NEW YORK — Gustavo Dudamel returned to David Geffen Hall for his next-to-last series of subscription concerts before the 2026-27 season, when he officially assumes his new position as music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. He is currently completing his 17th year at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but on April 30 an enthusiastic New York audience was clearly eager for “The Dude” to take up permanent residence. On Sept. 10, he launches his new role with a sprint of 13 performances in 22 days, beginning with a big show at Radio City Music Hall.
No longer the 20-something whiz kid who put José Abreu’s El Sistema on the map, Dudamel now has a podium demeanor that is more contained than during his Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra days — except when he gets excited, as he most notably did during Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Dudamel is in command, but he gives the impression of a cooperative leader more than an old school podium despot.
First on the program was a new work, Earth Between Oceans, by Ellen Reid, co-commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, which gave the premiere in the fall of 2025, and the NY Philharmonic. Born in Tennessee, Reid has studied in and now works in both New York and Los Angeles; her music is infused with the spirit of each place. Her work spans film and progressive pop-crossover projects as well as classical — whatever that means these days. Her first opera, p r i s m, about PTSD in the wake of sexual assault, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in music and MCANA’s Best New Opera Award. In early 2020, Reid’s When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist was the first commission premiered in Project 19, the New York Philharmonic’s commissioning project of 19 works by women, meant to commemorate the anniversary of the 19th amendment.
In 2020, Reid created a series of interactive installations called Soundwalk. Equipped with a mobile device and sturdy shoes, a listener could hear musical fragments while visiting GPS-activated sites in urban parks from Athens to Tokyo. Fortuitously launched in the early months of the Covid lockdown, it provided to pandemic-isolated New Yorkers and later Los Angelenos the opportunity to get out and experience new music while relating to the environment amid social distancing. (Ten of the 16 Soundwalks, including New York and Los Angeles, remain active through 2026).
Earth Between Oceans celebrates the four elements — earth, water, air, fire — which the ancient Greeks believed made up all matter. Reid’s work places each of these elements in specific contexts spanning the two oceans that delimit North America.
According to Reid’s notes, “Earth” evokes New York City; it opens with with booming piano and percussion, conjuring industrial clangor and anxiety. With “Air,” the shifting meters suggest a liberation from the confines of symmetric structures. The polyrhythms of “Fire” conjure the chaos of the catastrophic LA fires of early 2025, and “Water” introduces swirling sounds meant to depict the Pacific Ocean, both peaceful and surging to a powerful finish.
As is often the case with contemporary classical works, any story attributed to a movement is notional: A listener can persuade himself of the program or not. What was clear is that Reid is a creative master of orchestral color, combining disparate instruments from across the orchestra with wordless vocalization from a large choir and recorded fragments collected while she was gathering trash on the beach. Dudamel maintained a strong sense of pulse across shifting meters and varying tempos, giving the 28 minutes coherence. The piece earned an enthusiastic reception. I was pleased and fascinated especially by the panoply of timbres; a friend was bored. So it goes with new music.
Bloch’s Schlomo was originally scheduled featuring the young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who was sidelined by an injury. In its place, the program offered two shorter pieces that fit more neatly with the evening’s nature-dominant theme. Schubert’s “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (Song of the spirits over the waters, 1821) was a lovely surprise. Schubert wrote over 150 songs for two or more voices, most of which were published after his death and are seldom performed today, at least in the U.S. This work combined his graceful vocal writing with his sensuous way with chamber music.
Scored for male chorus and strings, with a double complement of cellos, the sound evoked a wood-paneled room redolent of brandy and cigars (though a tavern with beer and meerschaum pipes might have been more authentic). Goethe’s six verses compared the human soul to water in its varied presence in nature — calmly flowing rivers, storm surges, waterfalls. The silken sound of the men’s chorus balanced and lightened the especially rich sonorities of the string ensemble.
Dudamel opened with “Forest Murmurs” from Wagner’s Siegfried (1876) with a delicate, almost stiff metric precision but relaxed into a more atmospheric flow as the wind soloists chimed in, exquisitely, with the voices of woodland creatures.
The exuberance of the Wagner primed the audience for the finale, moving from Nordic myth to Russian fairy tale with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (1919). This is a Dudamel signature piece; his 2023 recording with the LA Phil was released on streaming platforms in March. In the New York Philharmonic reading, the orchestra plied the extremes of color and volume, and Dudamel’s earlier reserve receded as he nearly took flight. The audience exploded at the grandiose ending.
The New York Philharmonic Chorus, prepared by Malcolm J. Merriweather, proved again the success of the professional ensemble that took over after the dissolution of Westminster Choir College and its Symphonic Choir. Wind soloists — bassoonist Judith LeClair, flutist Robert Langevin, and clarinetist Anthony McGill (who had perfected his Siegfried solo during his years in the Met Opera Orchestra) — proved the pride of the Phil, but overall the orchestra is playing very well under the maestro-designate. The future looks promising.
