A great man once said, "Cali is where they put they mack down." That poet and prophet was 2Pac Shakur, who must have been looking into his crystal ball at James Conlon's contract extension with the LA Opera through the 2017/18 season. Announced by LA Opera GD Plácido Domingo, the American conductor will continue five more years as MD, which he's held since the 2006/7 season.
As the Los Angeles Philharmonic's The Mahler Project rounds third base, Los Angeles Magazine reports on Dudamel's five-week long initiative (scan above) that started on January 13.
The Mahler Project brings together two of Dudamel's pet orchestras -- the L.A. Phil and the Simón Bolívar -- for an all-Mahler program to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Austrian composer's death.
This past weekend's highlight was a monstrous performance of Mahler's Eight, the Symphony of a Thousand, with sixteen choirs (800 singers) and two orchestras (200 instrumentalists) that filled the Shrine Auditorium.
Last night Dudamel waved it* around the Hollywood Bowl for Puccini’s Turandot -- with Christine Brewer in the lead, Frank Porretta as Calaf, and Hei-Kyung Hong as Liù -- in a benefit concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for its Musicians Pension Fund.
An excellent analysis of how a kid from Caracas comes to rule the Los Angeles classical music scene. The Dudamel Phenomenon gets broken down by Tim Page in this month's Los Angeles Magazine.
Earlier today in Milan, at 10:15AM, Diego Matheuz held his first open rehearsal at Scala replacing Valery Gergiev who had apparently canceled (but later showed up in the audience, straight from the airport -- private flight because that's how star conductors roll, bY0tches! -- to support the young Venezuelan conductor and to conduct personally the second half of the rehearsal around 11:30AM).
Also present in the audience, Gustavo Dudamel, who's in town to conduct "Carmen" at Scala.
Matheuz is in town to rehearse the November 11 concert with Filarmonica at Konzerthaus in Berlin, his proper debut with the Scala symphony orchestra.
In an interview with Repubblica newspaper, Matheuz -- another product of El Sistema -- said something pretty funny: as a kid (he's 26 now) he used to be a cellist but the instrument was too bulky to fit in his dad's car: a baton is way more portable.
Gustavo Dudamel, in his second opening night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was accompanied by (pregnant) wife, Eloísa, who was in company of Juan Diego Flórez's wife, Julia. The two first ladies of classical music worked the red carpet while their husbands worked the stage.
The first half was a melange of Rossini overatures (La Gazza Ladra and Semiramide) with soloist Juan Diego Flórez singing arias from two Rossini arias. Flórez worked the whole Latino pride thing after the break with Chabuca Granda's Peruvian classic La Flor de la Canela, followed by Mexican and Venezuelan songs. He encored with his show-stopping Ah Mes Amis from La Fille and La Donna è Mobile from Rigoletto.
(Above: Eloísa and Julia)
Follow fierce byotches Ann Rutherford and Anne Jeffreys inside for more fabulousness from opening night!
The unimpeachable John von Rhein (who, you know, used to hang out with Carlo Maria Giulini and knows a truly great conductor when he sees one) reviews a Dudamel concert and after admitting that the "dynamo" conductor is a breath of fresh air because "(n)ow, more than ever, classical music needs its knight-errants on silver steeds", gets down to business.
There's no question he is inordinately talented, a brilliant and inspiring podium dervish who can get an orchestra to do anything he wishes while lifting an audience out of its seats. Even so, there sometimes appears to be a disconnect between the musical ends and the means he employs to achieve them. Half-formed interpretative ideas betray a lack of musical depth. The problem is not so much one of faulty instincts as where and how he channels those instincts.
His program showed Dudamel at his flashiest.
...
Dudamel looked to be in ecstasy on the podium, slashing the air with his baton, crouching and levitating as he drove the Russian warhorse onward. But that visual show of emotion did not translate into a particularly coherent or deeply felt reading. Pacing was erratic, balances were careless and there were noticeable lapses of tension between melodramatic effusions
The "O" word that comes to mind after reading a review such as this one of an artist as massively hyped as Dudamel ("60 Minutes" segment here), obviously, is, "overrated".
Gustavo Dudamel had pulled a muscle in his neck while conducting Dvorak’s Cello Concerto on the first half of the concert, and would be unable to continue on the second half. This with the tour coming up. Associate conductor Lionel Bringuier, 23 years old, stepped in to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony, as they say, on short notice.
...
UPDATE: A Philharmonic press release stated that Dudamel injured his neck during the third movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto. “We hope to have Dudamel back tomorrow,” it added. Friday’s concert is at 11 a.m.
Now that la Scala finally has, as of today, a spanking new board of directors, and that Stéphane Lissner has been confirmed as GM until 2013 -- but he'll stay on until 2015, the year when the Expo2015 rocks Milan -- there's increased chatter about the possible decision to finally name a Music Director. Daniel Barenboim enjoys the glorified status, the cash, the co-productions with Berlin and the largely ceremonial title of "Maestro Scaligero" that his idol Wilhelm Fuertwangler used to have, a glorified title of Guest Conductor that leaves the actual choices and the power safely in Lissner's hands.
Over the years, since 2005, when Lissner took over after the Riccardo Muti era, a sequence of high-profile Italian conductors has been initially mentioned as possible new MD -- Riccardo Chailly, then Daniele Gatti -- and their phantom campaigns have consistently crashed and burned in the famously Machiavellian world of Scala affairs.
And now the mostly all-powerful Lissner, safe until 2015 in his place, might -- it is said -- finally choose a Music Director. A Music Director he'd have to share power with, obviously (keep in mind, as mean Ioan Holender famously mentioned, Lissner can't read music).
The two names being floated are Gustavo Dudamel's and Daniel Harding's.
From one of OC's dearest and kindest Paris-based friends comes photographic highlights of Gustavo Dudamel's Paris adventures, where he's just finished two nights at Salle Pleyel. Earlier tonight he played with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (with soloist Renaud Capuçon) and Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie. The encore was (naturally) Lenny's Mambo.
But the real show started afterwards, when French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand presented Jose Abreu with the medal of Officier de la Légion d'honneur and Dudamel was made chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Félicitations!
I sing a random note and he tells me it's an A, "but a little bit low." I pick up a score from the table and ask him to sing a phrase from John Adams' "City Noir." He does – it starts on a low F, at the bottom of the bass clef – and runs over to the piano to check his accuracy. Right on the button.
Disclaimer: Opera Chic not only likes Gustavo Dudamel...she loves him. She was at la Scala for his Don Giovanni debut (an uneven performance of a monstrously difficult work, by the way, but this is beside the point) even before she had an actual blog, in the early fall of 2006.
So, let's make it clear that Opera Chic really likes Gustavo and she totally adores Eloisa, generous and easygoing, who endures politely all the talk about her husband being a genius when, in fact, she's the one who wears the smartypants.
Therefore, this post isn't really about Dudamel, but more about the choice of marketing him (especially as of late) by the LA Phil the way he's being marketed.
Cool? Cool.
Let us go, then.
Everybody is excited for Gustavo Dudamel's impending inaguration, too. But when you start alluding to Dudamel as a deity ("Some have taken to referring to the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic by his initials, thus: G*D."), when you seriously start comparing a great talent with a major league career that started 3 years ago with Leonard Bernstein, things are starting to get seriously out of hand. And when it comes to the mostly embarrassing, fawning, breathless media coverage of Dudamel's debut as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, we can safely say that most of the "general-interest" media is behaving poorly.
The media seems to be fascinated by the fact that, for once, on the podium they don't have an elderly Italian gentleman (Giulini), a weird-looking Jew with a French name (Previn), or a taciturn, shy, very blond Finn. Hence all the silly talk about Dudi as "the Obama of music" (actual quote) -- they simply wouldn't care otherwise, let's face it.
Do you think that Robin Ticciati, that soft-spoken, polite British cherub with a posh accent who's even younger than Dudamel -- and not necessarily a
worse conductor -- would turn them on that much?
The media -- with more than a little help from the LA Phil itself, who should know better -- is itching badly to turn Dudamel into the Roberto Benigni of
classical music, half mad genius and half court jester (speaking of Benigni,
interestingly enough, off the air he has a much lighter Italian
accent when speaking English -- he hams it up shamefully for the cameras, pretending to be the cartoonish Italian one would expect in the lamest of stereotypes).
All the "Gustavo" branding -- Amanda Ameer, who has X-Ray vision like Superman for this kind of thing, explained it all here -- is just that: gimmick. They needed a word
that ended with a vowel, and "Dudamel" is not ethnic enough for their
concept. It's ~MOLTO MARIO~ for classical music -- watch out
soon for Dudi on the Food Network making arepas. Unless you also remember all those "ESA!!!" billboards when Salonen took over in the 1990s, and the English/Finnish dual language microsite -- OC doesn't.
Opera Chic wants Dudamel and the LA Phil to succeed but you
don't build a new audience with stunts.
Salonen basically bored the non-classical media because he doesn't go against
the grain of how a conductor
is supposed to look like in the mind's eye of the people -- a vast majority of the public, after all -- who never go the symphony. But it's just plain wrong to assume -- or even hope -- that Dudamel would excite them because they assume
he should either be parking their car or at least be playing the
Mariachi instead of Beethoven. Just as TIME magazine a couple years ago, famously, was so impressed by a (then) thin soprano that they put Anna Netrebko on one of their "Most Whatever" zany lists -- they expect fat German ladies with horns, they saw Anna, and fainted.
Yes, yes, yes: conductors are no longer exclusively European, no longer Anglos (the
occasional gay Jew didn't count): for more than a few years now there have been Asians, women, blacks and even countertenors on the podium. In backwards-a$$ Italy, a place where a 2009 workplace looks like an episode of Mad Men with updated wardrobe and less stupid dialog, even there, Milan's second orchestra, La Verdi, hired a new Music Director and knew better than to beat the "she's female & Asian" angle to death in the press -- they just hired her because they really, really liked the way she made their orchestra sound. No Year of the Dragon parties, Bruce Lee t-shirts. Just music. They hired her because they really like the music she makes. Xian Zhang is not a prop for a PR campaign to bring different ethnic groups to the concert hall -- she's a musician. You only need to look at her picture to know that something big has changed. It has. It will change even more deeply, because history moves forward and PR campaigns are not the engine of history. Now let's make some music, OK?
Can Deborah Borda say the same? Really?
Xian Zhang -- in an undeniably sexist, racist country like Italy, by US standards, where stuff that would get you fired on the spot elsewhere simply provokes a chuckle -- conducted la Verdi while she was eight months pregnant and the Italian media, magically, mentioned that in a couple lines then simply wrote about the music.
It's a circus mentality and the LA Phil
is milking that for all it's worth. I think it's a mistake but I hope
it works out for them.
And by the way, Gustavo's back hurts when he's overworked. And he's almost always overworked. Let him rest a little, between microsites.
The incoming Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director was working the cameras at a recent Walt Disney Concert Hall press conference, where he's preparing for his Inaugural Gala and Opening Night Concert on October 8. He'll be conducting a world premiere of a L.A. Philharmonic John Adams commission, City Noir, and Mahler's First.
There were a number of dumb questions from various members of the
press (I expected no less), including stuff like “What’s on your iPod
that would surprise us?” (He digs Sinatra.) But the lady from the Huffington Post took
the cake. She sounded as if she wanted to have Dudamel’s child.
“Sycophant” is the word, I think. She called Dudamel “the Obama of
music.”
Dudamel was charming throughout, and genuine. I’m not cynical. The
hype surrounding him may be hard to take at times, but he’s good, and
appears to have his head on straight. His music directorship is going
to be marked by his efforts to take classical music to the people, to
the regular guy, but I don’t sense that he equates that with cheapening
the product in any way. Just making it available to more folks. The
phrase “creative use of digital platforms” was uttered, though not by
him.
Vogue's September issue -- a yearly rite of passage for glossy, fashion magazine carnivores & fiends alike -- is a behemoth of Autumnal fashion cleverly tucked between a (now ever-shrinking, sadly) bunch of couture ads, unnaturally airbrushed and cannily Photoshopped bodies modeling Fall's most sumptuous leathers (Gucci's metal-studded gear), sky-high platform stilettos (YSL's Tribute shoes), and purple pleated pants (only Juergen Teller could make Marc Jacobs' wackiness look haunted and intellectual). Credit crunch or not, shrinking ads or not, Anna Wintour having to debase herself on Letterman notwithstanding, it's the most anticipated issue of the year, the magazine that gets the most salon & spa fingerings, passed around dorm rooms at back-to-school inaugurations, and cleanly devoured & digested by glossy-paper-hungry (it's not fattening) fashionistas.
It's so much a phenomenon that Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue -- the Pixie Saint of the Eternal Bob, and the over-sized sunglasses that get almost as much airplay as Karl Lagerfeld's trademark shades -- stars in a new documentary (opening today in NYC, Sept. 11 nationwide) named just that: "The September Issue". In the latest resurgence of fashion icon documentaries (Valentino The Last Emperor and Lagerfeld Confidential), the film traces the formerly-private Wintour and Creative Director sidekick Grace Coddington through the daunting task of compiling the desirable Fall issue, catapulting the intimidating duo through chaotic fashion shows, editorial meetings, and photo shoots.
So what's so great about the 2009 Fall issue? Absolutely nothing, even at 584 pages (427 of those are ads -- the fattest ever, two years ago, was 840/727, but Vogue's circulation is at least declining less dramatically than its competitors), a price tag of $5, and Charlize Theron icy glare on the cover ('tho we admit that the Steven Meisel-shot "In the Mood" tribute to 1940s styles borders on the sublime). That is, until we flipped past page 518...
We're happy to see Dudamel ("short, dark, and handsome, with a dimpled smile and a mop of black curls
that can take on a life of its own...") sharing prime space with our iconic designers -- Prada, Valentino, Tom Ford -- but this is a bit too thingspeopleweretalkingaboutin2007.blogspot.com.
Yeah, he can fly. What of it? Year-old photos of Gustavo Dudmel have surfaced, confirming the rumors that the Venezuelan conductor can indeed fly. He can also walk on water and make really hawt women fall in love with him. Photog Andrew Eccles captured the airborne conductor (with the aid of a trampoline) in front of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dudi's new home come October.
Sunday found Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra (one of Venezuela's 125 youth orchestras that comprise el Sistema) at the Simón Bolívar Acoustic Shell in Caracas. The free concert was one of the many events that celebrated the 442nd anniversary of the Venezuelan capital.
Yo-Yo Ma joined Dudi for the concert of Bizet's Les Toreadors, Franz von Suppé's Light Cavalry Overture, and Saint-Saëns's Danse Bacchanale, all under the ready smile of founder José Antonio Abreu...and many thousands of screaming Dudi fans.