Gustavo Dudamel returns to the LA Phil with blended outcomes – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United States Correia, Beethoven, R. Strauss: Maria João Pires (piano), Robert deMaine (cello), Teng Li (viola), Los Angeles Philharmonic / Gustavo Dudamel (conductor). Walt Disney Live performance Corridor, Los Angeles, 2.5.2024. (LV)

Andreia Pinto Correia – Cortejo
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.4 in G main, Op.58
R. Strauss – Don Quixote

Returning to the rostrum after greater than three months, on the identical day that the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced Kim Notelmy from the Dallas Symphony could be its new CEO, Gustavo Dudamel was greeted with heat applause from the viewers earlier than he launched into the world premiere of Cortejo, Andreia Pinto Correia’s marvelous, typically very loud, all the time very emotional reflection on Cervantes’s ‘hidalgo’ (aka Don Quixote).

The younger Portuguese composer writes in her program notes that she ‘strove to conjure components of Iberian processions – ritual and communal, spiritual and pagan, celebratory and mournful – witnessed all through my life’. The six ‘episodes’, performed with out pause as in the event that they had been panels in an suMMAry musical diorama, inform a really completely different story from Richard Strauss’s exact narrative about the identical hero with which the night would conclude. The pleased and tragic sides of ceremonial chords and harmonies bubbled often with primeval power, set off by little touches like a single quick observe from the English horn. A flash of seismic exercise erupted right into a world of fantastically off-key sirens and many strings earlier than the final procession went quietly away.

After the cautious poetry of Maria João Pires’s opening few bars, Dudamel set a tempo for the tutti of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 that was alive with the springtime freshness of youth. He phrased the return to the pianist’s first huge entrance gracefully and graciously: this was a type of performances the place you watch for the artist on the keyboard to disclose treasures and insights on a construction laid out for her by the artist on the rostrum. The leisurely tempo at which they took the music had super advantages of its personal, reveling within the gradual, minor-key triplets as basically Beethoven. Dudamel and the LA Phil stayed along with her at each bar, adjusting as essential to swimsuit her elegant sense of tempo which allowed her to lavish care and love on the Sixteenth-note passages.

The gradual motion’s dialogue appeared to happen in darkness, as if the pianist’s introspective self was unaware of the blocks of orchestral sound passing by. A battery of excellent trumPets and drums set a full of life clip for the Rondo at which Pires by no means faltered, and her final assertion of the recurring theme, earlier than dashing to the top, was softer than the others, unhappy and touching.

With LA Phil principals Robert deMaine and Teng Li on platforms (though each performed with the orchestra for a lot of the way in which), Dudamel led a efficiency of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote that consisted of vivid episodes flippantly held collectively by a way of aspirational sweep, extra like Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen than a sprawling Romantic tone poem. The magnificent soloists had been extra like instrumental heroes than characters from a novel, deMaine’s Don heroically daring and incisive, and Teng Li’s Sancho Panza even bolder with an impressively rustic angle. Concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s Dulcinea was essentially the most sweetly sensible of all of them – though he had no platform. A pity that after all of the thrilling Technicolor adventures, Dudamel allowed the musical forces to float quietly to an uneventful finish.

Laurence Vittes