NEW YORK — Gustavo Dudamel knows how to read a room (or, in most cases, a concert hall) and apply his artistry accordingly. His 2009 inaugural concert as music director with the Los Angeles Philharmonic showcased the stylish darkness of John Adams’ City Noir and Mahler’s cheerful Symphony No. 1.
With the world now in turmoil, the inaugural New York Philharmonic concert of the 2026-27 season Sept. 16 had Adams represented by the explicit 9/11 tragedy in his On the Transmigration of Souls, followed by the fierce, confrontational world premiere of Invisible House by Canadian composer (of Ukrainian heritage) Zosha Di Castri (born 1985). Most likely to set the tone for Dudamel’s forthcoming tenure was Prokofiev’s wartime Symphony No. 5 — packed with content, richly orchestrated, but riding on the edge of catastrophe in ways that speak to the world in powerful yet never predictable ways.
With the symphony’s built-in explosiveness, Dudamel was a success in ways even some of the best conductors are not, avoiding grandiose tempos that slow the first movement to a turgid crawl and never falling into fortissimo overload that could bleach out the sound picture at Geffen Hall.
Though there’s much talk of the Philharmonic’s Mahler DNA, the Prokofiev Fifth has been a recording presence since a few years after its 1945 premiere, starting with Artur Rodziński (music director 1943-1947). With Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony widely known in the west during the 1940s, Rodzinski made the Fifth clean, sleek, and penetrating, while Dimitri Mitropoulos (1949–1958) delivered a searingly modernist expose of wartime atrocities. Leonard Bernstein (1958–1969) applied his x-ray vision to Prokofiev’s virtuosic compositional wizardry, Kurt Masur (1991–2002) was about nationalistic profundity, and Alan Gilbert (2009–2017) brought Impressionistic mystery to the slow movement.
The symphony’s well-chiseled, interacting layers — in contrast to the multiple ironies Shostakovich packed into a single idea — make the piece prime Dudamel repertoire. In the larger picture of Philharmonic history, Dudamel’s maturing musical strategy put him somewhere between Mitropoulos and Bernstein. Besides having the rhythmic thrust and vital tempos of a youngish conductor, Dudamel has a way of making symphonic strands bristle from within. During certain moments, a motif would fan out like a bushy-tailed animal on the hunt, thus becoming more audible and emphatic but not weighty.
More typical of Prokofiev performances, the swift, frenetic second-moment scherzo took on metallic hardness and machine-tooled precision. The third-movement adagio covers much symphonic ground, starting with a lyrical melody that’s a close cousin to the best-known aria from his later War and Peace opera. Dudamel gave short shrift to the Debussy-influenced harmonies that evolve into tortured dissonances that could be heard as an unfiltered lament for fallen victims of humanity.
The high-traffic final movement is among the most dizzying 10 minutes in 20th-century music. The many thematic threads return from all movements, like characters in a drama but constantly morphing. Balancing it all is where Bernstein was at his best, but Dudamel was no slouch.
I was grateful for the lack of an encore; as printed, the program needed all the rehearsal time it could get. With chorus, orchestra, and pre-recorded voices that seem to echo from the fallen World Trade Center, Adams’ Transmigration isn’t likely to come together effortlessly, even though it sounded that way on this occasion. More than any live performance I’ve heard, this one flowed with a great sound system allowing pre-recorded voices (with names, descriptions, and forwarding phone numbers for missing persons) to emerge from different parts of the hall.
In the past, orchestra and chorus seemed mainly there for atmospheric adhesive that held the piece together. Here, the Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus plus the Brooklyn Youth Chorus had moment after moment of dramatically relevant color, from the opening dreamy bardo haze (think Ives’ Central Park in the Dark) to the quiet but irresolvable dissonances of the later moments. The unassuming composer was on hand for a bow.
Invisible House, a Philharmonic co-commission, was dense, abrasive, and a bit puzzling because what one read in the program notes was so different from what one heard. Ukrainian folk songs and references to penetrating poetry were somewhere in a mixture that recalled the density of Edgard Varèse, the eloquent collisions of Elliott Carter, and the distant folk sensibility of late Aaron Copland (such as in Connotations for Orchestra, which opened what was then called Philharmonic Hall in 1962).
Maybe the piece needs a few years of performances before its logic becomes clear. One thing is clear: The composer, an assistant professor of music at Columbia University, is accomplished and knows what she is about even when her listeners do not.
