Listening to LA
Last month at an LA Phil concert led by Gustavo Dudamel I thought I saw Alex Ross in the lobby of Disney Hall. Turns out it was him, and this is what he heard:
Although Dudamel has the image of an impulsive conductor, a wild man of lunging arms and dancing feet, his musical choices tend to be controlled, sometimes a little predictable. He favored a lush, heavy sound in Mozart [Symphony no. 40], as on old Karajan records. Tempos were on the slow side. For the most part this Mozart needed punchier rhythms, cleaner dynamic contrasts, sharper details of articulation and phrasing. The Berg [Violin] Concerto, too, was curiously subdued. You might have expected Dudamel to wallow more in the veiled Mahlerian drama of Berg’s orchestral writing.
It seems Alex and I felt the same way about those performances of Mozart and Berg, though I did expect both orchestra and conductor to be tremendous in the unbridled finale of Mozart 40 and they did not disappoint. Dudamel is certainly gifted, but given his unprecedented amount of experience on the podium and the ‘breathless reports’ emanating from his concerts I expected more urgent interpretive insight.
One real downside of the frenzy surrounding The Dude [and something I’ve noted elsewhere] is the near-total media silence on Esa-Pekka Salonen’s primary role in shaping the LA Phil into to ‘the most interesting orchestra in America.’ Indeed, SoCal symphonic audiences are much indebted to him for the fact that ‘in L.A. no messiah is required; this orchestra has already been saved.’
Update: This is what Salonen’s been up to since his final concert with the Philharmonic last spring.
