The concert had hardly begun when Gustavo Dudamel turned to the audience and welcomed them back to “the Hollywood Bowl”. He smiled good-naturedly when he realized his mistake, and the audience laughed with him. It was a special Saturday afternoon concert that was part of the two-week, statewide California Festival of new music from around the world.
The most notable work was the world premiere of a Los Angeles Philharmonic commission, Gabriela Ortiz's arrangement for piano and string orchestra of her Seis piezas a Violeta. Originally written for the Quartet Latinoamericano in 2002, the six short movements comprise a musical affair with the musician and artist Violeta Parra who pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena. The music is often haunted, spectral, unquiet, unsettled and the energy was muted, the playing occasionally wooden. There were occasional bruised tendrils of emotion in the strings, and a sadness pervaded much of the music. The closing Amen was introduced by an impressive surge of energy like the transition Mussorgsky made from Baba Yaga to the Bogatyr Gates.
Roberto Sierra's Alegría, which Dudamel reminded us from the podium means “happiness”, was written in 1996, commissioned by the Houston Symphony, and consists of five minutes of relentlessly energetic and layering of generally happy sounds and rhythms dissolving into a wash of strings. Tania León's 12-minute Stride, written in 2019 for the New York Philharmonic's celebration of the 19th amendment granting the vote to women, began with scatterings of brass and spatterings of percussion, threw down carpets of sound in the strings with a little Till Eulenspiegel in the woodwinds and some fun licks from the contrabassoon. That so little happened so slowly but so inevitably fit the inspiration León took from the indomitable spirit of the movement's co-founder Susan B Anthony.
Arturo Márquez's Danzón no. 2 (written in 1994 but only popularized in 2007 by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela) lacked sex appeal, particularly in the solo riffs; overall it was more like a soundtrack to Hollywood's Technicolor musicals than a visit to the highly-charged salons of Veracruz and Mexico City where the danzón originated. And while Dudamel may have a highly developed sense of dance rhythms, his dance partner did not.
The program, which was titled “Canto en resistencia”, ended with a nod to musical worlds outside Disney Hall as indie star Silvana Estrada sang three songs pulsing with hope and energized by activism backed by the Philharmonic using Arturo Rodriguez's polished arrangements. During Se me occure, she asked the audience to sing along as a brass chorale rose behind her. She introduced León Gieco's famous protest song inspired by Mercedes Sosa Sollo le Pido e Dios, “If you don't know this song, what a wonderful day for you.”
It turned out that when Dudamel had said, “Hollywood Bowl”, he was not far off the mark.
