John Adams, *City Noir,* Gus­tavo Dudamel & the Los Ange­les Philharmonic

Gus­tav Mahler, *Sym­phony No. 9,* Gus­tavo Dudamel & the Los Ange­les Phil­har­monic

Gus­tavo Dudamel & the Los Ange­les Phil­har­monic, Avery Fisher Hall:

• March 27, 2013; John Adams, The Gost­pel Accord­ing to the Other Mary

• March 28, 2013; Claude Vivier, Zipangu, Claude Debussy, La Mer, Igor Stravin­sky, The Fire­bird

It’s not that I believed the hype about Gus­tavo Dudamel, it’s that I fig­ured that any­one who had gone so far, so fast, had some real promise, some unpol­ished tal­ent that the LA Phil­har­monic saw and wanted to have for them­selves as it grew, like what the Wash­ing­ton Nation­als see in Bryce Harper. Harper was spec­tac­u­lar at times dur­ing his rookie sea­son, and less than ordi­nary at other times, but the for­mer meant that there might be more often in the future. I assumed that was the case with Dudamel, and now that I’ve heard him on a hand­ful of record­ings and seen him lead the LA Phil at Lin­coln Cen­ter in an intrigu­ing pro­gram of Stravin­sky, Debussy, CLaude Vivier and John Adams, I real­ize that, as the say­ing goes, I’ve made an ass of myself.

Dudamel’s new Mahler 9 record­ing is super­fi­cial and schematic. He han­dles the musi­cal traf­fic skill­fully and the LA Phil is play­ing at a high tech­ni­cal level, but those qual­i­ties amount to watch­ing a machine run, the music-making doesn’t seem to have any par­tic­u­lar ideas or to be done for a par­tic­u­lar rea­son, other than habit. The open­ing bars are per­func­tory, there is no musi­cal state­ment made with the stum­bling rhythm, no ten­sion, and so the two-note descend­ing string line, which is a musi­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of the exha­la­tion of accep­tance that begins life’s final jour­ney, is totally flat — it’s one of the key moments of the sym­phony! After that, there’s no feel­ing that one phrase leads to another, that the point of Mahler’s writ­ing out the notes was to get the musi­cians to go from the begin­ning to the end. Every­thing is episodic, with one phrase and sec­tion clipped to the next. Mahler orga­nized the work, but Dudamel seems to find it arbi­trary. I have no idea what he thinks about the music, intel­lec­tu­ally or emo­tion­ally, because he doesn’t lead it as if he was think­ing of anything.

This was a strength with *The Fire­bird* because it’s an episodic piece, the short sec­tions jux­ta­posed for dra­matic and nar­ra­tive pur­pose, and so his abil­ity to han­dle tex­tures, dynam­ics and rhythms is impor­tant. The audi­ence broke into spon­ta­neous and deserved applause after a breath­tak­ing “Infer­nal Dance.” *The Fire­bird* almost plays itself, though. *La Mer* doesn’t, and this was the first per­for­mance of this beau­ti­ful, pro­found, involv­ing mas­ter­piece I had ever heard that was so … indif­fer­ent. Con­duc­tors like Charles Dutoit, Michael Tilson Thomas and David Robert­son give you their under­stand­ing of the music’s col­ors, drama and impor­tant struc­tural inno­va­tions, but Dudamel offered no ideas. It was pleas­ant enough in a bor­ing way and com­pletely for­get­table and meaningless.

For the affi­cianando, the draw of this pro­gram was Claude Vivier’s *Zipangu*. Vivier’s music seems to be under­go­ing a slow and very wel­come redis­cov­ery, in no small part due to the pro­mo­tion of his pub­lisher, Boosey & Hawkes. He was a pio­neer of the spec­tral move­ment and eas­ily the most acces­si­ble and pow­er­ful pro­po­nent of the style, fix­ing mag­i­cal sonori­ties to grace­fully strong struc­tures. Vivier wasn’t just explor­ing the pos­si­bilites of micro­tones and diaphanous har­monies, but express­ing ideas through them. Dudamel marked each moment of the piece with an exces­sively ver­ti­cal atten­tion, get­ting the notes write and miss­ing the point that they existed in the con­text of oth­ers. The lat­ter pieces con­firmed to me the impres­sion this open­ing work left, which is that he is didac­ti­cally focussed on mak­ing sure each moment is tech­ni­cally right and has no idea why each moment matters.

It’s a sad change from the Salo­nen years. Under him, the LA Phil­har­monic was fre­quently a rough ensem­ble, but they played with ideas and a tremen­dous com­mit­ment. There was a per­for­mance of the Beethoven Sym­phony No. 7 that almost set my hair on fire, and while that may not be every person’s idea of how the music should go, it was an idea, it was some­thing! The exces­sive palaver of the Dudamel style turns art into baubles for the bour­geoisie to col­lect as sig­ni­fiers of their cul­tural pres­tige. It’s awful.

His lack of per­sonal art leaves me at a loss to judge the qual­i­ties of John Adams’ *The Gospel Accord­ing to the Other Mary*. It’s an Easter com­pan­ion to his bril­liant Christ­mas ora­to­rio, *El Nino*, and not nearly as accom­plished. The libretto, put together with Peter Sel­l­ars, is ungainly and dri­ves the struc­ture, which has a first half mal­formed by an end­less scene involv­ing Lazarus’ death and res­ur­rec­tion. Once that passes, every­thing starts to move. But noth­ing much moves for the char­ac­ter of Mary Mag­da­lene, who steadily laments and regrets through­out, and at times the music goes for effect rather than mean­ing, evis­cer­at­ing Adams’ strength as a com­poser. Taken together with his awful copy and paste pas­tiche of Beethoven, *Absolute Jest*, I think he is cursed with being too busy as a com­poser, and is tak­ing short­cuts. But per­haps there is more to the music than Dudamel can give it, which I feel is also true for *City Noir*, which does every­thing that Adams does well: it’s smart, irrev­er­ent, sin­cere and even a lit­tle hip, but the one per­for­mance avail­able is unfulfilling.

Dudamel has a jejune touch, and it effects the music he leads. Con­sid­er­ing the clamor that greets him when he steps out onto stage, the yelling and cheer­ing, and that he’s got a long con­tract, that seems to be what audi­ences and trustees want. It’s clas­si­cal music as upper-class lifestyle acces­sory, and that’s noth­ing new of course. Nonethe­less, I hate it.




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