Gustavo Dudamel and James Conlon Bid L.A. Goodbye
Frank Gehry died on December 5th of last year, at the age of ninety-six. My father had passed away five days earlier, at the same age, and under the circumstances I was unable to write the tribute that Gehry’s death demanded. The gist of it would have been that Gehry was the greatest builder of concert halls of modern times. Recently, the architect has been on my mind again, as I’ve been making weekly visits to Disney Hall, his silver-winged masterpiece, to hear some of Gustavo Dudamel’s final concerts as the music director of the L.A. Philharmonic. Other halls may have a richer, more reverberant acoustic, although Disney’s is still uncommonly fine. Certainly, many have a longer, grander history; Disney opened in 2003. But it is a place where tradition and modernity achieve equilibrium—where both Beethoven and Meredith Monk feel at home. The space encourages boldness; at the same time, it possesses, as the architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has commented, a “warmheartedness,” a “small-d democratic sensibility.” It’s the hall I’ve come to love more than any other: music’s mellow citadel.
A few years ago, I visited Gehry at his studio, in Santa Monica. When I blurted out my fondness for Disney, he responded, in his impish way, “Tell them to let me do more concert halls!” Aside from Disney, he had built the Beckmen YOLA Center, for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles; the Fisher Center, at Bard College; the New World Center, in Miami; and Pierre Boulez Saal, in Berlin. Gehry showed me a model of a new hall, which was then in the planning stages and is now nearing completion: a music-and-dance complex for the Colburn School, down the hill from Disney. The other day, I received a hard-hat tour of the site. The exterior is less theatrical than Disney’s, its shape rectilinear rather than curvaceous, yet a pink hue adds the requisite Gehry jazz. The main auditorium, which will seat up to a thousand people, promises to replicate the vertiginous intimacy of Boulez Saal, with an oval balcony encircling the orchestra level and cloud-shaped panels floating above. Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry’s wizardly acoustical collaborator, is looking after the sonics; Craig Webb, the partner at Gehry’s firm who specializes in concert halls, is overseeing the design. When the Colburn center opens, next year, it will complement the big space up the hill, presenting local and touring groups alongside the school’s own artists.
The L.A. Phil paid tribute to Gehry in January with a concert titled “Music for Frank.” The pianist Víkingur Ólafsson played the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, nodding to the fact that Gehry was born Ephraim Goldberg, in Canada. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Dudamel’s predecessor as the orchestra’s music director, offered his own score “Wing on Wing,” in which Gehry’s voice is heard rumbling in the background. Herbie Hancock conjured what sounded like a lost Debussy Prélude. Dudamel led “Wild Nights,” from John Adams’s “Harmonium,” and the final movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. These choices reflected Gehry’s own enthusiasms in music old and new; he was a great builder of concert halls not least because he spent a good part of his life in them. Since December, I’ve missed seeing him in his usual seat in the front-orchestra section, with his wife, Berta, at his side. Yet he has been present all the same. To adapt Christopher Wren’s epitaph at St. Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek his monument, look and listen.
When Dudamel was announced as Salonen’s successor at the L.A. Phil, in 2007, he was only twenty-six, and aglow with a celebrity that is bestowed on just a handful of classical musicians. I spoke to him on the day of the announcement and got the sense that he knew how much work lay in front of him. He told me that he needed to absorb swaths of repertory and find his relationship with the progressive musical organism that Salonen had brought into being—one that had been infused with the modern energy of Gehry’s structure. At the same time, Dudamel made clear that he was not exactly a neophyte. Since the age of eighteen, he had been conducting up to ninety concerts a year with the youth orchestras of Venezuela, where he was born.
Dudamel’s most conspicuous legacy to L.A. has been his devotion to music education. It was at his behest that the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles was launched and a home for it found. (Gehry repurposed an old bank building in Inglewood.) YOLA players have regularly come to Disney to participate in L.A. Phil events. Some of them were on hand for Dudamel’s final concert at Disney, which paired Adams’s cosmic “Harmonium” with Antonio Estévez’s pungent “Cantata Criolla.” (Dudamel’s official farewell to the orchestra will take place in August, when he leads Beethoven’s Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl.) Thousands of young people have benefitted from free YOLA programs, not only at the Inglewood center but also at satellite sites across the city. The challenge will be to insure that YOLA stays strong after Dudamel has moved on. Late last year, the L.A. Phil announced that it was curtailing YOLA activities at Esteban E. Torres High School, in East L.A. After a local uproar, the program was temporarily reinstated.
The L.A. Phil’s bias toward the new remains in force: Dudamel has presided over more than sixty world premières. From the outset, he proved a committed interpreter of such complex scores as Adams’s dramatic oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” Thomas Adès’s evening-length ballet “Dante,” and Kaija Saariaho’s song cycle “True Fire.” But these composers were already well known in L.A. Dudamel’s engagement with contemporary music kicked into a higher gear about a decade ago, when he began commissioning Latino composers en masse. His championing of the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, in particular, resulted in a procession of large-scale works, including the choral ballet “Revolución Diamantina,” which honors Mexican protests against misogynist violence. Having introduced that fiercely luminous piece in 2023, Dudamel brought it back in March, placing it on the second half of a concert that began with Beethoven’s Seventh. He accorded a similar prominence to Adès’s roiling “Inferno,” the first part of “Dante,” putting it alongside Beethoven’s Sixth. He thus reaffirmed the local rule that new music is not a sideshow but the main event.
With that contemporary bent has come a degree of political boldness. In February, the L.A. Phil played Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play “Egmont,” and Dudamel brought in the playwright Jeremy O. Harris and the actor Cate Blanchett to fashion a modern meta-commentary on Goethe’s tale of rebellion against despotism. The resulting spectacle won no points for coherence or subtlety—at one point, Blanchett referenced recent demonstrations against ICE, and at another she yelled, “Fucking bitch!”—but it had the virtue of being chaotic and jolting, which is something you generally cannot say about American orchestral events. (Next year, the production will be mounted at the New York Philharmonic, where Dudamel becomes music director in the fall.) Themes of environmental crisis figured in several commissions, notably Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” which, back in September, filled Disney with an apocalyptic roar.
What still puzzles me, amid all these noteworthy projects, is Dudamel’s way with the standard repertory. Although his skill and discipline are never in doubt, he tends toward a bustling sameness. Dynamics often peak too early, robbing tension from later stages of a score. This going-to-eleven syndrome surfaced both in the “Egmont” Overture and in Beethoven’s Seventh. (By way of contrast, Manfred Honeck, in a guest appearance in April, elicited an extraordinary Tchaikovsky Fifth that proceeded from fraught murmurs to thunderclaps of passion.) Dudamel displayed a surer sense of narrative in Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” in May—a final collaboration with Gehry, who had designed evocative sets for the opera, playing off Disney’s twisty forms and earthy tones. Act I passed in a noisy blur, but Act III created real momentum. “Ride of the Valkyries” began in understated fashion, with sprightly, dancing rhythms. The intensity increased stepwise until, with nine Valkyries singing at full force, Dudamel unleashed a climactic storm of sound. It felt like another salute to Frank.
Dudamel leaves an orchestra in excellent technical shape, though it still has room to grow. He has hired more than fifty musicians during his tenure, and his penultimate event at Disney featured many of them in a whirlwind program of short concertante selections. Pride of place went to the woodwind principals, all Dudamel picks. The clarinettist Boris Allakhverdyan exhibited spectacular jazz chops in Artie Shaw’s Concerto for Clarinet. The flutist Denis Bouriakov and the bassoonist Whitney Crockett applied pinpoint dexterity to Paganini and Rossini, respectively. The oboist Ryan Roberts, who joined the L.A. Phil this season, was wrenchingly songful in the Adagio from Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto. John Williams served up a feast for the trumpet section in the form of a vibrant new miniature titled “Bravo Gustavo!” The brass are generally much sturdier than they used to be, with two first-rate horn players, Andrew Bain and David Cooper, anchoring the section. The strings lag a little behind. The musicians are individually superb, yet the ensemble sometimes lacks tonal weight and richness. I’d expected Dudamel to make more progress in this area than he did.
Such tasks now fall to Daniel Harding, who has been announced as Dudamel’s successor. A British former protégé of Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, Harding has lately come into his own as a conductor with an exacting ear for balance, nuance, and structure. In 2024, I heard him lead Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” at the L.A. Phil, and it was a more persuasively plotted interpretation of the piece than one that Dudamel offered in May. Harding has less of a reputation as a new-music advocate, but Salonen, who has maintained ties to L.A., will apply his expertise, presenting around six concerts a season. Dudamel, too, plans to return often, and the young German conductor Anna Handler has been given a curatorial role. In essence, the L.A. Phil is backing away from the model of a dominant music director and instead trying out a multi-baton system. It’s a risky move, but perhaps a wise one: the Dudamel era has shown both the power and the limits of superstar charisma.
Even if most of the hoopla has surrounded Dudamel, with “gracias gustavo” banners festooning the city, L.A. is losing another major conductor this summer. James Conlon, the music director of L.A. Opera, is departing after a twenty-year tenure. If Dudamel’s track record with the mainstream repertory has been irregular, Conlon’s has been remarkably consistent. This season, he was on the podium for Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde,” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” and in each case he delivered the kind of performance that feels idiomatic at every turn without calling attention to itself. A veteran who has been active in opera for more than five decades, Conlon knows how to adjust tempos, phrasing, and sonorities to the style at hand. His Bernstein had visceral, vernacular punch; his Verdi was ardent and spry; his Britten had the right textural grit; his Mozart unfurled with complicated grace. This kind of agility is sorely lacking these days at the Metropolitan Opera. Conlon was once a regular there, but, for whatever reason, he has been rarely seen of late.
Conlon arrived at L.A. Opera with grand ambitions to expand its repertory, some of which went unfulfilled. His early years were marked by the financial fiasco of Achim Freyer’s production of Wagner’s “Ring”—a hieratic, cryptic affair that somehow cost thirty-two million dollars and struggled at the box office. Aspirations for a staging of “Die Meistersinger” came to naught. Conlon also launched Recovered Voices, an initiative to revive operas by composers who had been murdered or driven into exile during the Nazi era. Having acquired a near-scholarly grasp of the material and its historical context, Conlon presented vital readings of such shadowy early-twentieth-century masterpieces as Franz Schreker’s “Die Gezeichneten” and Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Der Zwerg.” In 2007, he led Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”—a rugged tour de force starring Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone.
One aspect of Conlon’s tenure at L.A. Opera deserves special mention, though it may seem trivial at first glance. Before almost every performance he conducts, he gives an introductory talk. These lectures start an hour before curtain and often finish with only a few minutes to spare. His remarks on “The Magic Flute” drew listeners’ attention to Mozart’s Masonic numerological games, such as his groupings of notes and chords in threes and fives. Conlon throws in quips and personal details, revealing, for example, that when he led “The Magic Flute” in his student days he fell in love with the singer portraying Papagena—Jennifer Ringo, to whom he has been married since 1987. I can’t think of a conductor today who works harder to communicate with the public. It’s no surprise that hundreds of people turn out for Conlon’s talks, and that the ovations for him in recent weeks have been no less passionate than the ones for Dudamel at Disney. Rejecting the nonsense mystique of the maestro, Conlon demonstrates that only two things matter in the end: knowledge and conviction. ♦