Horse Hair and Fowl Feathers
Dudamel picks up his bow while Ballet Theatre rolls out ‘Swan Lake’
They heard the call, those curiosity-seekers, and jammed Disney Hall last week – vowing not to miss the first-time appearance of violinist Gustavo Dudamel.
That would be the same Gustavo Dudamel slated to become the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s next musical director in 2009. What, you say? Our next maestro treated as mere mortal, not holding forth on the podium but sitting among four other Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians to play chamber music? Just another sistema-type enthusiast, just another egalitarian bred in Venezuela’s up-from-poverty youth orchestra, not a celebrity in excelsis, not one who’s been seized upon by an avid international music press?
Well, bet on it.
Our young Dudamel – he’s 27 (27!) – is a humble sort. By taking second chair in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet he may have robbed the throngs of a high-profile exposure to his virtuosity as a fiddler. You see, there was no showcase here – only some doubling within an accompanimental role, really, to set off concertmaster Martin Chalinfour’s quite gorgeous playing of the melodic solos. But then what could be more gentlemanly than letting the orchestra members shine in this chamber opportunity and even getting to take a bead on their musicianship.
As it turned out, the rewards were big: clarinetist Michele Zukovsky floated Mozart’s unearthly line somewhere into the cosmos, seemingly without any physical effort, without taking a breath. Here was divine playing of divine music – surely you remember it being described thus by Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. Yes, some kind of miracle, a creative transport from humankind to the heavens. Together with cellist Peter Stumpf and violist Dale Hikawa these five players found a perfect calibration of musical/emotive gold. It was what we always come in search of, but rarely find.
A few nights later Dudamel switched from horse-hair (bow) to wood stick (baton), stepped up to the podium, and charged the full Philharmonic to ring Disney’s rafters, as is his wont. In a nod to Esa-Pekka Salonen he led the outgoing director-composer’s ear-popping soundscape Insomnia, a tormentedly graphic suggestion of the subject done here as a myriad of brilliant colors and textures all racing to the canvas edge. (Who could sleep?)
But just in case you thought of dozing off afterward, Dudamel returned with Simon Trpceski in tow and the two twenty-somethings rolled right into Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto. The stage shook with its currents of rhythmic dynamism. I mean shook. And rocked. The Macedonian musician seemed to swallow and digest the score whole, his fingers producing marvels of high-speed clarity and defining one percussive layer under another.
The thrills didn’t end there, though. For Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique Dudamel and the orchestra met every broad burnished effect and every outsized manic impulse of the score, with full wattage. Are the days of sound dimmers coming to end in Los Angeles?
On to fowl feathers. American Ballet Theatre unfurled its latest, lavish (too lavish?) Swan Lake for a first look at the Music Center Pavilion last weekend and left some of us with the thought that watching a classical icon so heavy on its accoutrements and light on its core expressive values just might be a losing proposition.
If, for instance, Kevin McKenzie’s choreography (after Petipa/Ivanov, of course) had flowed better from phrase to phrase and not come across as so awkward and phlegmatic for any number of soloists, then we could somewhat overlook Zack Brown’s costumes (with their thousands of yards of fabric), which, by the way, seemed to be wearing the dancers, rather than vice versa.
What’s sad is that the opening night’s high-powered cast simply did not have the interpretive depth or polish to draw us into the central drama. Michele Wiles, so steely and commanding in her technique, was at a loss when it came to projecting the Swan Queen’s despairing vulnerability, but wowed the crowd via her hard-glitter virtuosity. David Hallberg, with his gothic ghostly pallor looked every bit the noble Prince without quite delivering the live-or-die passion called for.
Ah, well. There’ll always be others.
Published: 04/02/2008
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