The year is still young, but this quote is so precious, it is certain to become a classic. In fact, it is rather emblematic of the Bush jr. era as a whole:
"It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community -- a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality."
From a letter by a number of CIA officers in response to Tenet's silly attempts at whitewashing his role in the pre-Iraq invasion intelligence scandal. It is scary just how interchangeable the names are to which the above description would apply.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Update
OK, I have been absent for quite a while. Studying for the Illinois bar exam, which I was forced to take at the end of February (I passed!), sorta drained my energy for writing for a while. Studying didn’t stop me from going to concerts, however. So, herewith a summary of the concerts I attended since my last posting.
Lang Lang Matures while Frühbeck de Burgos Bores – January 13
I went to this concert in part to finally hear Lang Lang live after reading mixed reviews about him. In part I also wanted to hear the CSO romp through Respighi’s Pines of Rome. While Lang surprised positively, the Pines fell mostly flat. Prime reason for this was conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, who is clearly well past his prime. Frühbeck de Burgos opened the program with his own orchestral arrangement of Isaac Albéniz’s Suite espanola. It was a rather pedestrian orchestration that reduced Albéniz’s colorful impressionist piano writing to a Hollywood-ish pseudo-folkloristic pastiche of predictable and repetitive orchestral effects (why must every movement end with a bell?). Despite Frühbeck de Burgos’ dull conducting – he opened the Chopin Piano Concerto No.1 with the most leaden march – Lang Lang managed to infuse the Chopin that followed with a chamber music intimacy and a thoughtful introversion that I would not have expected from someone with his reputation. Gone were the willful interpretive twists and showy flashes of virtuosity for its own sake that marred his earlier recordings. Instead we were given the most astounding phrasing and unbelievable, shimmering pianissimos at volume levels where few pianists would dare to try to still produce a sound. If only the accompaniment had matched the thoughtfulness of the solo part. The second half bought a similarly Hollywood-ish reading of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. I say “reading” because it doesn’t seem to have been well rehearsed or thought out. Adding to Frühbeck de Burgos’ inability to say anything meaningful about the music was his inability to make the CSO follow his tempo changes where needed. For example, in the Pines at the Janiculum there are number of tutti string passages that end in a ritard. Not a single one of them was executed together. Balances were also off in places resulting in lopsided chords. An orchestra of the CSO’s caliber – and especially one that has produced what is still the reference recording of the Pines with Fritz Reiner – should not have to put up with such conducting. To add to the disappointment, the antiphonal brass in the Pines at the Via Appia was not very antiphonal. Presumably in order to be able to sell out every last seat in the hall – more or less a given with Lang Lang on the program – the antiphonal brass was set up on stage left, barely separated from the regular brass section by the timpani. In an exemplary performance of the Pines at Northwestern University a number of years ago, the antiphonal brass was positioned in two or three places in the rear corners of the auditorium, thus really providing the image Respighi meant to conjure up: Roman Legions from all corners of the Roman Empire arriving from different directions and meeting on the Appian Way, the main artery of the empire. That’s how it should be done.
Chailly Channels Solti with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra – February 23
Up until February, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was the only major German ensemble I had not yet had a chance to hear live. Compared to their past recordings, the experience was somewhat disappointing. The Gewandhaus’ new music director, Riccardo Chailly, put only two pieces on the program: Schumann’s 1st symphony as re-orchestrated by Mahler and Mahler’s 5th. Somebody at the CSO’s programming department was asleep at the wheel, for the program notes only spoke of Schumann’s original version, not Mahler’s re-orchestration. In any case, contrary to what John von Rhein claims, the orchestra did not sound “like a million bucks”. The Schumann with which the concert opened had a number of serious trombone mess-ups and there were generally ensemble coordination issues. The Mahler 5th fared a bit better, with more seasoned principal players onstage, though the principal trumpet seemed incapable of playing softly. I can’t say that I am convinced by Mahler’s tinkering with Schumann’s score. While some aspects of his orchestration made sense, I didn’t quite buy into the many changes in dynamics that Mahler seems to have added and in which Chailly reveled to the max. In Mahler’s 5th, Chailly departed drastically from his earlier approach. Around the time that he recorded the 5th with the Concertgebouw for Decca, I heard Chailly conduct that piece with the same orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in a performance that, like his recording, was a hallmark of balance between emotional urgency, textural clarity and overall structure. The Chicago Gewandhaus performance, by contrast, was an edge-of-the-seat, high octane, energy packed roller-coaster ride of the kind that you would have maybe expected of Solti. Maybe that’s why the audience (and von Rhein) loved the performance so much. I wasn’t convinced. The performance was so high strung, that you were barely given room to breathe even when the music called for it. Even the Adiagetto provided barely a respite. I, for one, preferred Chailly’s earlier conception of the piece. A few CSO principals were spotted in the audience. Is the orchestra considering him as Barenboim’s successor? He wouldn’t be a bad choice.
Susan Graham Dazzles with Ravel – March 3
March 3rd showed the opposite of the Chailly performance. Whereas Chailly showed how a brilliant conductor could energize even a second-rate orchestra, Philippe Jordan showed how a first-rate orchestra like the CSO can play on autopilot with little input from the conductor. By all measures, Jordan, the son of the famous late Swiss conductor Armin Jordan, should have had more than enough resources for a serious head start in the music world. At age 31 he has had a number of great conducting opportunities around various opera houses in Europe. Yet, his presence on the CSO podium was not really noticeable. The Fauré suite from Pelléas et Mélisande is simple enough that it can be led competently by the principal players. Susan Graham dazzled the audience with her rich, mellow voice and textbook-perfect French diction (I didn’t need to look at the text at all to follow her) in Ravel’s Shéhérazade. The program concluded with César Franck’s massive Symphony in D. Again, everything was in its proper place, the balances were good, phrasing inoffensive, but there was no particular direction to the interpretation that would allow us to appraise Jordan’s artistic mettle.
Another Scheherazade – March 23
Given a somewhat slow week at work, I spontaneously went to hear Dutoit conduct Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Given the francophilia of Russian high culture of the 19th century, it should not be surprising that a Swiss/French conductor should have a certain affinity for the Russian romantic repertoire. Indeed, the performance that evening was one of the finest Scheherazade’s I have heard. Dutoit possesses that fine intangible – good taste – that allows him to negotiate the fine line between excessive emotionalism and aloof detachment. Scheherazade positively sparkled under Dutoit’s leadership in a myriad of shimmering colors. Robert Chen provided mesmerizing violin solos. The first half of the program offered one of the first opportunities to hear the CSO’s new principal oboe, Eugene Izotov, in Ravel’s demanding Tombeau de Couperin. A challenge he took with ease and elegance, supported again by Dutoit’s masterly touch in the French repertoire. Yuja Wang was the soloist in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2. While Wang clearly possesses prodigious technique and has something to say about the music, I can’t say I was taken by this performance. She seemed to be treating the orchestra as a decorative accompaniment to her solo show rather than a full-fledged partner in music making. All too often, her solos seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to what the orchestra was doing.
Hilary Hahn & Dutoit – March 31
It is inexplicable why it took this long for Hilary Hahn to make her CSO debut. She has been a shining star on the classical music firmament since her astounding Bach debut CD over ten years ago at age sixteen. Having traversed most of the standard violin repertoire in previous years (has she done the Tchaikovsky yet?), her recent tours have focused on more neglected works. It is therefore somewhat disappointing that the first opportunity for Chicago audiences to hear this formidable musician was in as uneven of a work as Karl Goldmark’s violin concerto. A rather predictable romantic showpiece, Goldmark’s concerto has runs up and down and sideways and crosswise for the soloist without producing any really transcendental musical moments. Oh, there was also the obligatory fugue. Even though an artist like Hahn can infuse even such a weak piece as the Goldmark with enough electricity to light the hall, it would have been nice to hear Hahn in a piece that offered more space to explore the depths of her interpretive capabilities. Particularly since on a number of her recent albums she is accompanied by less than inspiring ensembles, I was looking forward to an opportunity to hear what she could do when accompanied by an ensemble that matched her technical prowess. The undisputed Queen of Doublestops capped her performance with a stunning encore performance of a transcription of Schubert’s Erlkönig for violin solo. Dispatching the many voices of Schubert’s drama seemingly with less effort than it takes me to brush my teeth, she left the CSO’s string section drooling in awe, their chins on the floor. Charles Dutoit provided the accompaniment again and opened with a dazzling Flying Dutchman Overture. The second half showed him and the orchestra again in a finely judged and tasteful traversal of a Russian romantic masterpiece, this time Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique.
Gustavo Dudamel: The Real Thing – April 8
The best for last: yesterday we heard Gustavo Dudamel with the CSO. Dudamel opened the concert with a rarely heard piece by Venezuelan composer Evencio Castellanos: Santa Cruz de Pacairigua - a 15-minute curtain-raising romp that provided an interesting link to the Mahler in the second half in its juxtaposition of seemingly disparate folkloristic elements. That Pinchas Zukerman afterwards performed the Bruch Concerto No.1 very idiomatically, though with scratchy doublestops and extremely schmaltzy vibrato after that was practically irrelevant, for nothing could have quite prepared me for the Mahler 1 we were about to hear. I had seen a documentary about the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela a couple of years ago on German TV: the orchestra is the diamond in the crown of a system of youth orchestras designed to give impoverished children a musical education, get them off the streets and give them a meaningful occupation. The system is fully government funded, each child is given an instrument to keep and all of them are trained from the beginning in ensembles from as young as the age of three. The brainchild of José Antonio Abreu (he should be sainted), a trained petroleum economist, organist and composer, it has grown to encompass 125 orchestras around the country. The best young musicians are selected from the regional orchestras and flown to Caracas to participate in the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Dudamel started conducting ensembles within this system from age 14. At 18, he was named music director of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. The documentary I saw featured footage of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 5th, brimming with rhythmic propulsion and youthful enthusiasm, if a little smothered by the sheer size of the expanded ensemble used.
As I have previously observed, you can’t fake it when conducting inexperienced youth ensembles. Either you are communicating your musical ideas clearly and unambiguously, or you will reap an unmitigated musical mess. Where an experienced professional orchestra can produce a competent performance of standard repertoire practically in their sleep irrespective of the conductor, thus blurring the distinction between the conductor’s achievement and the work of the musicians, a youth orchestra provides instant musical feedback by rewarding each conductorial mistake with musical replication of each error. Such then was the difference between Dudamel, raised in youth ensembles, and Philippe Jordan, who started out prematurely in the big leagues. Where Jordan swam along with the orchestra in Franck, Dudamel led the CSO towards a very unique and personal interpretation of Mahler.
Indeed, Dudamel’s Mahler interpretation could not have been mistaken for anyone else’s. There was an emphasis on the folkloristic in the vein of Kubelik, emotional impulsiveness a la Bernstein, but never heart-on-sleeve, slashing rhythmic precision in the spirit of Solti. But Dudamel was neither a copy of any of them, nor an amalgamation. Dudamel still let the music breathe where needed and stopped to smell the flowers. His baton technique throughout was an example of clarity. But more importantly, he had the guts to use it to maximum effect rather than produce a forgettable streamlined performance. I was reminded of the Formula 1 champion Fernando Alonso: equally young, he nonetheless knows exactly how far he can push his machine to get the most out of it and win races. Like Dudamel, he never makes mistakes. On a number of occasions last night, I was downright frightened at the accelerandos Dudamel decided to take, only to realize that he knows exactly how far he can push the CSO: hardly another ensemble could have negotiated the hairpin turns Dudamel took without ever compromising articulation, intonation, balance or ensemble coordination. Yet, as daring as Dudamel’s ideas seemed, they were always eminently musical, serving Mahler’s concept, not distorting it. Unlike the hapless Jordan who had to play it safe, Dudamel took great risks and was rewarded for it. The audience burst out in ovations of rock-concert decibel levels. But Dudamel took not a single bow for himself but either stood amongst the CSO musicians or went around shaking hands and giving hugs to principal players who had excelled in their solos.
As we would say in German: Dudamel is a Jahrhunderttalent – a once in a century talent. Andrew Patner in the Sun Times voices hope that the CSO administration would show the foresight to appoint Dudamel as the next CSO music director. I was hoping the same thing after last night’s performance. Alas, it’s too late. As announced today, Dudamel has been appointed the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and will succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen at the end of the 2008/2009 season. Between LA, the music directorship of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra which he assumes next season and his ongoing commitments to the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, I’m afraid Dudamel will be busy for a while.
PS: CSO Broadcasts Resume
The CSO is returning to the air on WFMT. Those of you in the Chicago area or with a web subscription will be able to hear taped broadcasts of some of the performances I discussed on this blog, including Haitink’s Mahler 3, Hilary Hahn’s Goldmark and Dudamel’s Mahler 1. Click here for a full listing.
Lang Lang Matures while Frühbeck de Burgos Bores – January 13
I went to this concert in part to finally hear Lang Lang live after reading mixed reviews about him. In part I also wanted to hear the CSO romp through Respighi’s Pines of Rome. While Lang surprised positively, the Pines fell mostly flat. Prime reason for this was conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, who is clearly well past his prime. Frühbeck de Burgos opened the program with his own orchestral arrangement of Isaac Albéniz’s Suite espanola. It was a rather pedestrian orchestration that reduced Albéniz’s colorful impressionist piano writing to a Hollywood-ish pseudo-folkloristic pastiche of predictable and repetitive orchestral effects (why must every movement end with a bell?). Despite Frühbeck de Burgos’ dull conducting – he opened the Chopin Piano Concerto No.1 with the most leaden march – Lang Lang managed to infuse the Chopin that followed with a chamber music intimacy and a thoughtful introversion that I would not have expected from someone with his reputation. Gone were the willful interpretive twists and showy flashes of virtuosity for its own sake that marred his earlier recordings. Instead we were given the most astounding phrasing and unbelievable, shimmering pianissimos at volume levels where few pianists would dare to try to still produce a sound. If only the accompaniment had matched the thoughtfulness of the solo part. The second half bought a similarly Hollywood-ish reading of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. I say “reading” because it doesn’t seem to have been well rehearsed or thought out. Adding to Frühbeck de Burgos’ inability to say anything meaningful about the music was his inability to make the CSO follow his tempo changes where needed. For example, in the Pines at the Janiculum there are number of tutti string passages that end in a ritard. Not a single one of them was executed together. Balances were also off in places resulting in lopsided chords. An orchestra of the CSO’s caliber – and especially one that has produced what is still the reference recording of the Pines with Fritz Reiner – should not have to put up with such conducting. To add to the disappointment, the antiphonal brass in the Pines at the Via Appia was not very antiphonal. Presumably in order to be able to sell out every last seat in the hall – more or less a given with Lang Lang on the program – the antiphonal brass was set up on stage left, barely separated from the regular brass section by the timpani. In an exemplary performance of the Pines at Northwestern University a number of years ago, the antiphonal brass was positioned in two or three places in the rear corners of the auditorium, thus really providing the image Respighi meant to conjure up: Roman Legions from all corners of the Roman Empire arriving from different directions and meeting on the Appian Way, the main artery of the empire. That’s how it should be done.
Chailly Channels Solti with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra – February 23
Up until February, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was the only major German ensemble I had not yet had a chance to hear live. Compared to their past recordings, the experience was somewhat disappointing. The Gewandhaus’ new music director, Riccardo Chailly, put only two pieces on the program: Schumann’s 1st symphony as re-orchestrated by Mahler and Mahler’s 5th. Somebody at the CSO’s programming department was asleep at the wheel, for the program notes only spoke of Schumann’s original version, not Mahler’s re-orchestration. In any case, contrary to what John von Rhein claims, the orchestra did not sound “like a million bucks”. The Schumann with which the concert opened had a number of serious trombone mess-ups and there were generally ensemble coordination issues. The Mahler 5th fared a bit better, with more seasoned principal players onstage, though the principal trumpet seemed incapable of playing softly. I can’t say that I am convinced by Mahler’s tinkering with Schumann’s score. While some aspects of his orchestration made sense, I didn’t quite buy into the many changes in dynamics that Mahler seems to have added and in which Chailly reveled to the max. In Mahler’s 5th, Chailly departed drastically from his earlier approach. Around the time that he recorded the 5th with the Concertgebouw for Decca, I heard Chailly conduct that piece with the same orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in a performance that, like his recording, was a hallmark of balance between emotional urgency, textural clarity and overall structure. The Chicago Gewandhaus performance, by contrast, was an edge-of-the-seat, high octane, energy packed roller-coaster ride of the kind that you would have maybe expected of Solti. Maybe that’s why the audience (and von Rhein) loved the performance so much. I wasn’t convinced. The performance was so high strung, that you were barely given room to breathe even when the music called for it. Even the Adiagetto provided barely a respite. I, for one, preferred Chailly’s earlier conception of the piece. A few CSO principals were spotted in the audience. Is the orchestra considering him as Barenboim’s successor? He wouldn’t be a bad choice.
Susan Graham Dazzles with Ravel – March 3
March 3rd showed the opposite of the Chailly performance. Whereas Chailly showed how a brilliant conductor could energize even a second-rate orchestra, Philippe Jordan showed how a first-rate orchestra like the CSO can play on autopilot with little input from the conductor. By all measures, Jordan, the son of the famous late Swiss conductor Armin Jordan, should have had more than enough resources for a serious head start in the music world. At age 31 he has had a number of great conducting opportunities around various opera houses in Europe. Yet, his presence on the CSO podium was not really noticeable. The Fauré suite from Pelléas et Mélisande is simple enough that it can be led competently by the principal players. Susan Graham dazzled the audience with her rich, mellow voice and textbook-perfect French diction (I didn’t need to look at the text at all to follow her) in Ravel’s Shéhérazade. The program concluded with César Franck’s massive Symphony in D. Again, everything was in its proper place, the balances were good, phrasing inoffensive, but there was no particular direction to the interpretation that would allow us to appraise Jordan’s artistic mettle.
Another Scheherazade – March 23
Given a somewhat slow week at work, I spontaneously went to hear Dutoit conduct Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Given the francophilia of Russian high culture of the 19th century, it should not be surprising that a Swiss/French conductor should have a certain affinity for the Russian romantic repertoire. Indeed, the performance that evening was one of the finest Scheherazade’s I have heard. Dutoit possesses that fine intangible – good taste – that allows him to negotiate the fine line between excessive emotionalism and aloof detachment. Scheherazade positively sparkled under Dutoit’s leadership in a myriad of shimmering colors. Robert Chen provided mesmerizing violin solos. The first half of the program offered one of the first opportunities to hear the CSO’s new principal oboe, Eugene Izotov, in Ravel’s demanding Tombeau de Couperin. A challenge he took with ease and elegance, supported again by Dutoit’s masterly touch in the French repertoire. Yuja Wang was the soloist in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2. While Wang clearly possesses prodigious technique and has something to say about the music, I can’t say I was taken by this performance. She seemed to be treating the orchestra as a decorative accompaniment to her solo show rather than a full-fledged partner in music making. All too often, her solos seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to what the orchestra was doing.
Hilary Hahn & Dutoit – March 31
It is inexplicable why it took this long for Hilary Hahn to make her CSO debut. She has been a shining star on the classical music firmament since her astounding Bach debut CD over ten years ago at age sixteen. Having traversed most of the standard violin repertoire in previous years (has she done the Tchaikovsky yet?), her recent tours have focused on more neglected works. It is therefore somewhat disappointing that the first opportunity for Chicago audiences to hear this formidable musician was in as uneven of a work as Karl Goldmark’s violin concerto. A rather predictable romantic showpiece, Goldmark’s concerto has runs up and down and sideways and crosswise for the soloist without producing any really transcendental musical moments. Oh, there was also the obligatory fugue. Even though an artist like Hahn can infuse even such a weak piece as the Goldmark with enough electricity to light the hall, it would have been nice to hear Hahn in a piece that offered more space to explore the depths of her interpretive capabilities. Particularly since on a number of her recent albums she is accompanied by less than inspiring ensembles, I was looking forward to an opportunity to hear what she could do when accompanied by an ensemble that matched her technical prowess. The undisputed Queen of Doublestops capped her performance with a stunning encore performance of a transcription of Schubert’s Erlkönig for violin solo. Dispatching the many voices of Schubert’s drama seemingly with less effort than it takes me to brush my teeth, she left the CSO’s string section drooling in awe, their chins on the floor. Charles Dutoit provided the accompaniment again and opened with a dazzling Flying Dutchman Overture. The second half showed him and the orchestra again in a finely judged and tasteful traversal of a Russian romantic masterpiece, this time Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique.
Gustavo Dudamel: The Real Thing – April 8
The best for last: yesterday we heard Gustavo Dudamel with the CSO. Dudamel opened the concert with a rarely heard piece by Venezuelan composer Evencio Castellanos: Santa Cruz de Pacairigua - a 15-minute curtain-raising romp that provided an interesting link to the Mahler in the second half in its juxtaposition of seemingly disparate folkloristic elements. That Pinchas Zukerman afterwards performed the Bruch Concerto No.1 very idiomatically, though with scratchy doublestops and extremely schmaltzy vibrato after that was practically irrelevant, for nothing could have quite prepared me for the Mahler 1 we were about to hear. I had seen a documentary about the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela a couple of years ago on German TV: the orchestra is the diamond in the crown of a system of youth orchestras designed to give impoverished children a musical education, get them off the streets and give them a meaningful occupation. The system is fully government funded, each child is given an instrument to keep and all of them are trained from the beginning in ensembles from as young as the age of three. The brainchild of José Antonio Abreu (he should be sainted), a trained petroleum economist, organist and composer, it has grown to encompass 125 orchestras around the country. The best young musicians are selected from the regional orchestras and flown to Caracas to participate in the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Dudamel started conducting ensembles within this system from age 14. At 18, he was named music director of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. The documentary I saw featured footage of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 5th, brimming with rhythmic propulsion and youthful enthusiasm, if a little smothered by the sheer size of the expanded ensemble used.
As I have previously observed, you can’t fake it when conducting inexperienced youth ensembles. Either you are communicating your musical ideas clearly and unambiguously, or you will reap an unmitigated musical mess. Where an experienced professional orchestra can produce a competent performance of standard repertoire practically in their sleep irrespective of the conductor, thus blurring the distinction between the conductor’s achievement and the work of the musicians, a youth orchestra provides instant musical feedback by rewarding each conductorial mistake with musical replication of each error. Such then was the difference between Dudamel, raised in youth ensembles, and Philippe Jordan, who started out prematurely in the big leagues. Where Jordan swam along with the orchestra in Franck, Dudamel led the CSO towards a very unique and personal interpretation of Mahler.
Indeed, Dudamel’s Mahler interpretation could not have been mistaken for anyone else’s. There was an emphasis on the folkloristic in the vein of Kubelik, emotional impulsiveness a la Bernstein, but never heart-on-sleeve, slashing rhythmic precision in the spirit of Solti. But Dudamel was neither a copy of any of them, nor an amalgamation. Dudamel still let the music breathe where needed and stopped to smell the flowers. His baton technique throughout was an example of clarity. But more importantly, he had the guts to use it to maximum effect rather than produce a forgettable streamlined performance. I was reminded of the Formula 1 champion Fernando Alonso: equally young, he nonetheless knows exactly how far he can push his machine to get the most out of it and win races. Like Dudamel, he never makes mistakes. On a number of occasions last night, I was downright frightened at the accelerandos Dudamel decided to take, only to realize that he knows exactly how far he can push the CSO: hardly another ensemble could have negotiated the hairpin turns Dudamel took without ever compromising articulation, intonation, balance or ensemble coordination. Yet, as daring as Dudamel’s ideas seemed, they were always eminently musical, serving Mahler’s concept, not distorting it. Unlike the hapless Jordan who had to play it safe, Dudamel took great risks and was rewarded for it. The audience burst out in ovations of rock-concert decibel levels. But Dudamel took not a single bow for himself but either stood amongst the CSO musicians or went around shaking hands and giving hugs to principal players who had excelled in their solos.
As we would say in German: Dudamel is a Jahrhunderttalent – a once in a century talent. Andrew Patner in the Sun Times voices hope that the CSO administration would show the foresight to appoint Dudamel as the next CSO music director. I was hoping the same thing after last night’s performance. Alas, it’s too late. As announced today, Dudamel has been appointed the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and will succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen at the end of the 2008/2009 season. Between LA, the music directorship of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra which he assumes next season and his ongoing commitments to the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, I’m afraid Dudamel will be busy for a while.
PS: CSO Broadcasts Resume
The CSO is returning to the air on WFMT. Those of you in the Chicago area or with a web subscription will be able to hear taped broadcasts of some of the performances I discussed on this blog, including Haitink’s Mahler 3, Hilary Hahn’s Goldmark and Dudamel’s Mahler 1. Click here for a full listing.
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