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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000039.txt from 2007/11

From: "HAROLD" <harold@-----.br>
Subj: [DR-L] Venezuela and music
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 04:37:44 -0500

Despite the presence of would-be dictator "President,"--whom the King of
Spain recently requested to "shut his mouth"(applause?), Venezuela musically
is doing very well.
Prediction:Venezuelan musicians will soon be flooding the US and Europe as
Senor Chavez becomes a full-time dictator!(Echoes of Hungary and Cuba in the
last century?)
-----

Music

Music Review
Youth Handles the Serving, in Large, Robust Portions

Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Simon Rattle leads the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in an
encore performance of "Mambo!"

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: November 14, 2007
Inevitably, the Sunday afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall by the Simón
Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela became an occasion to assess the work
of the ensemble's talked-about and fast-rising music director, Gustavo
Dudamel, making his New York debut

.

An Excerpt from Part III of Mahler's Symphony No. 5, Conducted by Gustavo
Dudamel (mp3)

Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Gustavo Dudamel leads the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in a
performance at Carnegie Hall.

But the orchestra itself was the center of attention on Monday night in the
second and final program at Carnegie Hall. The news was the technically
astonishing and powerfully communicative playing of these dedicated and
accomplished young musicians, who range in age, roughly, from 15 to 25.

Of course, Mr. Dudamel, just 26, who began the concert conducting Bartok's
Concerto for Orchestra, deserves enormous credit for the high level and
intensity of this youth orchestra, which he has led since 1999. And the
players proved that they could adapt and work with a master in the second
half of the program, when Simon Rattle conducted Shostakovich's Symphony No.
10 in E minor. Yes, amid these young Venezuelans, the youthful Mr. Rattle,
all of 51, still looked like an elder statesman of music. Context is
everything.

The orchestra's appearances were officially part of Carnegie Hall's Berlin
in Lights Festival. Mr. Rattle and members of the Berlin Philharmonic, which
he directs, have been mentors to Mr. Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar
orchestra. The link may have been a stretch. But who cares? The audience
that awarded both performances frenzied ovations would have been there under
any circumstances.

Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra was partly fashioned to show off virtuosity.
The piece brought out the best in Mr. Dudamel and his players. There are
some 200 musicians in the orchestra, and most seemed to be crowded onto the
stage for this performance. In climactic fortissimo passages of both scores,
the sheer richness and visceral power of the sound was awesome.

Typically, the more players involved, the harder it is to play together. But
these musicians perform with such discipline and well-honed precision that
they can go for maximum expression and follow the lead of their impetuous
conductor.

Mr. Dudamel has a keen ear for instrumental coloring and musical character.
In the opening of the first movement the hazy tremolos in the high strings
had an eerie allure. When the clarinet played a sultry melody over a quietly
restless orchestral backdrop, the ensemble gave the music an undulant,
almost Latin American tinge.

The third movement, an elegy, was transfixing and nocturnal, at once calming
and unsettling. The perpetual-motion fifth movement often seems the least
substantial music in the score, a toss-off, high-energy finale. But it was
the highlight of this performance, played at daring tempos with rhapsodic
fervor, even in the intricate fugato outbursts, where it's easy for
overlapping lines to go astray.

In Shostakovich's daunting 10th Symphony (1953), Mr. Rattle empowered the
players to take risks and play all out, leaving matters of control to him.
And there was control in this formidable performance of Shostakovich's
60-minute score. The brooding and moody first movement, with its long
passages of ruminative counterpoint, unfolded with grim yet inexorable
force. In the second movement - brutal, driven, full of raucous bursts of
dissonance, thought by some to be a parodistic portrait of Stalin, who died
while Shostakovich was composing this score - Mr. Rattle proved every bit as
wild and daring as his exuberant young players.

When it ended, Mr. Rattle, with not a trace of British reserve, dived among
the players and engaged in a hugfest. Not to be outdone by Mr. Dudamel, he
led the orchestra in a reprise of the hit encore from Sunday afternoon, the
"Mambo" from Bernstein's "West Side Story." Mr. Rattle kept turning to the
audience to lead shouts of "mambo!" as the Venezuelan musicians played and
danced their hearts out.

Berlin in Lights? I don't think so.

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