Opera Chic

Dudi & Danny: La Scala's Odd Couple

When, over the last few days, we began to experience sightings of both Daniel Harding and Gustavo Dudamel around the mean streets of downtown Milan we figured out that it had to be either a case of Yves Saint Laurent sample sale-induced hallucinations (the Opera Chic version of "teh vapors"), or they really had to be here at the same time.

A quick double check to our Blackjack's monstah database of thangs-to-do confirmed that indeed the two little rascals of classical music, the scarily talented young men who have turned major record companies and big opera houses and orchestras into their personal blowup dolls, are bound to appear almost simultaneously at la Scala: Harding debuts on Sunday 18 with a tasty, superkewl Dallapiccola/Bartok double bill, quite possibly the most interesting programs we have witnessed in our 2+ years in Milan (two gems, and indeed good luck selling out the house with that to the army of casual Scala-goers  who are mainly happy to flaunt their Rolexes, their mistresses, their cabana boys, and then proceed to fart their way through another performance of Traviata or Aida).

Dudamel instead will strut his stuff with Filarmonica della Scala Lenny's Chichester Psalms and Mahler's Titan -- funnily enough, one work OC finds deeply moving and the other she instead considers titanically b0ring.

Anyway, what really made us LOL is the idea that maybe, in an era of cutbacks, la Scala has given Harding and Dudamel a two-bedroom apartment to share and they're now roommates for two weeks -- Dudi blasting Kanye on his Macbook, while Danny tries to watch Manchester United on SKY while going over his scores: what we like to think of as the Oscar and Felix of classical music. Sitcom gold.

Unleash The Dogs Of Dudamel: L.A. Goes Crazy For Gustavo's Sausage

Dear Tim Mangan made our weekend in a very tasty way: he has the porky goods on the hot dog party thrown for Gustavo Dudamel at the L.A. Phil.

As you might know, the d00ds at Pink's hot dog stand in L.A. like the D00damel so much they named a hot dog after him. Now there's photo evidence of Gustavo's "meaty bacchanal" at Disney Hall (poor Frank Gehry must be very worried about mustard stains on the upholstery).

Photos by Joanne Pearce Martin, also via The Mangan Man's arts blog over at the OC Register.

Dudi The Violinist

Gustavo Dudamel plays second fiddle

Esa Pekka's Last L.A. Hurrah

If he were single and if he wore a proper white tie instead of those bad black Nehru jackets he inexplicably favors as concert attire, E-Pek (for those of you who didn't use to babysit his kids, Maestro Esa Pekka Salonen) would come dangerously close to being a perfect man: really talented, really smart, with a sense of humor, rich, famous, and seriously handsome (for an older guy). He also speaks really good Italian.

Then, props to Deborah Borda, who paid hommage to Esa-Pekka Salonen's impossible-to-overstate influence on the LA Phil:

We have a season and a half to go. But more importantly, it's a celebration of one hell of a guy, a man who has led us on amazing excursions and will continue to do so

The 2008-09 season, Salonen's last as Music Director, since he chose to concentrate on composing (blonde moptop and boyish smile and all, he'll nevertheless turn a secksy 50 in June), will include seven world premieres and residencies by John Adams, Yefim Bronfman, Peter Sellars and Dawn Upshaw. The Wiener Philharmoniker (led by Zubin Mehta) will make their Disney Hall debut. Kaija Saariaho's "La Passion de Simone" will receive its U.S. premiere. András Schiff will complete his Beethoven piano sonatas cycle.

Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct the SFO in "The Thomashefsky Project". Salonen's last hurrah will take place on April 19, 2009.

Then our Dudi, Gustavo Dudamel, will step in as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and for all his monster talent, his hype, and the obvious love audiences worldwide have poured over his cute wild bushy hair, he will have to demonstrate that he is worthy of the directorship once held, among others, by Carlo Maria Giulini and Otto Klemperer.

Dudi does not need to be afraid; he will only need, every once in a while, to remember the giants who came before him. Salonen's one of them.

OMG It's Dudamel on the TeeVee!

Latest OC crush tjfloyd alerted us to 60 Minutes segment on Gustavo Dudamel, which you can access via web (for those of us in Europe…or those of you in the USA who forgot to pay your cable bill). Titled “Gustavo The Great”, Bob Simon interviews the Venezuelan supah-stah and follows him from Los Angeles to Lucerne in a thirteen minute clip. Transcript and story here (with small video embed), while a bigger video embed is found here. 

Just make sure to stop the clip 5 seconds from the end, unless you want to hear this from Mr. Simon: "If you’ve never heard Gustavo Dudamel make music before, remember in years to come, you saw him on 60 Minutes first." laffeaux laffeaux. o ok, CBS. Yeah, Dudamel is like the Wii of conductors. CBS magically found him in their crystal ball. More like crystal balls. Don’t force my hand, Robert Simon!!

Lenny & Dudi Play 'Hold My Baton'

Our dear Dudi, Maestro Gustavo Dudamel for the public at large (the second-coolest member of the Dudamel family after Eloisa), not only conquers NYC with "a bang", but also managed to charm (aka "scam") the NYPhil archivist to let him use one of Bernstein's batons.

The usual killjoys will all go, "blah blah he's not as good as Lenny blah blah just a kid blah small repertoire blah untested blah Salonen's scholarship is much deeper blah blah blah", and yes for all his mad skillZ his Don Giovanni at la Scala wasn't the best DG we've ever heard (but then this is an insane metric for any conductor, which opera or symphony piece conducted by Lenny that was not also written by him is the best performance in existence of that piece? We say maybe none, and nobody's a greater fan of Lenny's than Opera Chic who worships him the way Catholics worship their saints).

So if Dudamel is not "the future of classical music" -- a splendidly dumb title that would not have fitted even Lenny's monster strong shoulders -- he's totally one of the few people that have the passion and the fire and, yes, the love that can make this old art form cool and relevant again in a world that could easily do without it.

Oh, and and more often than not whenever he's conducting and we're there, Dudi and OC -- he on the podium OC in some palco -- are the youngest people in the house. Unless you want opera houses and symphony halls to shut down in two or three decades, when most of the current audience will be either dead of old age or getting there, then you'd better get ready for Dudi -- and maybe, just maybe, he'll show you his baton.

Headlines Scream: DUDAMEL 4 TEH WIN!!!

The scarily apocalyptic reviews are in from Dudamel's Thursday & Friday, November 1/2 appearances at the Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall, where he played with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela some Bernstein & Mahler, Beethoven, Moncayo & Márquez.

The headlines tell all: "Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the greatest show on Earth"; "Gustavo Dudamel is maestro of all he surveys"; "A PRODIGY AT THE PODIUM"; "Buzzy Star Dudamel, 26, Brings His Kid Orchestra to Disney Hall"; "Dudamel is absolutely revelatory".

Is there an echo up in here? We’ve been saying the same for over a year now.

From the LA Times article:

"Both Thursday's concert and another on Friday night had sold out quickly, and Internet ticket scalping had reached near Ian McKellen-like proportions. When an orchestra of 160 slowly filed onto the Disney stage Thursday, the applause grew and grew. When Dudamel walked out, he might have been a rock star. When the concert ended, he might have hit a home run to win the World Series."

But this kind of sucks, “A little rehearsal time in L.A. was lost because the visiting orchestra's instruments were held up by U.S. Customs, which wanted to go through them with a fine-tooth comb.” CHECK HIS AFRO 4 TEH  LOL BOMBZ & LLELLO!

Gustavo In The Candy Store

When he came home from school at lunchtime, he would arrange his Fisher-Price toy figures as if they were an orchestra, making a little box for the conductor, and put a record on the phonograph; he would ask her not to break up the orchestra while he was in music class so that he could resume directing the musicians on his return. One time his grandmother took him to see his father perform in a classical concert in Barquisimeto. “He was very small, I thought he was going to fall asleep,” she told me. “And he was completely attentive to details of the instruments. He said, ‘Grandmother, I like this music.’ ”

Gustavo Dudamel's toy story in tomorrow's NYT Magazine

Listen To Gustavo Dudamel's "Ejaculation" @ the Proms, Thanks To The BBC

Curious about Gustavo's apparently X-rated Shostakovich?

The .ram stream is here

XXXDudamelXXX

Gustavo Dudamel (conducting without a score) violently contrasted the two, concentrating on hushed textures and interplay of lines in the former and ejaculating the brisker passages with horrifying, agitated urgency.

lol he wrote "brisker" lol

*Ahem*

It's only fair that Dudamel is best experienced live, then.

I Am Dudamel Hear Me Rraar

The puppylicious replacement for E-Pek Salonen at the LA Phil talks to the Times of London about his forthcoming Proms engagement:

“They play with this . . . rraar!”

El Sistema: Made In Scotland

By now we all know how the awesome Venezuelan system for music education, El Sistema, nurtured the genius of our pocketsize, cute Afro'd conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.

The Scots are so impressed with it that they want to import it. It will apparently be rebranded as "El McSistema". Attempts to convince Hugo Chavez to wear a kilt have so far been unsuccessful.

"El Sistema": Gustavo Dudamel's Secret, A Stick For Conducting

"El Sistema" ["The System"], as we call it, now encompasses 140 youth orchestras and 128 children's orchestras in our country, as well as the semi-professional Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of which I have been music director since 1999, when I was 18. Some 260,000 children and young people are involved in The System -- studying and playing orchestral music all the time. Every day. Absolutely. We are a family. My orchestra, and The System, is my family.

Newly minted L.A. Phil Music Director Gustavo Dudamel talks about Venezuela, giant trombones, and his three baton-wielding angels.

We Enjoy Our Vacation, Esa Pekka-Salonen Passes Teh Baton

As Opera Chic was enjoying her well-deserved Easter vacation in the Alps between Mahler, Titian, and dozens of different yummy foods (more of that later), the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, il maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen (who is still teh mang, by the way, even if he has a taste for some seriously ghastly suspenders), announced that he's stepping down at the end of the 2008-2009 season; he has his Philharmonia job, and wants to devote more time to composing.

He will be replaced by our dear Gustavo "Behold My Unruly Afro" Dudamel, who was signed to a five-year contract.

«Los Angeles was the first orchestra to give me the opportunity to make my U.S. debut at the very beginning of my career -- Dudamel told the Los Angeles Times -- The energy was very special from the start, and I love how open to new ideas the orchestra is».

Blahblahblah, etc.

Who cares: mad props to Dudi and his beloved wife, Eloisa for the new, plum job.

Easter Music Blowout: Dudamel in Lucerne, Rattle does Wagner, Barenboim/Boulez Do Mahler; We'll Go Ski.

Now, Opera Chic is going to Cortina d'Ampezzo to breath the clean air and eat the tasty Knoedel (spinach, no meat thx) and ski @ 130 mph more dangerously than some crazed Manga character.

But actual classical music lovers, instead, tend to choose more musical -- if a bit staid not to say b0ring -- destinations such as Lucerne, Berlin, Salzburg (been there already!) or Schwetzinger (where is that? It must be the South Dakota of Europe, quite difficult to pinpoint on a map).

A handy Bloomberg piece (thanks Mr. Mayor!) gives us the whole map.

To sum it up:

The Lucerne Easter Festival, starting March 24: has two resident orchestras this year, Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (chief conductor Gustavo Dudamel), and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons. 

El Dudamel will conduct pretty kicka$$ works such as Mahler 5, Rueckert-Lieder (Kozena), Ravel's La Valse, Tchaikovsky 5, Rachmaninov 3rd piano concerto (Yefim Bronfman).         

Jansons will lead his Germans in Mahler 7 (guys, why not the Third, Opera Chic's favorite Mahler symphony???), then works by Schubert, Haydn and Gounod the next day.

Sadly, Nikolaus "The Taxidermist" Harnoncourt will appear at the Festival as well, always eager to embalm astonishingly beautiful works with his trademark glacial tempi and gloomily desaturated colors.

Wagner-lovers (ie, not us) can enjoy the old neckbearded Nazi's feverish musical dreams of racial purity in Salzburg (more on Herr Richard's appalling neckbeard fetish here), where our Lord of nerdy-cool Sir Simon Rattle (Levine, Rattle, Dudamel -- why do we like conductors with Afros so much?) will condcut the BPO in Das Rheingold,' staged by Stephane Braunschweig, in the cast Willard White, Robert Gambill and Anna Larsson. The Berlin Philharmonic and Rattle will thankfully give three further concerts.

Those in search of a musical holiday with a de-nazification bonus, here's our unimpeachable hero Daniel Barenboim, who will conduct Staatskapelle in a Mahler Cycle in Berlin for the Festtage, with his BFF&E Pierre Boulez.

The beautiful sounds of poor old forgotten Giovanni Legrenzi will echo in Schwetzingen, for the annual Festival (April 24). So, if you wanna get down with Legrenzi's 1683 Il Giustino in a baroque moment of raprture, check it out, all info is here.

Dudamel's Don Giovanni on RAI television

Tonight, lucky Italians will be able to catch on RAIDUE Gustavo Dudamel's supercool Mussbach-directed Don Giovanni we saw at la Scala last October. Any kind readers who feel like sending poor Opera Chic an .avi file or something will receive her neverending gratitude, and a shout out on this blog. kthnxbi.

Dudamel stung by wild ambition (not poisonous)

The Los Angeles Times wrote an article on 25-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, focusing on the eager contingent of kids that comprise the Dudamel-directed Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra, and their brewing plan of world domination. Opera Chic had labled him as the the brand new h0tness back in November, and I am happy to see that he is in the news again.

Although Dudamel has much less experience compared to his dinosaur-aged colleagues, he displayed latent musical talent throughout his childhood. As an 8-year-old boy, he already understood his resonance in conducting:

"I had just gone to a concert with my parents and I identified with the conductor a lot [...] I thought, how interesting that the conductor uses an instrument that no one hears. I fell in love with it. I began to conduct in my house, arranging dolls as the orchestra. I'd put on a record and conduct, like theater."

Very sweet.

Bring in da dudamel!

I know that NYC has been all-a-titter at the recent reappearance of the universally-acknowledged-Peruvian hottie JDF in recent days for his much anticipated Count Almaviva …

...but here in Milan, there has been a brand new hawtness that is setting everyone’s nether-regions ablaze.

Yes, we have our very own latin lover, and he’s got more hair, more sparkle, and more pull than your ballet-dancing, guitar-strumming, lamby-voiced, inca kola-chugging Peruvian fairy-prince.

Who dat?
Let me hear you say G.D.

Tonight in Milan marks the finale of il maestro giovincello Gustavo Dudamel’s Teatro alla Scala premiere, which began last month with la prima of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni on October 10, 2006.
 
There was so much anticipation at the beginning of October for this young director’s debut at Teatro alla Scala. Pretty awesome for me is that I know his wife, Eloísa, in a vague social capacity, as last month we shared certain morning activities together, and the excitement leading-up to la prima was palpable among our group. And let me just tell you that homegirl is as effervescent, witty, and bright as she appears...and I was duly impressed, because she was so committed to our daily activities, that she was in attendance the very morning of her husband’s premiere. Listen, if my husband was to premiere at Teatro alla Scala, I’d be laid-up in the gorgeous Hotel Sacher Spa in Vienna for a week-straight, making sure that my pores were scrubbed clean, and my hair laid brilliant and shiny. Damn straight. 

The reaction to Dudamel's la prima was mixed, but they all followed the same general principal that although Dudamel is provocative and precocious, he needs many more seasons to properly mature. He has a problem with capturing and presenting the cohesive theme of an overall work, and therefore conducts somewhat erratically. When he has his heart into a passage, it is gorgeous and breath-taking...but when he's distracted, he's lost.

The critics’ lamentations were quantified this morning, when I saw Dudamel conduct Mahler’s 3rd for the inauguration (you can find the official Filarmonica announcement as a Word Document here: Download comunicato stampa.doc) of the Filarmonica della Scala season. La 7 (channel 7 here in Milan) was carrying a broadcast of his performance from this past Monday, November 6th concerto at Teatro alla Scala, and I was able to discern his conducting.

Dudamel had a fairly loose grasp of the first movement, and it sounded chaotic, like it could slip away from him at any moment. The Menuetto was gorgeous however, suffused with paramount control and sentiment. (btw, the most worn-out version of Mahler's 3rd in our house is the 1969 Barbirolli Berliner, which is truely a masterpiece, and I can't recommend it enough.) He captured well Mahler's 3rd, but there were a few glitches that clashed with his overall proficiency. But no one really cares about his conducting right now; because unless he develops a crippling crystal meth addiction, or gets caught indulging in a shoplifting fix at Saks, they know he will eventually pull his sh*t together, and become the 'Next Big Thing".

In the meantime, Dudamel and his bubbly Venezuelan wife have been making the social rounds in Milan, and fashionably strutted between the covers of Corriere della Sera Magazine’s (edition #39 from September 29, 2006) flippant “Benvestiti/Malvestiti” (Best & Worst Dressed List) photo layout as two gorgeous benvestiti, alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Gisele Bündchen, and Prince Charles. (Although one of my favorite celebrity websites trashed the benvestito of Cate Blanchett, saying of the very same dress that, “the absurdly ethereal collar that makes it look like her head is the centerpiece in a macabre gift basket.”) heh.

Interestingly enough, the Dudamel picture chosen for the Corriere layout was cribbed directly from this webpage, which curated recent pictures of the Dudamels’ among the random company of a past event in Rome for the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de Venezuela "Simón Bolívar", (Youth Orchestra Simón Bolívar that Dudamel has been conducting since he was sixteen-years-old), which hosted such magically random couples as Claudio and Daniele Abbado, Paolo and Matie Bulgari, and Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi. But why the hell in the name of holy god would you put on a public website a picture with his mouth all agape like that? Somebody please tell his agent before nasty photoshoppers like me get our agile little hands on it...

Btw, if you go to Dudamel’s website, and go to his personal favorites section, you’ll find gems such as this:

♥Historical personalities whom I despise most: Hitler (Right on, my Sephardic brother!)

♥Favorite name: Eloísa (awwwwwwwww!!)

Gustavo and Eloísa Dudamel rawk my socks.