A Dudamel Preview: Plenty of Razzle, Short on Dazzle

Nine months after being anointed the next music director of the New York Philharmonic and two years before he officially takes over, Gustavo Dudamel is in the middle of an extended cross-country procession, zigzagging toward his new post like the Olympic torch. Last spring, he led his future group in a Mahler blowout; this week, he returned with his eventually to-be-former orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, to open the Carnegie Hall season. Every appearance feels like a portent. To engineer maximum oomph, Dudamel teamed up with Lang Lang for Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, and the sense of occasion asserted itself immediately. In the introduction, the pianist balanced each note in the succulent chords and gave each of those stately low Fs its own impetus and energy. And that’s where the wondrousness ended.

Lang Lang can make even short pieces seem long-long. In his miraculously athletic hands, Rachmaninoff’s half-hour concerto sounded twice as monumental, and not because he took slow tempos. He’s a paradoxical player whose quick fingers and doggedly dramatic interpretations produce dull performances lacquered in glamour. In the Rachmaninoff, he showed off his full set of binary modes: very loud, very soft, very fast, and very slow. It’s the in-between gradations he skims over, which is too bad because that’s where the music is. Even as I write down these curmudgeonly thoughts, though, I know that he glides far above earthly criticism, through galas and ad campaigns to high-altitude adulation. At this point, people don’t really care how he plays, so long as the notes keep coming quickly and accurately enough. And yet the world is full of pianists I would rather hear play Rachmaninoff, starting with the fashion-plate superstar Yuja Wang.

With the celebrity guest safely offstage, the conductor turned the spotlight back on himself and his Latin American roots. Alberto Ginastera’s Four Dances from Estancia have been a Dudamel calling card since his earliest days with the Venezuelan Youth Symphony. (The same orchestra of teens performed it over the summer as part of Carnegie’s World Orchestra Week.) This time, though, he brought the whole unexpurgated ballet, with the baritone Gustavo Castillo singing and reciting scenes of life on the pampas by the 19th-century poet José Hernandez. The language is earthy, the setting rural, and Castillo’s delivery pleasantly hyperbolic. A gaucho sips maté in his kitchen at dawn before a day’s work, then heads off to face his sorrows, cheered by galloping rhythms and robust country tunes. Even if you’ve never been to the Southern Hemisphere, the score will have a familiar ring, since Ginastera reinvented Argentine music by blending Stravinsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s imitations of Russian folk music with Aaron Copland’s imitations of Mexican music and Maurice Ravel’s imitations of Spanish music. Then, as now, a global network of nationalists taught each other how to be chauvinistic.

The score is a showpiece for an orchestra that can steer deftly through its syncopations and brass flourishes, making it all sound fast, fearless, wild, and precise. That’s not the ensemble that showed up at Carnegie Hall. Which brings up a second paradox: Dudamel always seems most energized with scores full of rhythmic rattle and percussive excitement, pieces that demand pinpoint exactitude and a knack for assembling large, coherent structures out of jagged shards. And yet after 15 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra he led at Carnegie sounded surprisingly underpowered and out of focus.

Things improved on the second night of a three-concert stint. The orchestra had opened its L.A. season with a major world premiere, the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s cello concerto Dzonot, written for Alisa Weilerstein. A week later it brought the same program to New York, now road-tested and tightened. I suspect the players were grateful for another crack at this glittering, complex, and ornate score. I would appreciate one myself.

The Mayan title translates to cenote, a reference to the bewitching, watery caverns sprinkled throughout Yucatán. Dropping into one of those bluish grottos makes it clear that the dense greenery blanketing the peninsula is a lush coat over a brittle limestone crust and a hollow world beneath. Ortiz’s music penetrates into those underground lairs, sounding out the mythologies they incubate, the creatures they nurture, and the cacophonous threat from tourism, roads, and industry. Like a hyperactive guide who can’t focus on any one sight long enough to explain what it is, the piece is constantly drawing the ear from flutter to blast, from ethereal haze to remorseless thumps, to scraps of Ginastera-like folklore. Somehow, it all comes together into a dizzying panoply. Ortiz tailored the work to Weilerstein’s way of gripping each note and squeezing it for the last drop of expressive juice, and to Dudamel’s love of a crazy musical party. Despite its disorienting originality, I kept sensing a familiar palette of effects in the evocation of skittering creatures, shafts of harmonic radiance, and air of excitable fantasy. The aha came after intermission, when Dudamel conducted Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s what I was thinking of! It’s there, in the scampering strings and moonlit wind chords, the detailed description of a vivid but unseen natural world soaked in shadow, glimmer, and color. Dudamel made sure we heard those unmentioned relationships in two works composed on different continents two centuries apart, a kinship burbling like a sunken spring beneath the surface of style.