LOS ANGELES — The Never-Ending Gustavo Dudamel Farewell Tour reared back and reached a crescendo over the past weekend with concerts that were supposed to be his “farewell” to Walt Disney Concert Hall as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
While the above is technically true, it is not the last this hall’s subscription audiences are going to see of the Venezuelan flash-turned-world-famous celebrity maestro. Not even close. He’ll be here again, and often: three weeks in Disney Hall per season, starting this December, plus another week at the Hollywood Bowl.
But if the audiences June 4 and 5 were aware that Dudamel would not be lost to them, it didn’t seem like it. All four concerts were sold out, even at rock-star-concert prices. The few remaining tickets for June 4 were going from $271 to $399.50 on the LA Phil website. The weekend concerts were even higher‚ $449.50 tops on June 7. The crowd cheered loud and long. They wouldn’t let him go after the usual span of time for curtain calls. One woman shouted in Spanish before his first downbeat on June 4, “Gustavo, don’t leave us for New York!”
Whether or not this was a real farewell, it was certainly a most creative farewell.
In a generous gesture I don’t recall any music director of this orchestra making, Dudamel dedicated nearly the entire Thursday concert to solo showcases for the principal players in his orchestra. Each musician stepped up to the apron and performed a short piece or an excerpt from a concerto with the wholehearted backing of his/her colleagues. Every instrument of the orchestra was represented, except for the tuba (understandable) and the curious omission of the viola (which could inspire another unfortunate salvo of viola jokes among musicians).
They were unusual selections, too, pieces that may be standard in practice rooms but are hardly ever heard in the concert hall these days. For example, when was the last time you heard Soviet composer Reinhold Glière’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra live, the jaunty Allegro giocoso movement of which Emmanuel Ceysson polished off with brilliant rippling relish? Or Rossini’s Bassoon Concerto, with Whitney Crockett displaying deft comic timing and superb articulation. Swing Era jazz intervened with Artie Shaw’s blues-drenched Concerto for Clarinet, as Boris Allakhverdyan, Gustavo, and the Phil swung it in decidedly straighter form than the looser, boogie-crazy Shaw original.
For the record, and with limitations of space in mind, the other musicians on parade were Andrew Bain (horn), Denis Bouriakov (flute), David Rejano Cantero (trombone), Robert deMaine (cello), Christopher Hanulik (bass), Thomas Hooten, Christopher Still, Jeffrey Strong, and James Wilt (trumpets), Matthew Howard and Joseph Pereira (timpani), Joanne Pearce Martin (piano), Ryan Roberts (oboe), and Bing Wang (violin). All excelled at their particular craft.
The newsmakers of the evening were world premieres by two composers whom Dudamel has fervently championed during his time here. One who is already famous, 94-year-old John Williams, contributed a delightful chip of a piece, Bravo Gustavo!, a fanfare for four trumpets and large orchestra that begins in atonal drift before bursting forth with brazen quotes from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth, solo cadenzas for each trumpeter, and a raucous coda full of South American rhythms. The other composer, whom Gustavo almost single-handedly made famous, was Gabriela Ortiz, who came up with Mujer Arena. A quiet moonlit opening gradually developed forward motion, picking up speed, volume, and indigenous Mexican-Indian rhythms toward another roaring conclusion. A good time was had by all.
The following evening contained the designated “farewell” program for Dudamel, and the presence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale would normally signal something overwhelming. Beethoven’s Ninth? Nope, that was being saved for Gustavo Week at the Hollywood Bowl in August. A big Mahler symphony? Guess again. An opera? Are you kidding, after they went to the trouble of producing a fully staged Die Walküre two weeks prior?
Instead, Gustavo went his own way, picking two 33-minute works that symbolized his dual loyalties between North and South America, his homeland and his adopted homeland, Venezuela and Los Angeles, a work from his youth in Venezuela and another from his Creative Chair at the Phil over the entire span of 17 seasons.
The Creative Chair, of course, is John Adams, and the piece was in retrospect, a relatively early work of his that helped to establish his brand in San Francisco in 1980. Harmonium is a product of the time when Adams was still working his way through his minimalism period, with the revolving string figurations on one chord occasionally rising to crescendos and falling with diminuendos. It was a style of composing for voices and orchestra that Adams gradually abandoned, seemingly leaving it to the likes of Steve Reich to develop in his own way.
For this, Dudamel invested his own brand of dynamism, building the crescendos of the “Wild Nights” section to a dazzling fury I don’t recall from earlier renditions and recordings. The Master Chorale sang with a golden ethereal collective tone quality, whether in the texts of John Donne and Emily Dickinson poems or wordless syllables.
Antonio Estévez’s Cantata Criolla from 1954, a setting of a mystic poem by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba about a singing contest between troubadour Florentino and the Devil, seems to have become the Venezuelan national work. The best part of the piece for me is the third movement, where, after much neo-Romantic scene setting with shards of Dies irae (for the Devil) and Ave maris stella (for Florentino) thrown in, the Venezuelan harmonic riffs and rhythms finally kick in hard.
Dudamel led Cantata Criolla during his first season here and capped the last program of his last season with it over the weekend, conducting from memory, driving his orchestra fervently, mouthing the words as he went. Tenor Anthony León (Florentino) and baritone Eleomar Cuello were both outstandingly powerful in their respective ranges, and the Master Chorale shone as before.
A different Alberto Arvelo — the grandson of his namesake poet — was listed as director but didn’t seem to have much to do, certainly not on the scale of his participation in Die Walküre. Also, the performance was preceded by a recitation of Guillermo Arriaga’s poem América by six dauntless kids from Dudamel’s YOLA program, which turned into a laundry list of musical forms and sayings from the Western Hemisphere.
On to Hollywood Bowl for the (apparent) conclusion of the Never-Ending Gustavo Dudamel Farewell Tour Aug. 20-23.
