The Pan-American Philharmonic: Dudamel Starts With a Big Sweep
Gustavo Dudamel has had a lot of chances to make a first impression on the podium of the New York Philharmonic — as rookie phenom, visiting superstar, anointed future music director, and now the orchestra’s not–yet–but–de facto artistic boss. (He will finally take over officially a year from now.) Dudamel filled the first two weeks of the season with a generous vision of America, leading works by the 20th-century New Englander Charles Ives, the unassimilated immigrant Béla Bartók, the 87-year-old New Yorker John Corigliano, and the young(ish) native Hawaiian Leilehua Lanzilotti. What unites them, and evidently excites Dudamel, is their disparateness — not just the range of backgrounds and time periods but the way they define American music as a great amalgamation. There was no need for explanatory speeches. If you were listening closely, you heard a ringing retort to those who frame our nation’s culture in narrow, exclusive terms, delivered by a conductor who emigrated from Venezuela, one of the president’s least-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 Kalākaua royal family, but it feels more as though she’s using a vast palette of orchestration to evoke a mystical landscape. Cloudy chords, meditative tintinnabulation, the whoosh of wind and rain, blocks of iridescent brass — all these discrete sonorities trundled by, like a train of boxcars with panoramas painted on their sides. The somber atmospherics and satisfying weightiness allowed Dudamel to show off his new ensemble’s soloists and sections, which have prepped for his arrival by burnishing their sonic gold.
The music of home often quivers with nostalgia. But if Bartók, exiled and ailing in New York, yearned for his native Hungary when he was writing his Third Piano Concerto in 1945, his score keeps soft-focus memories well out of sight. He was for a short sad period a reluctant American, his spirit rooted in old native ground, his imagination unleashed by a land he barely knew. With Yunchan Lim as soloist, the performance was as sharp and shadowed as though it were etched with a burin on a copper plate.
Ives, Bartók’s close contemporary and a composer of similarly radical sensibilities, mapped out the future 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 chord, which he added many years later), and it evoked the prickly, sublime New England of his childhood. By the time Leonard Bernstein led the premiere, four decades later, the music was doubly wistful: The performance was a tribute to a composer who had reached old age before most people recognized what marvels he’d been conjuring all his life.
Nostalgia and Americana have a political tinge these days, but Ives’s music is as complicated and multifarious as the country he eulogized, and in this performance, it sounded even less parochially Yankee. Dudamel’s embrace aligns Ives’s Second with a Pan-American history of orchestral music infused with popular and traditional tunes. Conducting from memory, Dudamel wandered comfortably, excitedly around the great musical thrift store where Ives scooped up bits and bobs. He was completely in control of Ives’s fitful changes of pace, from gallop to languorous yawn, his incongruities and tonal shifts, the irony and sentiment so intertwined it’s impossible to tell them apart.
The next week’s program brought an even sharper sense that 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 performance of Corigliano’s 1990 Symphony No. 1, Of Rage and Remembrance, a musical memorial to the victims of AIDS. In the quarter-century since its premiere, the work has become a classic, not because it’s universally revered but because it continues to provoke strong opinions, arguments, and reversals. When the Philharmonic last played it in 2019, the New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini and The New Yorker’s Alex Ross both confessed that they had 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 assertion of gay pride, a protest symphony, a tragic memorial, a collective 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 abstruse modernism of an older generation and not yet ready to absorb renegade minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich into the symphonic Establishment, went hunting for composers who could connect with audiences on an emotional level 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 concoctions that were tepid enough to avoid scalding sensitive ears.
All these years later, Corigliano’s symphony has outlasted those skirmishes and emerged sounding fresh 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 aggressive, in ways that are too familiar to shock. The composer mashes together elements of forefathers who were themselves notorious mashers-up of traditions. In the second movement, he deploys a tarantella the way Mahler invoked the village dance, Berlioz commandeered the waltz in Symphonie Fantastique, and Ives and Bartók resurrected the folk song: to represent the way simple memories get scrambled by experience. Here, the tarantella is by turns gleeful and demonic — a frantic 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 and sensitivity of a master confronting a classic. An army of brass sent waves of sound rolling out into the house. Pinpoints of color — muted trumpets quietly rubbing together, Carter Brey’s touching cello solo at the start of the final movement, an Albéniz tango played on the piano from the back of the stage like a ghostly souvenir — offset the irate percussion explosions. 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 this is not the first time this country has been scarred by a pandemic, roiled by ideals, and riven by culture wars. Music has a lot to tell us about America’s complexity and magnificence — so long as we listen.
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