LOS ANGELES — That Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a free concert last Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl, a multicultural community love fest, will always be a point of pride for citizens here.
Gustavo Dudamel during the opening night performance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Mr. Dudamel’s much-anticipated official inaugural came on Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a formidable program with Mahler’s First Symphony and the premiere of a new work by John Adams. This was a black-tie gala, complete with a red- carpet procession of celebrities and patrons, and a South American-themed post-concert dinner in a makeshift tent set up outside the hall, smack in the middle of South Grand Avenue.
For all of Mr. Dudamel’s innate abilities to connect with audiences and inspire young people, he was hired to conduct a major American orchestra. The 10-minute ovation that erupted at the end of the Mahler made clear that supporters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic are thrilled with their new 28-year-old music director. But this was an exceptional and exciting concert by any standard.
Making a telling artistic statement, Mr. Dudamel began his tenure conducting the premiere of the new Adams piece, “City Noir,” a bustling, complex 35-minute work in three movements: the final panel in a triptych of orchestral works inspired by what Mr. Adams calls the “California experience,” its “landscape and its culture.” (The first two are “El Dorado” and “The Dharma at Big Sur,” a violin concerto.)
The piece was suggested, Mr. Adams has written, by the richly evocative books on California’s social history by Kevin Starr, especially a chapter called “Black Dahlia,” which explores the sassy, shoddy and sensational era of the 1940s and ’50s, which gave rise to film noir. It is not easy to evoke the milieu of an era in music. But this score was also inspired by jazz-inflected American symphonic music of the 1920s through the ’50s, from Gershwin to Copland to Bernstein, something that is a lot easier to evoke.
Mr. Adams does so brilliantly in this searching, experimental de facto symphony. The first movement, “The City and Its Double,” begins with a wash of orchestral sound, murmuring motifs and rhythmic shards. Scurrying figurations break out and whirl around, getting stuck in place one moment, spiraling off frenetically the next. Is this harmonically astringent be-bop or weird echoes of a Baroque toccata?
Eventually the violins begin a winding, sometimes aimless-sounding episode of fitful, churning lines. Mr. Adams has become a master at piling up materials in thick yet lucid layers. Moment to moment the music is riveting. Yet, as in some other Adams scores, I found it hard to discern the structural spans and architecture of this one.
The pensive second movement, “The Song Is for You,” with its hazy sonorities, slithering chords, sultry jazzy solos and undulant riffs, does somehow convey California. The third movement, “Boulevard Night,” begins languorously but soon erupts, all jagged, quirky and relentless. Call it “The Rite of Swing.”
Mr. Dudamel, gyrating on the podium and in control at every moment, drew a cranked-up yet subtly colored performance of this challenging score from his eager players. He seemed so confident dispatching this metrically fractured work that I was drawn into the music, confident that a pro was on the podium.
Like Mr. Dudamel’s Beethoven Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl, the Mahler performance was not what you might expect from a young conductor. For all the sheer energy of the music-making, here was a probing, rigorous and richly characterized interpretation, which Mr. Dudamel conducted from memory. The suspenseful opening of the first movement, with its sustained tones and cosmic aura, had uncannily calm intensity. But when bird calls and genial folk tunes signaled the awakening of nature, the music had disarming breadth and guileless tenderness. And Mr. Dudamel was all ready-set-go when Mahler’s wildness broke out.
In the rustic second movement, he captured the music’s beery, galumphing charm, and milked the Viennese lyricism with the panache of a young Bernstein. He and his players uncovered the slightly obsessive quality of the songful slow movement, with its droning repetition of tonic-dominant bass patterns. And he viscerally conveyed the fits and starts of the mercurial finale, building to a brassy climactic fanfare almost scary in its ecstasy.
The musicians were with him all the way, though the playing was rough at times, with patchy string tone and scrappy execution. For all the important accomplishments, of Mr. Dudamel’s predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, he was not the most gifted orchestra builder. The vitality of the playing was always inspiring. No one wants the slick virtuosity that some orchestras are content with. Still, Mr. Dudamel and his players may have work to do.
At the end, as a confetti shower of Mylar strips fell from the ceiling, Mr. Dudamel returned to the stage again and again. But he never took a solo bow from the podium. Instead, he stood proudly with his players on stage.
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