Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto
Monday, May 24, 2010
Hispanic Society
We went to the Hispanic Society yesterday, Sunday. Quite impressive, and, gladly, not at all crowded. Hamilton Heights is not a popular destination for many; they don't know what they're missing (let's keep it that way).
Most impressive was the art work of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. Aside from three canvases in the main room, there is a series in its own large room.
The 14 paintings that make up Sorolla's ambitious and overwhelming "Visions of Spain" (1913-1919), which were originally commissioned by Mr. Huntington for the Hispanic Society, are newly installed in their own large gallery after returning from a tour of six Spanish museums. Both a tour de force and a tour of Spain, the paintings are especially persuasive thanks to extensive conservation work that has restored their brilliance. The sailors, fishermen and fish in the post-Impressionist "Ayamonte" (1919) are all in tones of white, yet poles apart from those of the gauchos and cattle in "Andalucía, The Round-Up" (1914)—reflecting the variations in light in different parts of Spain. It's easy to be put-off by clichéd images of local color and ceremonies, folk costumes and dances, but Sorolla manages to draw you into these settings, conveying an authenticity that also speaks to a moment in time, because the scenes were developed from the artist's travel sketches.
The paintings are very large, and it is only because the room is so large that one can get enough perspective to see them properly. Ayamonte is one of them.
http://museosorolla.mcu.es/
Most impressive was the art work of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. Aside from three canvases in the main room, there is a series in its own large room.
The 14 paintings that make up Sorolla's ambitious and overwhelming "Visions of Spain" (1913-1919), which were originally commissioned by Mr. Huntington for the Hispanic Society, are newly installed in their own large gallery after returning from a tour of six Spanish museums. Both a tour de force and a tour of Spain, the paintings are especially persuasive thanks to extensive conservation work that has restored their brilliance. The sailors, fishermen and fish in the post-Impressionist "Ayamonte" (1919) are all in tones of white, yet poles apart from those of the gauchos and cattle in "Andalucía, The Round-Up" (1914)—reflecting the variations in light in different parts of Spain. It's easy to be put-off by clichéd images of local color and ceremonies, folk costumes and dances, but Sorolla manages to draw you into these settings, conveying an authenticity that also speaks to a moment in time, because the scenes were developed from the artist's travel sketches.
http://museosorolla.mcu.es/
Friday, May 21, 2010
African Folk Gets a Jazz Infusion
On "Reverse Thread," her seventh album as a leader, the 43-year-old Ms. Carter reinterprets traditional and contemporary folk music from Kenya, Mali, Uganda and other African nations; the impact of the continent's music on the Western canon is represented by Papo Vázquez's "Un Aguinald Pa Regina" and "Day Dreaming on the Niger," a song co-written by Ms. Carter and Reginald Washington that first appeared on her 1997 album "Something for Grace."
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Upper Broadway's buried treasures
Standing on what was once the estate of the bird painter John James Audubon, known today as Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street, is an assemblage of elegant Beaux-Arts structures built during the first three decades of the 20th century. Some of the original tenants—including the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society—have moved out, but fortunately the Hispanic Society of America remains firmly planted.
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.
One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.
Upon entering the Society's elegant courtyard, the first work one encounters is the magnificent and commanding portrait by Francisco Goya of "The Duchess of Alba" (1797). Several other Goyas are on the balcony above, which serves as a venue for a quick survey in Spanish painting from the late Renaissance to the late 19th century.
I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.
The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.
One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.
I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'
The Hispanic Society of America
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'
La Gioconda
Heard acts 3 and 4 past Saturday night, and liked the music. Music in Act 4 really grabbed my attention. It was a familiar version of a piece called "The Dance of the Hours" -- which is also in Fantasia.
Another famous parody of "The Dance of the Hours" is Allan Sherman's song Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, describing a miserable time at summer camp. It uses the main theme of the ballet as its melody.
Another famous parody of "The Dance of the Hours" is Allan Sherman's song Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, describing a miserable time at summer camp. It uses the main theme of the ballet as its melody.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Mamet's top 10
What plays does David Mamet like best—and why?
• Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"
• Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's "The Front Page"
• Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
• Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"
• Arthur Miller's "All My Sons"
• John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"
• William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life"
• Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band"
• Gore Vidal's "The Best Man"
• Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women"
• Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"
• Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's "The Front Page"
• Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
• Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"
• Arthur Miller's "All My Sons"
• John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"
• William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life"
• Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band"
• Gore Vidal's "The Best Man"
• Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women"
America's Golden Boy
I know the name, but not the music.
* MUSIC
* MAY 18, 2010
America's Golden Boy
By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
Philadelphia
In this centennial year of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81), performances of his work are taking place throughout the nation and abroad.
Meanwhile, as I communed recently with his spirit at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Barber's alma mater, a birthday bash was in full swing. Central to the festivities was a celebratory all-Barber concert by students and faculty in the handsome recital hall where the composer himself had performed as a student.
A child prodigy who had entered the newly founded conservatory at age 14, Barber was very much its golden boy when he graduated in 1934. Handsome, refined and well-spoken, he was a musical triple threat as well, achieving distinction there as a composer, pianist and singer.
Barber recorded his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" with the Curtis String Quartet in 1935. The recording preserves not only the lovely tone of his light, nuanced baritone, but his superb diction. The voice and its music were central to Barber's creativity; even his instrumental works are guided by a born singer's lyrical sensibility. While unmistakably 20th-century in character, his melodies tend to move in singable arcs rather than the jagged declamation of much modernist writing.
Barber, who wrote an operetta at age 10 (to a libretto by the family's Irish cook), had revealed himself as worthy of professional rank while still at Curtis, and it wasn't long before his first major orchestral score, the sparkling overture to Sheridan's comedy "The School for Scandal" (1931), entered the symphonic repertoire. In 1937 his Symphony in One Movement (1936) became the first American symphonic work performed at the Salzburg Festival. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini conducted his "First Essay for Orchestra" and the "Adagio for Strings" on an NBC Symphony broadcast, and by the time his Violin Concerto appeared the next year, Barber's international position was secure.
Barber has been called many things—neo-romantic, eclectic, conservative—terms considered almost pejorative during the second half of the 20th century. During Barber's formative years, radical American composers such as Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, happily experimented with new musical language, much of it bitingly dissonant. They exhorted young Americans to embrace the avant-garde. But Barber's musical development had been carefully guided from childhood by his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer. She was a star contralto of the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso's heyday; her husband was a highly regarded composer of art songs. Uncle Sidney encouraged Barber to pursue his own artistic path regardless of outside pressures. At Curtis, Prof. Rosario Scalero, a prominent composer in his own right, further instilled in Barber a deep sense of traditional craftsmanship.
Hence, Barber held himself aloof from the controversies that honed the cutting edge of his time. Though he increasingly incorporated Stravinskian dissonance and complex syncopation into such works as the Violin Concerto, "Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance," the "Capricorn Concerto" and Cello Concerto, he felt under no obligation to employ anything that interfered with his fundamental urge to write emotionally expressive, well-crafted music.
Composer David Ludwig, artistic chair of the Curtis performance studies department, observes that creating a good composition is like making a good story. "And like well-written stories, Barber's scores are structurally watertight."
Barber might today be indisputably regarded as the standard-bearer of 20th-century American music were it not for two contemporaries—Aaron Copland, 10 years older than Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, eight years younger. Both outlived him. Copland and Bernstein deployed the postwar media to greater advantage than Barber, conducting, teaching, writing books and making the most of a golden age of network-televised concert music that put them in the public eye much more frequently than Barber. Moreover, each produced a body of work that struck a chord among a wide range of audiences: Copland's homespun ballet scores captured in the popular mind the essence of rural America, while Bernstein's jazz- and Broadway-inflected music embodied urban America's cosmopolitanism and cultural malaise. Their works' immense popularity led to widespread performance and recognition. Because Barber never sought his own easily recognized all-American idiom, his music—however rich in invention and sheer beauty—did not achieve the same popular identity.
Nonetheless, having already received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera "Vanessa" (premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first American opera to be staged by the Salzburg Festival), Barber seemed poised to consolidate his pre-eminence through the three commissions he received to inaugurate New York's Lincoln Center. His 1962 Piano Concerto, written for the opening week of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall, garnered him a second Pulitzer Prize. "Andromache's Farewell," a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides' "Trojan Women," was lauded as well. But the highest honor was supposed to be realized with the premiere of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" to open the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. It was a fiasco primarily because of Franco Zeffirelli's overwrought production, and because preperformance hubris had set expectations unrealistically high. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the musical press were gunning for Barber at the time. Revised, and restaged by Barber's life-partner and sometime collaborator, Gian-Carlo Menotti, it was received far more positively at its second premiere at the Juilliard School in 1975. But on a personal level, Barber seems never to have regained the wind in his sails, and died believing himself forgotten.
On the contrary, Barber has remained among the most programmed American composers over the decades. His music represents the best meaning of "conservatism"—the conservation and perpetuation of what Barber felt was a living musical tradition stretching back two centuries. And Barber's work represents his lifelong pursuit of honest, meaningful expression. "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand," he said in an interview later in life.
Probably the most frequently performed Barber work has been the Adagio for Strings. Yet it has never become hackneyed. "Because it's perfect music," says Mr. Ludwig, "and ravishingly beautiful. I think there is something melancholic about it that appeals to everyone, almost a sense of loss that moves people deeply." He also says that while Barber's training is "Eurocentric, his music is not just American in style but very democratic. It's not just accessible to the most highly trained musicians but also to anyone out there in Rittenhouse Square. So its accessibility runs across the board. It's vibrant, it's full of energy, it's completely unpretentious."
Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.
* MUSIC
* MAY 18, 2010
America's Golden Boy
By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
Philadelphia
In this centennial year of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81), performances of his work are taking place throughout the nation and abroad.
Meanwhile, as I communed recently with his spirit at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Barber's alma mater, a birthday bash was in full swing. Central to the festivities was a celebratory all-Barber concert by students and faculty in the handsome recital hall where the composer himself had performed as a student.
A child prodigy who had entered the newly founded conservatory at age 14, Barber was very much its golden boy when he graduated in 1934. Handsome, refined and well-spoken, he was a musical triple threat as well, achieving distinction there as a composer, pianist and singer.
Barber recorded his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" with the Curtis String Quartet in 1935. The recording preserves not only the lovely tone of his light, nuanced baritone, but his superb diction. The voice and its music were central to Barber's creativity; even his instrumental works are guided by a born singer's lyrical sensibility. While unmistakably 20th-century in character, his melodies tend to move in singable arcs rather than the jagged declamation of much modernist writing.
Barber, who wrote an operetta at age 10 (to a libretto by the family's Irish cook), had revealed himself as worthy of professional rank while still at Curtis, and it wasn't long before his first major orchestral score, the sparkling overture to Sheridan's comedy "The School for Scandal" (1931), entered the symphonic repertoire. In 1937 his Symphony in One Movement (1936) became the first American symphonic work performed at the Salzburg Festival. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini conducted his "First Essay for Orchestra" and the "Adagio for Strings" on an NBC Symphony broadcast, and by the time his Violin Concerto appeared the next year, Barber's international position was secure.
Barber has been called many things—neo-romantic, eclectic, conservative—terms considered almost pejorative during the second half of the 20th century. During Barber's formative years, radical American composers such as Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, happily experimented with new musical language, much of it bitingly dissonant. They exhorted young Americans to embrace the avant-garde. But Barber's musical development had been carefully guided from childhood by his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer. She was a star contralto of the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso's heyday; her husband was a highly regarded composer of art songs. Uncle Sidney encouraged Barber to pursue his own artistic path regardless of outside pressures. At Curtis, Prof. Rosario Scalero, a prominent composer in his own right, further instilled in Barber a deep sense of traditional craftsmanship.
Hence, Barber held himself aloof from the controversies that honed the cutting edge of his time. Though he increasingly incorporated Stravinskian dissonance and complex syncopation into such works as the Violin Concerto, "Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance," the "Capricorn Concerto" and Cello Concerto, he felt under no obligation to employ anything that interfered with his fundamental urge to write emotionally expressive, well-crafted music.
Composer David Ludwig, artistic chair of the Curtis performance studies department, observes that creating a good composition is like making a good story. "And like well-written stories, Barber's scores are structurally watertight."
Barber might today be indisputably regarded as the standard-bearer of 20th-century American music were it not for two contemporaries—Aaron Copland, 10 years older than Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, eight years younger. Both outlived him. Copland and Bernstein deployed the postwar media to greater advantage than Barber, conducting, teaching, writing books and making the most of a golden age of network-televised concert music that put them in the public eye much more frequently than Barber. Moreover, each produced a body of work that struck a chord among a wide range of audiences: Copland's homespun ballet scores captured in the popular mind the essence of rural America, while Bernstein's jazz- and Broadway-inflected music embodied urban America's cosmopolitanism and cultural malaise. Their works' immense popularity led to widespread performance and recognition. Because Barber never sought his own easily recognized all-American idiom, his music—however rich in invention and sheer beauty—did not achieve the same popular identity.
Nonetheless, having already received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera "Vanessa" (premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first American opera to be staged by the Salzburg Festival), Barber seemed poised to consolidate his pre-eminence through the three commissions he received to inaugurate New York's Lincoln Center. His 1962 Piano Concerto, written for the opening week of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall, garnered him a second Pulitzer Prize. "Andromache's Farewell," a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides' "Trojan Women," was lauded as well. But the highest honor was supposed to be realized with the premiere of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" to open the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. It was a fiasco primarily because of Franco Zeffirelli's overwrought production, and because preperformance hubris had set expectations unrealistically high. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the musical press were gunning for Barber at the time. Revised, and restaged by Barber's life-partner and sometime collaborator, Gian-Carlo Menotti, it was received far more positively at its second premiere at the Juilliard School in 1975. But on a personal level, Barber seems never to have regained the wind in his sails, and died believing himself forgotten.
On the contrary, Barber has remained among the most programmed American composers over the decades. His music represents the best meaning of "conservatism"—the conservation and perpetuation of what Barber felt was a living musical tradition stretching back two centuries. And Barber's work represents his lifelong pursuit of honest, meaningful expression. "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand," he said in an interview later in life.
Probably the most frequently performed Barber work has been the Adagio for Strings. Yet it has never become hackneyed. "Because it's perfect music," says Mr. Ludwig, "and ravishingly beautiful. I think there is something melancholic about it that appeals to everyone, almost a sense of loss that moves people deeply." He also says that while Barber's training is "Eurocentric, his music is not just American in style but very democratic. It's not just accessible to the most highly trained musicians but also to anyone out there in Rittenhouse Square. So its accessibility runs across the board. It's vibrant, it's full of energy, it's completely unpretentious."
Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Ismael Rivera
Found him whilst listening to Héctor Lavoe radio on last.fm website. Born in Saturce, PR, 5 October 1931.
In 1952, Rivera joined the U.S. Army but was quickly discharged since he didn't speak English. When he returned to Puerto Rico he went to work as a lead singer with Orquesta Panamericana, thanks to the recommendation of his friend Cortijo.
How did he get in, in the first place?
Cortijo's Combo continued to gain fame and so did Rivera's reputation as a lead singer. Benny Moré visited the island and was so impressd with Rivera's voice and skills that he baptized him as "El sonero mayor". The band went to New York City and played in the famed Palladium Ballroom, where the orchestras of Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Charlie Palmieri also played.
What amazing music that must have been.
In 1952, Rivera joined the U.S. Army but was quickly discharged since he didn't speak English. When he returned to Puerto Rico he went to work as a lead singer with Orquesta Panamericana, thanks to the recommendation of his friend Cortijo.
How did he get in, in the first place?
Cortijo's Combo continued to gain fame and so did Rivera's reputation as a lead singer. Benny Moré visited the island and was so impressd with Rivera's voice and skills that he baptized him as "El sonero mayor". The band went to New York City and played in the famed Palladium Ballroom, where the orchestras of Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Charlie Palmieri also played.
What amazing music that must have been.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Ebb Tide
Crossword puzzle clue, 62 across: Hit for Vic Damone and the Righteous Brothers; answer: Ebb Tide. Frank Sinatra also recorded it: Frank Sinatra sings for only the lonely.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Tales from the field hit the road
As the Mexican-immigrant workers called braceros age, a touring exhibit tells their stories
Slideshow
SAN JOSE, Calif.—During World War II, facing a national labor shortage, the U.S. government turned to Mexico. It recruited about two million Mexican laborers to work on farms on in 29 U.S. states, helping to plant crops and pick cotton. The workers were known as braceros, a term derived from the Spanish word for "arm." Many of the braceros settled in the U.S., marrying and raising families. Now in their 70s and 80s, they are gradually dying off—advocates estimate that more than half of all braceros have passed away—and few Americans know their stories.
To ensure that those memories remain alive, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and a consortium of universities embarked five years ago on a project to record the oral histories of braceros, conducting interviews with surviving members of the program around the country. Nearly 1,000 interviews have been digitally recorded and uploaded onto a website, www.braceroarchive.org. An exhibit called "Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964," based on the interviews and featuring documents, photographs and artifacts from that period, is now touring the U.S. It will open at the Museo Alameda in San Antonio later this month.
Slideshow
SAN JOSE, Calif.—During World War II, facing a national labor shortage, the U.S. government turned to Mexico. It recruited about two million Mexican laborers to work on farms on in 29 U.S. states, helping to plant crops and pick cotton. The workers were known as braceros, a term derived from the Spanish word for "arm." Many of the braceros settled in the U.S., marrying and raising families. Now in their 70s and 80s, they are gradually dying off—advocates estimate that more than half of all braceros have passed away—and few Americans know their stories.
To ensure that those memories remain alive, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and a consortium of universities embarked five years ago on a project to record the oral histories of braceros, conducting interviews with surviving members of the program around the country. Nearly 1,000 interviews have been digitally recorded and uploaded onto a website, www.braceroarchive.org. An exhibit called "Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964," based on the interviews and featuring documents, photographs and artifacts from that period, is now touring the U.S. It will open at the Museo Alameda in San Antonio later this month.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel
* MAY 6, 2010
With Gustavo Dudamel
Before His U.S. Tour Begins
By DAVID MERMELSTEIN
Los Angeles
The young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is so personable, unpretentious and full of energy that it's easy to see why even seasoned journalists treat him with kid gloves. Yet as he approaches the end of his inaugural season as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, his first major post, an assessment of his achievements seems in order.
[ccdudamel] Zina Saunders
He and the orchestra have just concluded "Americas & Americans," a small series of concerts billed as his first festival with the ensemble, and they are about to embark on their first tour: an eight-city trek across the U.S., beginning in San Francisco on May 10 and culminating in New York on May 22. The programs feature works by Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bernstein and John Adams.
On a Saturday afternoon last month, Mr. Dudamel, age 29, looked entirely at ease wearing jeans and an orange rugby shirt while sitting in his bright, airy and still largely unfurnished office at the Walt Disney Concert Hall—a space until recently the private domain of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra's longest-serving leader. Five years ago, Mr. Dudamel was unknown in this city—and most others. But in the summer of 2005 he made an electric American debut at the Hollywood Bowl, leading the Philharmonic in music of Tchaikovsky and Silvestre Revueltas. Intense interest in him followed, reaching a peak in April 2007 when he was named Mr. Salonen's successor. Dudamania has yet to subside.
Mr. Dudamel and his wife now rent a house in the Hollywood Hills, and he suggested that life here pleases him, praising Los Angeles's abundance of good food and drink and noting that the weather is similar to Venezuela's. Moreover, plenty of locals speak his native Spanish. But more important, he is taken with this city's appetite for artistic adventure. "I came for a concert of modern music," he said in his still-limited English, referring to attending one of the Philharmonic's new-music programs. "It was all modern music, and it was sold out. I was very impressed. This is a city of new traditions. People are really open to new things, and that is important."
Yet he also respects classical music's conservative canon—something that must come as a relief to Philharmonic patrons who considered Mr. Salonen an uncompromising avant-gardist. Mr. Dudamel maintains that his programs will balance old and new. "It's not difficult when you have good music," he said. "On this tour, we will do Mahler's Symphony No. 1 with John Adams's 'City Noir.' Next year we have a Brahms festival, and all the symphonies will be paired with new music, including two world premieres—so it's Brahms, but with new and amazing composers. It's like when you go to eat and try a new dish: You always have it with something you already know. That's the kind of combination I want."
This view has already been reflected in the handful of programs Mr. Dudamel led this season. In November, for example, he conducted vibrant, evocative accounts of two scores by the 20th-century Italian composer Luciano Berio that used older material as inspiration. But on the same program he directed a comparatively wan account of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony—especially compared with versions I heard this season from David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic. And on a bill not long after, he sandwiched a dull and diffuse reading of Alban Berg's impassioned Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as soloist, between sprightly readings of Mozart's "Prague" and "Jupiter" Symphonies.
So the results are mixed. The performances are often thrilling, as with a roof-rattling Verdi Requiem last fall or last month's by turns haunting and snappy take on Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety Symphony" (featured on the coming tour). Yet sometimes his performances are less consistently rewarding than his myriad boosters would have it.
The conductor has only praise for his predecessor, Mr. Salonen, who backed him for the job he now holds. But that doesn't mean the Philharmonic's sound will go unchanged. "I arrived to a wonderful orchestra," Mr. Dudamel said. "The fact that they were 17 years with one conductor made a stability in the orchestra. They were having this connection with Esa-Pekka, and he left it in an amazing condition. But we don't have the same way to interpret, or ideas about repertoire. We are now working really deeply on the sound, and it's a different point of view. They already have their amazing sound, but we have to combine energies. And to describe that is difficult. Lighter? Heavier? More sunny? More dark? I don't know. It's more the personality; we are building a personality."
Mr. Dudamel is now in his third season as principal conductor of Sweden's Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he remains artistic director of Venezuela's esteemed Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, a title he acquired at age 19. So his relative youth is not an issue. "Of course, I don't have the knowledge and the experience of a 60- or 70-year-old conductor," he said. "But I have been conducting for 17 years, starting at 12. When I see the development of my life, I can see that every day has been a new step forward. I'm always crazy to learn. In 10 years I will have more experience and in 20 even more—if God give me life. So I'm not worried about that. When you are focused on the things you want, and you study, and you are open to listening, all of the experience is coming naturally."
If Mr. Dudamel appears unflappable, that's because he is. Even mention of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's repressive president, does not faze him, though he quickly steers the conversation toward El Sistema, his country's vaunted and longstanding music-education program for underprivileged youths, from which he himself sprung. "For me to talk about politics is really impossible," the conductor said. "But it's very important to understand that I'm coming from this wonderful program of music, and through music we are building a better country. I'm very proud of my country. . . . As an artist, the main thing is to unify, to stand on the stage and play music for everybody."
Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.
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