By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News
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Los Angeles
Philharmonic; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Leonidas Kavokos, violin
Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor and Academic Festival Overture;
Dutilleux: L’arbre des
songes, (The Tree of Dreams)
Friday, May 6, 2011 Walt Disney Concert Hall
Next performance: Sunday at 2 p.m.
Info: www.laphil.com
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Success is a mercurial word when it comes to evaluating
conductors but at least one measure of that elusive quality is how any maestro
(or maestra) handles “meat the potatoes” repertory staples, including the music
of Johannes Brahms.
For the next five weeks, Gustavo Dudamel — the 30-year-old
Venezuelan who is completing his second season as music director of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic — is going to show us at least some of his thoughts and
feelings about Brahms’ four symphonies and Ein
Deutsches Requiem under the banner of “Brahms Unbound” at Walt Disney
Concert Hall.
This week’s concerts feature Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and the Symphony No. 1, and if last
night’s performance is any indication, success will be just one of the
laudatory words that will be heaped upon Dudamel and the Phil by the time the
festival concludes in the first week of June.
Dudamel and Co. opened the evening with a stylish and
rhythmically precise rendition of the Academic
Festival Overture, highlighting the four student songs that Brahms worked
into the 10-minute piece.
That was a foretaste of what was to come with the first
symphony after intermission. Conducting without a score, Dudamel seemed to
shape every note and phrase, beginning the opening measures, which he took at an
ultra-luxurious tempo. Dudamel had a lot to say about this familiar work and
his concepts kept the audience fully involved throughout. He also took a few
seconds extra between the first and second and second and third movements to
let people exhale, although he moved almost without pause from the third
movement to the fourth.
The final two movements were typical Dudamel; you may not
have liked everything he had to say but what he elicited from the orchestra was
compelling. The third movement began lyrically, then moved forward with sense
of urgency. The final movement opened very slowly and softly but Dudamel never
relaxed the tension for an instant, so that the opening bars moved inexorably
toward the familiar main theme and from thence on to the dramatic, cathartic
ending.
Dudamel was in his element on the podium; although his
gestures weren’t as histrionic as they can be when he’s conducting Mahler, for
example, every movement meant something musically and both his smile and fierce
concentration were infectious. The orchestra played as it always seems to do
when the boss is at the helm: at the peak of their collective game and the
audience was, of course, on their feet at the end.
The original concept for “Brahms Unbound” was to pair the
major Brahms works with new pieces, including three world premieres and one
U.S. premieres. The U.S. premiere — Sofia Gubaidulina’s Glorious Percussion — remains scheduled for May 19-22 (along with
Brahms’ Symphony No. 2) but the other works have bitten the dust: Polish
composer Henryk Gorecki died last November before completing his Symphony No. 4
and Peter Lieberson passed away last month, apparently before finishing his
percussion concerto.
No such fate befell Osvaldo Golijov; unfortunately, as has
been the case too often of late, the Argentine composer simply failed to
complete his Violin Concerto in time for it to receive its world premiere this
week. Instead, Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos was the soloist in Henri
Dutilleux’s violin concerto L’arbre des
songes, which is subtitled The Tree
of Dreams.
This was the first LAPO performance of this work, which was
completed in 1985 and written for Isaac Stern. It’s a brooding, mysterious,
complicated piece that has four movements tied together with three interludes (as
Dutilleux termed them), a structural device that he employed in his previous
cello concerto, according to the program note by John Henken.
Kavakos, who was to have been the soloist for the Golijov
concerto, brought his considerable talents to Dutilleux’s score, instead. That
included a rich tone and a thoughtful traversal of Dutilleux’s meanderings.
Dudamel and the orchestra accompanied sympathetically.
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Hemidemisemiquavers:
Dudamel continues to offer beautiful lessons on how to
accept audience following a successful performance, wading into the orchestra
to acknowledge individuals and entire sections, turning the orchestra around to
acknowledge applause from all sides, including the rear, and taking his own
bows from deep within the ensemble, arms around his musical colleagues.
After the final performance of this program tomorrow, next
up on the agenda is Ein Deutches Requiem
(A German Requiem) next week (Thursday-Sunday), paired with another violin
concerto, the West Coast premiere of Steven Mackey’s Beautiful Passing. Leila Josefowicz will be the soloist in the
concerto (Mackey wrote the piece for her). The Los Angeles Master Chorale and
soloists Christine Schfer, soprano, and Matthias Goerne, baritone, will sing
in the Requiem.
Both pieces have in common the death of the composers’
mothers. Mackey’s mother died during the composition of his work in 2008; the
title comes from her last words, “Please tell everyone I had a beautiful
passing.” After Brahms’ mother died in 1865, he inserted the fifth movement
into A German Requiem, in which a
soprano soloist sings the prophet Isaiah’s words, “As one whom his own mother
comforteth, so I will comfort you.” Info: www.laphil.com
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.
