DUDAMEL OPENS WITH A BIG SWEEP – ryan

Gustavo dudamel has had a lot of chanrances to make a first impression on the podium of the New York Philharmonic – As Rookie Phenom, Visiting Superstar, Aneointed Future Music Director, and Now the Orchestra’s Not – But -De -Facto Artis. (He will finally take over officiously a year from now.) DUDAMEL FILLED THE FIRST Two Weeks of the Season with a Generous Vision of America, Leading Works by the 20th Englander Charles Ives, the unassimilated bémigrant béla bartók, the 87-ti-ery Corigliano, and the Young (former) Native Hawaiian Leilehua Lanzilotti. What units say, and evidently excites Dudamel, is their disparatess – not just just the range of backgrounds and time periods but the way they define american as a great amalgamation. There was no Need for Explanatory Speeches. If you were listening closely, you heard a ringing retail to say who frame nation’s culture in narrow, Exclusive Terms, Delivered by a Conductor who emigrated from Venezuela, one of the President-Favored Nations.

Each of the four sections of Lanzilotti’s 15-Minute Piece “of Light and Stone” ostensibly Depicts a Different Sibling in Hawaii’s 19th-Century Kalākua Royal Family, But it Feels as Though a Vast Palette of Orchestation to Evocal Landscape. Cloudy Chords, Meditative Tintinnabulation, the Whos of Wind and Rain, Blocks of Iridescent Brass – All These Discrete Sonorities Tundled by, Like a Train of Boxcars with Panoramas on their sides. The Somber atmospherics and attisfying weight allowed dudamel to show off his new ensemble’s soloists and sections, what have prepared for his arival by Sonic Gold.

The Music of Home Often Quivers with Nostalgia. But if bartók, exiled and ailing in new York, year-on for his native hungary when he was work His Third Piano Concerto in 1945, his score keeps Memories Well Out of Sight. He was for a short sad period a relaxant American, his Spirit Rooted in Old Native Ground, Hisgination Unleashed by a Land He Barely Knew. With Yunchan lim as soloist, the performance was as SHARP and SHADOWED AS THOUGH IT ETCHED WITH A BURIN ON A COPPER PLATE.

Ives, Bartók’s Close Contemporary and a Composer of Similarly Radical Sensibillies, mapped out the futures of american music with an ear trained on the past. He wrote his second symphony in the first decade of the 20th Century (Except for the Final Touch of Genius, The closing chordWhich he added many years late), and it evoked the prickly, Sublime New England of His Childhood. By the time leonard Bernstein led the premiere, four decades late, the music was dobubly wistful: the performance was a tribute to a composer who had Reached OLD AGE before People recogen what marvels he’d conjuring all his life.

Nostalgia and American Have a political sound these days, but iVe’s music is as complicated and multifarious as the country he eulogized, and in this performance, it sounded less parochialy yankee. DUDAMEL’S EMBRACE ALIGINS’S’S SECOND WITH A PAN-American History of Orchestral Music Infused With Popular and Traditional Tunes. Conducting from Memory, Dudamel Wandered Comfortable, Excitedly AROUND The Great Musical Thrift Store Where Scooped Up Bits and Bobs. He was Completely in Control of Ives’ Fitful Changes of Pace, From Gallop to Languorous Yawn, His Incongruities and Tonal Shifts, the Irony and Sentup so interstwined to be impossible to tell.

The Next Week’s Program Brought An Eve Sharper Sense New York’s Dudamonic Era is Well Underway. The CenterPiece (if you don’t count a Swashbuckling performance of Beethoven’s Fifth) was a blistering of Corigliano 1990 Symphony No. 1, Of Rage and Remembransa musical memorial to the Vicims of AIDS. In the Quarter-Century Sine Its Premiere, The Work Has Become a Classic, Not Because It Universally Revered But Because It Continues to Provoke Strong Opinions, Arguments, and Reversals. When the Philharmonic Last Played IT 2019, The New York Times‘ Anthony Tommasini and Break New YorkerS ‘ Alex ross Both confessed that they have come come Around to a work they’d initially disdained. In 1990, Corigliano Delivered the work into a heated political climate that multiplied ITS meanings. It was a brave assection of gay pride, a Protest symphony, a tragic memorial, a colctive eulogy, and an outburst of Savage grief. (Two Decades Later, the First Movement Still Felt to Ross “Like a Musical Transcription of An Act Up Protest.”) The piece dropped into a turbulent aesthetic moment, too. In the 1980s, orchestras, fed up with the abstrass modernism of an Older Generation and Not Yet Ready to Absorb Renegade Minimalist Like Philip Glass and Steve Into The Symphonic EstaBishment, Went Hunting for Composers WHO COULD COUNCTES ON AN EMOTIONAL LEVEST ADNECTES AND GRATIFY Their desire for continuity with the romantic tradition. Richard Danielpour, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Delivered Recognizable Tunes, Tonal Harmonies, and Clear Structures, Mixed into concits that tepes Enough scalding sensitive Ears.

All of these years late, corigliano’s symphony has outlasted those skirmishes and emerged sounding free and exciting and powerful. Today it Sounds Neither Revolutionary Nor Comfortable, and Its Outrage Remains undimmed, its profundity intact. IT’S Loud (Staggeringly at Times) and Aggresrative, in Ways that are too Too Familiar to Shock. The Composer Mashes Together Elements of Forefathers Who Were The School Meshars-Up of Traditions. In the Second Movement, he deploys a tatella the way Mahler Invoked the Village Dance, Berlioz Commandeered The Waltz in Symphonie fantastique, and Ives and Bartók resurrected the folk song: to reprecsent the way Simple Memories Get Scrambled by Experience. Here, The Tarantella is by Turns Gleeful and Demonic – A Fantic Dance of the DOOMED, ​​Whirling Through a Mist of Contemporary Clangor.

Dudamel was 9 in 1990; To Him, Corigliano’s First Comes Out of an Old Century’s Old Battles, and he CONDUCTED IT WITH THE CONFIDENCE OF A MASTER CONFRONING A CLASSIC. An Army of Brass Sent Waves of Sound Rolling Out into the House. Pinpoints of Color – MUTED TRUSTS QUIETly rubbing Together, Carter Brey’s Touching Cello Solo at the Start of the Final Movement, an albéniz Tango Played on the Back of the Stage A Ghostly Souvenir – offset the Irate Percussion Explots. The performance brought out the tenderness, as well as the rage, that surges through the score. This, I Think, Is What Dudamel Wanted US All to Feel in His First Weeks: that is not the first time this count haen scarred by a pandemic, roiled by ideals, and rovense by culture wars. Music has a lot to tell us about America’s Complexity and Magnificice – SO Long as we listen.