Gustavo Dudamel and James Conlon Exit L.A.

When Dudamel was announced as Salonen’s successor at the L.A. Phil, in 2007, he was only twenty-six, and aglow with a celebrity that is bestowed on just a handful of classical musicians. I spoke to him on the day of the announcement and got the sense that he knew how much work lay in front of him. He told me that he needed to absorb swaths of repertory and find his relationship with the progressive musical organism that Salonen had brought into being—one that had been infused with the modern energy of Gehry’s structure. At the same time, Dudamel made clear that he was not exactly a neophyte. Since the age of eighteen, he had been conducting up to ninety concerts a year with the youth orchestras of Venezuela, where he was born.

Dudamel’s most conspicuous legacy to L.A. has been his devotion to music education. It was at his behest that the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles was launched and a home for it found. (Gehry repurposed an old bank building in Inglewood.) YOLA players have regularly come to Disney to participate in L.A. Phil events. Some of them were on hand for Dudamel’s final concert at Disney, which paired Adams’s cosmic “Harmonium” with Antonio Estévez’s pungent “Cantata Criolla.” (Dudamel’s official farewell to the orchestra will take place in August, when he leads Beethoven’s Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl.) Thousands of young people have benefitted from free YOLA programs, not only at the Inglewood center but also at satellite sites across the city. The challenge will be to insure that YOLA stays strong after Dudamel has moved on. Late last year, the L.A. Phil announced that it was curtailing YOLA activities at Esteban E. Torres High School, in East L.A. After a local uproar, the program was temporarily reinstated.

The L.A. Phil’s bias toward the new remains in force: Dudamel has presided over more than sixty world premières. From the outset, he proved a committed interpreter of such complex scores as Adams’s dramatic oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” Thomas Adès’s evening-length ballet “Dante,” and Kaija Saariaho’s song cycle “True Fire.” But these composers were already well known in L.A. Dudamel’s engagement with contemporary music kicked into a higher gear about a decade ago, when he began commissioning Latino composers en masse. His championing of the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, in particular, resulted in a procession of large-scale works, including the choral ballet “Revolución Diamantina,” which honors Mexican protests against misogynist violence. Having introduced that fiercely luminous piece in 2023, Dudamel brought it back in March, placing it on the second half of a concert that began with Beethoven’s Seventh. He accorded a similar prominence to Adès’s roiling “Inferno,” the first part of “Dante,” putting it alongside Beethoven’s Sixth. He thus reaffirmed the local rule that new music is not a sideshow but the main event.

With that contemporary bent has come a degree of political boldness. In February, the L.A. Phil played Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play “Egmont,” and Dudamel brought in the playwright Jeremy O. Harris and the actor Cate Blanchett to fashion a modern meta-commentary on Goethe’s tale of rebellion against despotism. The resulting spectacle won no points for coherence or subtlety—at one point, Blanchett referenced recent demonstrations against ICE, and at another she yelled, “Fucking bitch!”—but it had the virtue of being chaotic and jolting, which is something you generally cannot say about American orchestral events. (Next year, the production will be mounted at the New York Philharmonic, where Dudamel becomes music director in the fall.) Themes of environmental crisis figured in several commissions, notably Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” which, back in September, filled Disney with an apocalyptic roar.

What still puzzles me, amid all these noteworthy projects, is Dudamel’s way with the standard repertory. Although his skill and discipline are never in doubt, he tends toward a bustling sameness. Dynamics often peak too early, robbing tension from later stages of a score. This going-to-eleven syndrome surfaced both in the “Egmont” Overture and in Beethoven’s Seventh. (By way of contrast, Manfred Honeck, in a guest appearance in April, elicited an extraordinary Tchaikovsky Fifth that proceeded from fraught murmurs to thunderclaps of passion.) Dudamel displayed a surer sense of narrative in Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” in May—a final collaboration with Gehry, who had designed evocative sets for the opera, playing off Disney’s twisty forms and earthy tones. Act I passed in a noisy blur, but Act III created real momentum. “Ride of the Valkyries” began in understated fashion, with sprightly, dancing rhythms. The intensity increased stepwise until, with nine Valkyries singing at full force, Dudamel unleashed a climactic storm of sound. It felt like another salute to Frank.