PERSPECTIVE — Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez’s term as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic officially began at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009 with a free concert anchored by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It ended last week right back where it started with another Beethoven’s Ninth (though not free this time) on Aug. 20. As Harry Chapin used to sing, “All my life’s a circle … “
This was just the first of four wildly multicultural “farewell” concerts at the sold-out, 17,500-seat Bowl that underlined what an unusual music director the LA Phil has had. There was “Gustavo’s Fiesta” Aug. 21, which spotlighted six artists and groups from Mexico, Colombia, and Spain before Dudamel and members of the Phil came aboard to back some of them in the last fourth of the concert. Here, the Phil seemed superfluous — as is often the case when symphony orchestras back pop musicians — and they could barely be heard amid the amplified din anyway.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Dudamel, the LA Phil, and a few elite members of YOLA (Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles) sprinkled within the ranks were better suited to backing the punk/pop/grunge-rock ministrations of the Foo Fighters Aug. 22, and the orchestra traded off with a fantastically grooving group of traditional Venezuelan musicians on Aldemaro Romero’s “Fuga con Pajarillo”.
Then came the real grand finale Aug. 23, which was transformed into a benefit concert for the victims of the devastating June 24 earthquake in Dudamel’s Venezuelan homeland. Dudamel and company backed a parade of performers from Mexico, Venezuela, England, Long Beach, Calif., and elsewhere, ending with a 30-minute finale dominated by an adoring Chris Martin from the mega-popular rock band Coldplay. It put the seal on Dudamel as an honorary rock star, as a humanitarian, and as a beloved cultural figure in Los Angeles who still wants to gamble on his reputation by going to New York.
How did we get to this point from the time when Gustavo Dudamel was still a relatively untested kid?
Although I didn’t catch Dudamel’s now-fabled North American debut at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Phil in September 2005, I was there for his first concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Jan. 4, 2007, amid a gusher of hype. According to my notes, he really put on a show when the going became agitated — throbbing, shaking, swaying to and fro, the baton vibrating wildly or lunging at the orchestra, his mop of curly black hair flying around. Yet for all of that action, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra received a conventional rendition that had nothing unusual except for a pell-mell rush to the finish line.
In the middle of the opening piece, Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta, Dudamel took off on an unprepared accelerando and left half the orchestra behind struggling to catch up. At this exact point, Esa-Pekka Salonen, sitting in the audience next to then-LA Phil chief Deborah Borda, reportedly said to her, “This is our man.” (Really? After a near-train wreck?) Just three months later, Dudamel was named as Salonen’s successor.
Yet as things turned out, Salonen’s hunch has for the most part paid off. Contrary to initial impressions, the young man in a hurry was not in so much of a hurry to leave Los Angeles behind as he built his international career. Following the career paths of Salonen and Zubin Mehta, who were also hired young by the LA Phil (Salonen at 31, Mehta at 26), Dudamel stayed put for 17 years, tied with Salonen and one year ahead of Mehta for the longest tenures at the Phil.
And he grew on the job. The 45-year-old Gustavo Dudamel of 2026 is much changed from the 25-year-old fireball of 2007 — far less of a showboater on the podium, more restrained in his physical motions, having learned along the way how to get better results with less movement. Always a quick study, he is very good with detail, diligently burrowing into the scores. He was only too happy to continue Salonen’s progressive bent in programming, expanding the repertoire with floods of newly commissioned works, maintaining the Phil’s reputation as the most forward-looking of the Big Seven American orchestras.
In the core repertoire, Dudamel likes complete cycles, working his way through a composer’s entire symphonic output, often in a compressed period of time, in order to get a grip on their entire worlds. In Los Angeles, he has done all of the Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Ives, and the completed Mahler symphonies. He has also done cycles with semi-staged opera such as the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas, and as he leaves Los Angeles, he is halfway through his first Wagner Ring cycle with a possibility that it will be completed in future seasons.
The most successful cycles to my mind have been those of Tchaikovsky and Ives. He treats the popular Russian with complete seriousness, verve, and not an iota of fashionable condescension — and he totally grasped the Ivesian mashup of Americana, European tradition, experimental mischief, and visionary philosophy to produce a recorded cycle that can compete with the best.
The most audacious cycle was his Mahler Project of 2012, where, in a fit of reckless bravado, he led all nine, plus the Adagio from the Tenth, in a span of three and a half weeks here and did it again a few days later in Caracas in less time. That was too much, as he tacitly admitted, and his later Mahler performances, now faster in tempos and more cogently organized than before, were more sparingly spooned out. His “Mahler Grooves” festival of 2025 limited itself to symphonies Five and Seven and excerpts from the other symphonies and song cycles.
But these projects were not Dudamel’s biggest contributions to Los Angeles musical life. Looming larger, of course, is YOLA, the El Sistema U.S.A. project that he inspired and oversees now and then, which should continue for as long as he maintains his L.A. ties. But I think his most valuable legacy will be unlocking the lid on a neglected treasure chest of Latin American classical music.
Through Dudamel, we got to know the danzons and concertos of Arturo Márquez, whose Danzon No. 2 he has single-handedly punched into the mainstream repertoire. He has championed Alberto Ginastera’s music of the pampas, introduced the Venezuelan national composer Antonio Estévez, and taken up where Salonen left off in advocating the music of Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas. Most of all, Dudamel is the one who brought Gabriela Ortiz to the world’s attention, serving as a passionate advocate of irresistibly rhythmic symphonic compositions like her freedom-fighting ballet Revolución diamantina, the crown jewel of his Pan-American Music Initiative.
No one on the classical scene feels the grooves of Latin American music more instinctively and skillfully, and Dudamel has torn down the long-standing curtain of disdain for strong dance rhythms in classical music. But he has gone even further by embracing popular music up and down the Western Hemisphere, as well as the film music of an L.A.-based hero of his, John Williams.
Pops and film concerts are, of course, the ATMs of orchestras everywhere, but their music directors hardly ever inject themselves into that sphere as deeply as Dudamel has. Collaborating with pop musicians can be seen as part of his laudable mission to bring diverse populations together through music — and he genuinely likes the stuff, even when presiding over perfunctory orchestral backings of rock groups, Latino artists, and rappers. Now and then, he comes across some genuinely interesting orchestrations like those backing the Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade, but most of the time, there are deserts of whole notes for the players to endure.
One wondered how effective Dudamel was at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show waving his arms trying to control YOLA, Coldplay, and the multitudes of players on the vast field. Yet he seemed to be having the time of his life at the LA Phil’s appearance at Coachella in 2025, happily leading the band in classical excerpts and pop songs by others as thousands of rock fans chanted his name. Same with his appearance with the Foo Fighters on Aug. 22 as he was caught on the video screens beaming with delight through every decibel-loaded number.
Meanwhile, Dudamel’s recording history with the LA Phil has been a puzzle filled with frustrating gaps for listeners and collectors. It is difficult to understand why some of his recordings are released on streams and downloads but not in physical forms, or why some come out on LP but not CD, or on CD but not LP. On what basis do labels decide, and what happens if licensing disputes wipe out the streams?
Dudamel’s legacy on CD from 17 years at the Phil consists of just seven albums, all of which happen to be two-disc sets, plus half of a Khachaturian disc with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Their latest releases continue the exclusions: a long-delayed, speedy traversal of the four Schumann symphonies from 2018 is digital-only, while a recording of his last concerts in Disney Hall is LP-only. Of Dudamel’s adventures with the Phil outside classical music, all we have are two brief numbers with Lafourcade and the rapper Common as part of the eclectic, seven-LP-only Hollywood Bowl 100 boxed set.
For all of his popularity and celebrity status — and perhaps because of his celebrity status — Gustavo Dudamel the person is still an enigma to outsiders. From the beginning, he has been systematically shielded from the press here just like A-list movie stars and pop musicians are. He doesn’t give interviews, except on sporadic occasions to a handful of major media outlets. He rarely holds press conferences — and when he does, he is whisked onto the stage, says a few words, or is interviewed by the reigning CEO of the orchestra, and is whisked off without mingling or taking questions (I can only recall one occasion in which he took questions, and it was limited to two). By contrast, no one stopped his successor, Daniel Harding, from mingling immediately after he was introduced to the press last May.
Some of this isolation may have been due to Dudamel’s precarious situation in his home country (his name on his parking place at Disney Hall had been quietly removed after awhile, possibly for security reasons). One wonders whether New York journalists will also be barred from penetrating the invisible wall.
Moreover, the enigma also extends to whether Dudamel has actually developed a sound of his own while in L.A. A graphic demonstration could be heard at the unique centennial concert in October 2019, when all three living LA Phil music directors performed on the same evening. With Salonen and Mehta, you could hear the Phil instantly adapting its sound to their distinct sonic profiles — a lean, precise, brilliantly transparent sheen for Salonen; darker, thicker, Viennese-influenced sonorities for Mehta. With Dudamel, there was flash and volume in the extroverted peaks (he has always liked things loud in general) but otherwise a thoroughly conventional treatment of the material without an easily defined overall sonic personality. Nothing has fundamentally changed since, though the orchestra is technically playing better than ever for him.
Everyone has their strengths in repertoire, and Dudamel certainly has his, as detailed earlier. In the core repertoire, though, while he almost always turns in good performances, would you choose them over those from the past that changed your lives? When Dudamel and the LA Phil appeared in London in August just before the Hollywood Bowl dates, the consensus of several British critics struck a familiar tone: They were bored by what read like a humdrum rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and dazzled by “Inferno” from Thomas Adès’ Dante ballet, one of the biggest triumphs from the Dudamel years.
Summing it up, Dudamel is a figure unlike any who have occupied the NY Phil top job; the comparison to Bernstein is misplaced except for the charisma factor. Will the multicultural gestures that worked so well in Los Angeles find the same welcoming response in the less-permissive cultural atmosphere of New York? Will New York concertgoers be receptive to an unaccustomed flood of new music? Can something resembling YOLA take root there, and will he have the time to cultivate it? So far, he has the New York public and musicians on his side, but those long knives in the press are waiting.
As for the future of the LA Phil after Dudamel, I wouldn’t worry. If this article had been written a year ago, I would have. But since then, Salonen was enticed to return to his old crew at the Phil for six weeks annually over the next five years in a newly created role of creative director, with carte blanche to do whatever strikes his fancy. Add to that the signing of Harding as music director, Anna Handler as conductor-in-residence for two weeks, Emmanuelle Haïm as artist collaborator, the retaining of Mehta as conductor emeritus, John Adams as creative chair, Herbie Hancock as creative chair for .jJazz, Thomas Wilkins as principal conductor of the adjacent Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and two as-yet-unfilled new posts, creative chairs for Latin music and film music.
And Dudamel himself remains part of the team, for he’ll be back for four weeks with two new titles in hand, artistic and cultural director laureate of the LA Phil and founding director and conductor iaureate of YOLA, starting in December 2026 with a clutch of all-Beethoven programs.
All of that gives the LA Phil a Murderers’ Row lineup of heavy hitters that no other orchestra in the land can match. It’s a new concept of team leadership that ought to be a lot of fun to watch, one that, if it works, may redefine just what it means to be a music director for an American orchestra. Which, in his own way of trying to embrace everything in music, is part of what Dudamel has been doing all along.
So instead of saying goodbye to Gustavo Dudamel, what L.A. really means is hasta luego (see you later). Big difference.
