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アメリカ東西の若手新コンダクターの影響 [音楽時評]

アメリカの東海岸と西海岸でそれぞれ新たな若手指揮者の登場と共に,他方では,東海岸で既存有名指揮者の今後の活動に若干の懸念が生じています.

若手新進指揮者とは,いうまでもなく,New York Philharmonic の新音楽監督,43歳の Alan Gilbert と Los Angels Symphony  へのヴェネズエラの貧民街育ちの弱冠28歳の新音楽監督 Gustavo Dudamel を指しています.

両新人音楽監督は,共に,tokens of fresh offerings and festivals to come として委嘱新作曲目で新シーズンの幕開けの初演奏を飾ったのですが,最後は有名作品で締めくくりました.

新曲は the Philharmonic has a composer in residence again, Magnus Lindberg, though you can understand the complaints of some East Coast composers; while Mr. Dudamel, a Venezuelan, appointed an American, Mr. Adams, to a comparable post in Los Angeles, Mr. Gilbert, a New York native, chose a Finn.

そして,New York が In Gilbert's case, the new work was "Expo," a 10-minute work by the philharmonic's composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg. It was pleasant enough, but utterly forgettable.

In contrast, Dudamel had John Adams' "City Noir," which excited its audience in part because it was about them. It was Adams' three-movement portrait of LA, with jazz saxophone, lots of percussion and the uneasy feel of 1940s film noir - the dusty streets of an LA night.                                              とまったく対照的な新作でした. Gilbert の曲は直ぐ忘れられるでしょうが,Dudamel のそれは,LA を音楽で描いた約30分の曲でしたから,聴衆は熱狂し,恐らく忘れがたいモノになったでしょう.

後半の大曲でも対照的でした.Dudamel gave us one of the great Mahler Firsts, detailed, driven, fresh, as if it were the world premiere rather than the Adams.と,演奏に荒さは目立ったモノの,聴衆を熱狂させるモノでした.それに対して,Gilbert は,    In contrast, Gilbert gave a competent but ultimately dull reading of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." Nothing was out of place, but, as LA critic Mark Swed wrote, "Mostly the 'Symphonie Fantastique' moved along without unusual incident."

Certainly, you can't manufacture what Dudamel has: charisma and excitement. He is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. Like Leonard Bernstein before him, he seems to be channeling music through the very fiber of his being. Gilbert lacks that and substitutes sobriety, which some listeners may take for depth.

But there is something essentially different in their approaches to music. Gilbert says he is honoring the "intentions of the composer," and does so by making sure that when the composer wrote an E-flat, his orchestra plays an E-flat.  He never said anything about what the symphony means. There is a contingency that prefers such an approach, feeling uncomfortable with the messy human emotions involved.

But that is only a shallow sense of a composer's intentions. Dudamel understands that it is the composer's intention to excite and thrill his listener. Punctiliousness is a poor substitute for amazement.

Dudamel excites not only his audience but also his musicians, who play for him like demons. That is true of the LA Phil, but it is also true of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra he led for years in Venezuela as part of El Sistema, the music-education program that trains impoverished Venezuelan youths to play music.

It was even true for the grizzled old veterans of the Israel Philharmonic when the normally staid ensemble played the Tchaikovsky Fourth at Carnegie Hall last fall with Gustavo leading them into a frenzy of Tchaikovskitude. They not only played like enthusiastic kids, they gave their conductor a standing O at the end. Their love for each other was palpable.

両者を比較すれば,while Dudamel and his orchestra showed why classical music matters, Gilbert and his showed why audiences are dwindling. と対照しています.Dudamel has the chance to make the LA Philharmonic as vital to his city as the Dodgers, the beach and the film industry. Gilbert seems to be taking the New York Phil in the direction of the horse and buggy.                                    と極論しています.

TheNewYorkTimes ともっと歯切れの良いThe Arizona Republic の評論を下記に載せましたので,両者の対照についてへ双方をご参照下さい.

TheNewYorkTimes は東西の対照として,東の Levine と西のサンフランシスコのThomasをあげています.Levine は Metropolitan Opera を38年も指導してきましたし,小澤征爾が2流に落としたBoston Symphony を再建した功労者ですが,2年前の肝臓癌に続いて,今度は背骨の手術を受けて,Boston Symphony のCarnegie Hall でのシーズン

 

 

 

The New World on the Two Coasts

/Associated PressJason Redmond

Conductors at work: Gustavo Dudamel with the Los Angeles Symphony in his debut as its music director.

 

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI        Published: October 22, 2009

WHEN a music director takes the helm of a major American orchestra, the inaugural concert should be not just a musical celebration but a statement of artistic mission. The recent debuts of Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic both showed how this can be done.

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

Alan Gilbert, center, leading the New York Philharmonic in Central Park.

Here were two purposeful musicians, the 42-year-old Mr. Gilbert and the 28-year-old Mr. Dudamel, shaking up their institutions, generating excitement in their cities and conducting programs that began with the premieres of significant commissioned works, tokens of fresh offerings and festivals to come.

Concurrently New Yorkers lost an opportunity to assess how James Levine, 66, is doing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra after five years as its music director. We New Yorkers are interested parties, given Mr. Levine’s central role at the Metropolitan Opera for the last 38 years. Unfortunately he had to undergo surgery to correct a spinal problem, forcing him to withdraw from conducting the Boston Symphony in the season-opening concert at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 1.

This is the third major health crisis Mr. Levine has grappled with over the last four years. It may be unfair to invoke illness as a metaphor. Yes, Mr. Levine has struggled to stay in shape, and anyone can take a fall onstage or develop a malignant cyst on a kidney (which was treated successfully).

Still, having revitalized the Boston Symphony after Seiji Ozawa’s nearly 30-year tenure and having challenged Boston players and audiences with formidable contemporary works and numerous premieres, Mr. Levine seems to be in an artistic quandary at the orchestra.

In any case, the classical music field is abuzz about the new music directors on opposite American coasts, although buzz hardly begins to describe the scene in Los Angeles since the arrival of Mr. Dudamel, a boyish Venezuelan with charisma to burn. The city is swept up in Dudamania.

His real debut was part of a free concert on Oct. 3 at the Hollywood Bowl before 18,000 cheering people, a multicultural gala including master musicians and youngsters performing gospel, jazz, rock and Latino pop. It concluded with Mr. Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and 200 local choristers in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The performance during that four-hour program that most embodied Mr. Dudamel’s vision, however, was given by 100 young people, mostly from minority families in South Los Angeles. The children were members of the youth orchestra program that the Los Angeles Philharmonic inaugurated two years ago, inspired by Mr. Dudamel, for whom a commitment to educating young people is encoded in his DNA. With Mr. Dudamel conducting, the players sawed through an arrangement of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth as their proud families watched from prime seats in the front rows.

“You could see the hearts of the kids,” Mr. Dudamel said four days later, during a brief interview in his office at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Instruments were placed in their hands only two years ago, he added, yet “they are already serious.”

“They believe in what they are doing, like, ‘O.K., we are musicians,’ ” he said. “This identity is everything.”

During the 17-year tenure of Mr. Dudamel’s predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic changed the perception of what an American orchestra could be. Other conductors have been part of this shift, especially Michael Tilson Thomas at the San Francisco Symphony. But Los Angeles audiences are conditioned for adventure. They expect their orchestra to be inclusive, to offer new and experimental works, for living composers to be presences in the community, like John Adams, the orchestra’s new chairman for contemporary programming.

Mr. Salonen built a modern orchestra that can dispatch a complex Ligeti score and handle the meter-fracturing challenges of a restless work like Mr. Salonen’s own “L.A. Variations.” But there has been a trade-off. The Los Angeles Philharmonic does not have the technical finesse and rich sonority of, say, its friendly upstate rival, the San Francisco Symphony.

Mr. Dudamel’s performance of Mahler’s First Symphony on opening night was telling. He is a music-making animal but also a gifted and substantive musician. Yet for all its searching moments and driving energy, the Mahler performance was rough-edged, raw and shaky at times.

Mr. Dudamel knows there is work to do.

“I think this is an amazing orchestra,” he said in the interview. “We are working now. I don’t know how to describe my sound yet, because it is their sound, not my sound. But the musicians are so open, so giving, to a different, a new energy.

“Look, I think in one year we can see.”

Whatever risk may have been involved in hiring a music director who is barely older than the conductors participating in the Dudamel Fellowship Program has paid off, and how. All of Mr. Dudamel’s programs this season are sold out.

In comparison with Mr. Dudamel, a rock star, Mr. Gilbert seems almost a mature maestro. Yet after Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, two much older, authoritarian music directors, the youthful Mr. Gilbert represents a needed generational overhaul.

Musically he is off to an encouraging start. In a recent column in The New Yorker the critic Alex Ross said the Philharmonic “is playing better than it has in the 17 years that I’ve been a critic in New York.” And Allan Kozinn, my colleague at The New York Times, wrote, “Mr. Gilbert is transforming the icy glare of the Maazel sound into a warm glow.”

In his modest way Mr. Gilbert has it in him to be an influential educator and proselytizer. His spoken introductions to new or unfamiliar works, like Schoenberg’s lush symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande,” complete with musical excerpts played by the orchestra, have been lucid and helpful. I was impressed that for his opening concert he emboldened Renée Fleming to take a chance and perform an early Messiaen work, “Poèmes Pour Mi.” It worked. Ms. Fleming sang this 30-minute score from memory with total involvement and radiant sound.

What’s more, the Philharmonic has a composer in residence again, Magnus Lindberg, though you can understand the complaints of some East Coast composers; while Mr. Dudamel, a Venezuelan, appointed an American, Mr. Adams, to a comparable post in Los Angeles, Mr. Gilbert, a New York native, chose a Finn.

Michael J. Lutch for The New York Times

James Levine, directing the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood.

Perhaps, as some have suggested, Mr. Gilbert has been cautious so far about taking interpretive chances. His account of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” though crisp, inexorable and brilliantly played, was missing some madness. But give him time.

 

In Boston, meanwhile, the major project Mr. Levine has lined up for audiences this season is routine by comparison: a survey of the Beethoven symphonies. The performances were to be recorded for release as a complete set of the symphonies, Mr. Levine’s first. The orchestra has now announced that Mr. Levine’s recuperation from surgery will compel him to cede more than half of the cycle to other conductors. As of now he will conduct only the Sixth through Ninth Symphonies. (He will conduct the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies when the Boston Symphony comes to Carnegie Hall on Nov. 2.)

Things started out splendidly for Mr. Levine in Boston. Mr. Ozawa was a notoriously uncreative programmer, so the orchestra’s artistic administrators were delighted when Mr. Levine reported for duty with enough ideas for five seasons. Though I lack the perspective of those who hear the Boston Symphony week to week, the orchestra sounds great on his watch. Still, these days his imagination seems lacking.

He has long had an intense interest in highly complex contemporary music: scores by composers like Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, that he had had few opportunities to explore during the decades when he was focused mostly on opera.

For two full seasons he immersed the Boston Symphony and its audiences in an extensive celebration of the 100th birthday of Mr. Carter, which came in December. That a major composer was still producing important scores at such an advanced age was unprecedented in music history, Mr. Levine said in touting the Carter project. But this worthy endeavor soaked up a lot of the creative juices of the orchestra and its audience. Diverse younger composers who should be heard in Boston have been overlooked so far.

Mr. Levine now holds two of the most important musical jobs in America. Though they are in the same time zone, the workload would test any conductor. When he accepted the Boston post, it seemed that he might drift slowly away from the Met, concentrate on the symphony and try to build a legacy with this historic orchestra to match his transformational tenure at the Met. Now I am not sure.

During curtain call for the Met’s opening-night gala last month, a convoluted new production of “Tosca” by the modernist director Luc Bondy, Mr. Levine seemed miffed as the production team was booed. With the determined general manager Peter Gelb in place, Mr. Levine will have to assert himself more forcefully to shape the overall artistic direction at the Met. And if his health problems continue, he may have to make career choices.

  

Youthful maestros - one staid, one frenzied

The East Coast and the Left Coast each saw new music directors conduct their initial concerts this fall, and the results may tell us something about the future of classical music.

In September, Alan Gilbert took over the New York Philharmonic in a concert broadcast on the PBS "Live From Lincoln Center" series.

This week, Gustavo Dudamel led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his first "official" concert, broadcast on the PBS series Great Performances." (He had led a Hollywood Bowl performance of the Beethoven Ninth the week before, in a festival atmosphere that included a good deal of salsa and pop music on the program).

The results couldn't be more different. The two conductors represent two diametrically opposed schools of thought on music. And the future of classical music in America may hang in the balance.

Both were advertised as young, energetic conductors, taking their orchestras in new directions. Both are genuinely competent technicians and bring from their ensembles beautiful sound and respectable performances.

But while Dudamel and his orchestra showed why classical music matters, Gilbert and his showed why audiences are dwindling.

The symmetry was notable: Both are young, at least by orchestra-leader standards (Gilbert is 42, Dudamel is 28), both opened their programs with commissioned work and ended with familiar standards.

In Gilbert's case, the new work was "Expo," a 10-minute work by the philharmonic's composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg. It was pleasant enough, but utterly forgettable.

In contrast, Dudamel had John Adams' "City Noir," which excited its audience in part because it was about them. It was Adams' three-movement portrait of LA, with jazz saxophone, lots of percussion and the uneasy feel of 1940s film noir - the dusty streets of an LA night.

But the major test came in the concerts' second halves. Dudamel gave us one of the great Mahler Firsts, detailed, driven, fresh, as if it were the world premiere rather than the Adams. (Dudamel will repeat his program in Phoenix on May 12 at Symphony Hall.)

In contrast, Gilbert gave a competent but ultimately dull reading of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." Nothing was out of place, but, as LA critic Mark Swed wrote, "Mostly the 'Symphonie Fantastique' moved along without unusual incident."

You can't make an ultimate judgment on the basis of two single concerts, but I have heard both conductors live and I attended Gilbert's rehearsal of the Beethoven "Eroica" at Avery Fisher Hall. I have heard recordings by both. The impression left by the TV concerts is only reinforced.

Certainly, you can't manufacture what Dudamel has: charisma and excitement. He is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. Like Leonard Bernstein before him, he seems to be channeling music through the very fiber of his being. Gilbert lacks that and substitutes sobriety, which some listeners may take for depth.

But there is something essentially different in their approaches to music. Gilbert says he is honoring the "intentions of the composer," and does so by making sure that when the composer wrote an E-flat, his orchestra plays an E-flat. His "Eroica" rehearsal was all about text: what was written in Beethoven's score. He never said anything about what the symphony means. There is a contingency that prefers such an approach, feeling uncomfortable with the messy human emotions involved.

But that is only a shallow sense of a composer's intentions. Dudamel understands that it is the composer's intention to excite and thrill his listener. Punctiliousness is a poor substitute for amazement.

Dudamel excites not only his audience but also his musicians, who play for him like demons. That is true of the LA Phil, but it is also true of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra he led for years in Venezuela as part of El Sistema, the music-education program that trains impoverished Venezuelan youths to play music.

It was even true for the grizzled old veterans of the Israel Philharmonic when the normally staid ensemble played the Tchaikovsky Fourth at Carnegie Hall last fall with Gustavo leading them into a frenzy of Tchaikovskitude. They not only played like enthusiastic kids, they gave their conductor a standing O at the end. Their love for each other was palpable.

The truth is that classical music, when played right, is vital, exciting and tells us something about our own lives and emotions. It isn't about Beethoven; it's about us.

Dudamel has the chance to make the LA Philharmonic as vital to his city as the Dodgers, the beach and the film industry. Gilbert seems to be taking the New York Phil in the direction of the horse and buggy.


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