Cheers greeted Gustavo Dudamel when he came on stage and even more followed his rousing performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic of John Williams's Olympic Theme, the first of his four fanfares for the Olympic Games. Featuring superhero heraldic strains with a big broad melody out of Technicolor westerns, lots of heavy artillery echoing Bernard Herrmann's scores for Patton and On Dangerous Ground, and the kind of frantic scribbling in the strings that reminded me of why studio musicians, used to sitting around in long boring recording sessions, love Williams for all the notes he writes, the music ended with some seismic drumming that recalled the early days of digital when Telarc threatened to blow out loudspeakers with the cannons in the 1812 Overture.
Gabriela Ortiz' Altar de cuerda, an ambitious 30-minute violin concerto written for Maria Dueñas and the LA Phil in 2021, showed off the young Spaniard's technical dazzle, her incomparable theatrical timing and her ability to completely commit to the music she is playing. Since it was written for them it's the type of music the LA Phil eats up, outstandingly precise not just to notes and intonation but to expressive markings and dynamic changes. Its three movements of emotional events, dreamspaces and soundscapes, sometimes jeweled, sometimes weighed down by bass heavy clumps, are all laid down for the soloist to range ethereally through a series of cadenzas of various lengths and intensities.
Morisco chilango is a nod to Dueñas's Andalusian roots. Canto abierto colors its reflections on the embrace by 16th-century Mexican churches of indigenous peoples with a background of eight tuned crystal glass virtuosos (percussionists and brass players) making ghostly sounds, like Mozart's glass harmonica or, as I just read, James Horner's theme for Mr Spock in the The Wrath of Khan. Maya déco is a spectacular tour de force, a disjointed perpetuum mobile at a jaunty pace, set by the drum with the brass, back at their usual stands, and Dueñas in the biggest of the cadenzas flashing arpeggios and double-stops triggering soaring lyrical flights ending in a frantic rush of saints and lights, one more cadenza and one last orchestral outburst.
Before the Dvořák began, Daniel Song, who had led the Phil bravely on an interim basis until new CEO, Kim Notelmy from the Dallas Symphony, introduced six retiring players representing 184 years of service to the orchestra: violinists Stacy Wetzel (since 1995), Camile Avellano (since 1981) and Suli Sue; principal second violin Lyndon Johnston Taylor; associate principal clarinet Burt Hara; and English horn player Carolyn Hove.
Dvořák's New World Symphony might have been programed as a tribute to Hove, and indeed she played what might have been her last performance of the great second movement solo with the Philharmonic with perhaps a touch more mournful soul but no less calm demeanor than usual, blending so perfectly with the orchestra that they seemed to be one voice. Dudamel caught the rush of Dvořák's imagination in the first movement and for a while he avoided the conventional but disfiguring slowings-up; instead, he aimed for the high, fresh exhilarating tops of phrases. He then pulled back the reins and took the iconic theme in the violins impossibly slow and mannered, which then required a hasty acceleration back to the main tempo – none of this marked in the score. After the quietly emotional Largo, the Scherzo seemed intolerably long and intrusive and the ending so ferociously violent that the audience collectively gasped before Dudamel and LA Phil reverted to rousing for the finale. And when that wasn't enough, Dudamel conducted the theme from John Williams's Raiders of the Lost Ark as an encore.
