Grand” series. It went on to win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the Music Critics Association of North America award for best new opera.
Place and environment also play large roles in her compositional output, including even the womb in Body Cosmic, which I saw at the Hollywood Bowl in early September. In Earth Between Oceans, Reid explores the power of nature amid, as she wrote in a program note, “rising political chaos.” (Spoiler alert: nature wins.)
Cosmic, with the Phil conducted by James Gaffigan, was a tight 15 minutes. Earth came in at slightly more than twice that length. The score is ambitious, to be sure, perhaps overly so. The city of New York is portrayed in “Earth,” in which piano, harp, tam-tam, and bass drum conjure the frozen soil. In “Air,” the chorus expertly summons breath and wind creating an aura of, as Reid writes, the “calm detachment” of New York viewed from above.
“Fire,” Reid’s response to the vast destruction by the recent wildfires across Southern California, proved more problematic. Driving polyrhythms created a visceral effect, but the movement’s attempt to reflect on the tragedy of so many people losing not just their homes, but also everything they possessed, seemed well-intentioned but burdened by its programmatic agenda. Would a one- to two-minute meditation, à la Chopin’s Presto finale of his Piano Sonata No. 2, have engaged our emotions more memorably and powerfully? Tragedy rendered musically — especially a recent tragedy — is a tough aesthetic nut to crack.
In the last movement, “Water,” inspired by California’s glorious coastline, strings, voices, and brass swelled and receded. However, the unremittingly loud and long conclusion attenuated the overall effect of what came before. That said, Reid’s imaginatively wide palette for the Chorale’s vocalizations never sounded hackneyed or derivative, going beyond mere oohs and aahs and differentiating itself from such famous vocalises as Debussy’s mysterious “Sirènes” from Nocturnes and Holst’s ethereal “Neptune” from The Planets. One magical passage of Earth Between Oceans ends with Chorale vocalists whistling softly, their sound retreating ever more quietly into the ether.
After intermission, Dudamel and the Phil’s headlong hike up and down the Alps in Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony delivered almost everything a listener could desire in energy, atmosphere, and excitement. The work, a tone poem, was the composer’s last and longest (50 minutes), employing the largest orchestra he ever used. Though no title projections were offered, it was often easy to recognize where we were among the score’s 22 sections, particularly in the orchestra’s crashing “Thunderstorm.”
A major highlight: the oboe solo in “Upon the Summit.” Here the LA Phil’s new principal oboist, Ryan Roberts, late of the New York Philharmonic, gave a glowing, awe-inspiring account. Throughout, the brass, woodwinds and percussion were by turns brooding, seductive, and grippingly virtuosic.
The orchestra’s string section is currently in flux, in need of finding greater body, character, and depth of sound. Connoisseurs of distinctive string sonority lamented the loss of former first associate Nathan Cole to the Boston Symphony, where he is now concertmaster. But opportunity calls. The Phil’s principal viola position is also vacant. For this concert, Yoonshin Song, concertmaster of the Houston Symphony, acted as guest concertmaster. Will she be the one to lead and help enrich the section? Stay tuned.
