Los Angeles Philharmonic / Esa-Pekka Salonen / Nora Fischer LOUIS ANDRIESSEN The Only One

 

THE ONLY ONE

Los Angeles Philharmonic / Gustavo Dudamel CHARLES IVES Complete Symphonies

COMPLETE SYMPHONIES

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts STRAVINSKY

                                    ESA-PEKKA SALONEN CONDUCTS STRAVINSKY

Yuja Wang / Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic JOHN ADAMS Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

                                   MUST THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD TUNES?

Los Angeles Philharmonic / Gustavo Dudamel CELEBRATING JOHN WILLIAMS

On March 15, Deutsche Grammophon released “Celebrating John Williams”, a double album recorded during the four concerts of Williams music conducted by Gustavo Dudamel between January 24 and 27 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The album includes the first official release of ‘Adagio for Strings from The Force Awakens‘, a new concert arrangement of music from the seventh Star Wars score premiered by Williams in 2018.

Yo-Yo Ma / Los Angeles Philharmonic / Esa-Pekka Salonen SALONEN Cello Concerto

In his program notes for the Cello Concerto Salonen writes, “I have never — not even during the quite dogmatic and rigid modernist days of my youth — felt that the very idea of writing a solo concerto would in itself be burdened with some kind of dusty, bourgeois tradition. A concerto is simply an orchestral work where one or several instruments have a more prominent role than the others.”

The Cello Concerto, however, does follow the traditional three-movement layout. But within the piece, Salonen develops remarkably diverse and contrasting landscapes of orchestral coloration, rhythmic intensity, and instrumental by-play.

The opening movement emerges, like the dawn, with shadows in the low strings accented by pure pitched glimmers from the celesta and glockenspiel. When the cello makes its entrance, establishing itself as a middle voice, the effect is like a gracefully evolving aria, evoking the brooding atmosphere of Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande. 

“I like the concept of a simple thought emerging out of a complex landscape,” Salonen writes. That is certainly the way the opening movement develops: As the cello lines gain strength, accentuated by a trio of flutes, the scene takes on more and more vibrant coloration. Debussy came to mind, again, but now in the richly textured world of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

The second section begins with an orchestral wake-up call accented by the first full statement from the brass. But, like a sudden storm passing, the thunder gives way to an elegiac, deeply reflective statement from the cello, its arching lines hovering over the denser orchestral fabric.

Then, in what comes as a genuine surprise, Salonen uses a loop effect, in which a computer records Yo-Yo Ma’s performance then repeats the cello’s most ethereal passage allowing it to hang suspended, like the glitter of the Northern Lights.

A long sonorous solo section for the cello begins the final section. But somber reflection quickly gives way to an impressive, technical display, brilliantly executed by Yo-Yo Ma, with accentuating rhythmic punctuations coming from conga drums and bongos.  

“An acrobatic solo episode,” Salonen writes, “leads to a fast tutti section where I imagined the orchestra as some kind of gigantic lung.”

I can honestly say the cumulative giant lung of the audience held its breath until the final notes faded away. Then the ovation began, as well as a series of hugs and genuine beaming smiles between Salonen and Yo-Yo Ma.

Los Angeles Philharmonic / Gustavo Dudamel TCHAIKOVSKY The Nutcracker

When reading about Tchaikovsky and The Nutcracker in a book written around 1950, one finds the comment that the ballet was somewhat successful at first, but that, since that time (1892), there have been very few performances outside Russia. How times have changed! For several decades since that observation was made, in America The Nutcracker has been – and continues to be – the attraction that proclaims the Christmas holiday season from sea to shining sea. In productions large, small, and in-between, with choreography by a variety of dance creators, this dance theater piece captivates children and the child that lives still in any adult. Because, for the children and the big people who take them to a performance of the ballet, the great equalizer is the marvelous score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. (Orrin Howard)

ARVO PÄRT Symphony No. 4

Nobody, I think, would have predicted a Symphony from Arvo Pärt nearly 40 years after his last one. But since No 3 he has developed a vocabulary of a singular intensity and cohesion, which is something he was grasping for, and not quite finding, while still in his native Estonia in 1971. That vocabulary has been established by means of an extended series of choral works, linked ever more clearly with his Orthodox faith but employing an ever-expanding range of musical and linguistic colour. That confidence – evinced most clearly, perhaps, and most recently in the majestic Kanon Pokajanen, fragments of which complement the new Symphony – has transferred itself in no uncertain terms to his instrumental work.

There has probably never been a symphony like this, though one can in some way imagine Bruckner approving of it, and it has a precedent in La Sindone from 2006. Inspired by the Canon to the Guardian Angel (an Orthodox devotional text), it harks back to a Bachian pre-tintinnabuli history, but with the slow lushness characteristic of the composer’s recent work. I find it difficult to comment on the work structurally, so much of a continuous stream is it, but it is important precisely to emphasise the astonishing feeling for that very continuity that the LAPO under Salonen clearly has. The sheer beauty of the sound – and the silence – also does not escape them (I wonder if there is any orchestra on the planet that can make pizzicatos sound as sensuous as this?), but that is also part of the work’s never-ending line. Repeated listening brings great rewards: this is a true symphony for the 21st century. (Ivan Moody / Gramophone)

Esa-Pekka Salonen / Los Angeles Philharmonic LUTOSLAWSKI The Symphonies

This complete set of Witold Lutoslawski's symphonies is a mixture of old and new. The second, third, and fourth symphonies are reissues of recordings made in the 1980s and 1990s during Esa-Pekka Salonen's tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; all were acclaimed readings, and the 1985 version of the sizzlingly orchestrated Symphony No. 3, by now Lutoslawski's most commonly programmed and recorded work, has held up well against newer recordings. What's new is the Symphony No. 1, recorded in the new Walt Disney Hall to round out the set in commemoration of the composer's 100th birthday. (The entire recording of the symphony is new, although the bizarre numbering of the tracks makes this difficult to figure out.) This work is not often played. Lutoslawski wrote it in occupied Warsaw and managed to physically carry the score out of the city during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and hide with it in an attic for eight months. Later he expressed a negative attitude toward the piece, but it's well worth hearing. It might be described as overgrown neo-classicism, with short sonata-form movements and strong traces of Prokofiev and Albert Roussel, but with harmonic density, Lutoslawski's complex orchestration, and his characteristic bristly counterpoint breaking out everywhere. Salonen still ranks as Lutoslawski's foremost champion, and these four symphonies, evenly distributed over 50 years of the composer's career, form an arresting portrait of the figure in whose work modernism and the traditional symphonic medium seem most closely reconciled. If there's a complaint here, it's that the remastering, although quite good, cannot compensate for the sonic differences between Walt Disney Hall and the earlier recordings in a studio and in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The set makes you want to hear all four symphonies conducted by Salonen in the new hall, which seems tailor-made for Lutoslawski. (James Manheim)

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic JOHN ADAMS The Gospel According to the Other Mary

In December 2000, the premiere of El Niño signaled a landmark in John Adams’ artistic evolution. This Nativity oratorio, premiered over the weeks of Christmas at Paris’ Châtelet Theater, conveyed a message of rebirth and hope attuned to what the composer sensed as the mood of the new millennium.

Yet the very simplicity of this story of birth and renewal allowed Adams to evoke unsuspected undercurrents of darknessbeneath its reassuring light. Already in that score, juxtaposed against musical imagesof joy and the miraculous, one could hear a threatening note of violence, especiallyin the work’s climactic episode of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.This strategy of weaving together multiple, at times contradictory, layers of emotionalresonance is even more central to Adams’ new work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. It is a key to his treatmentof that most archetypal story of Western music and art: the Passion of Jesus. For several years Adams and hislongtime collaborator Peter Sellars contemplated a companion piece to El Niño.
Their goal, explains Sellars, was to set the Passion story “in the tradition of sacredart, in the eternal present.” Violence and suffering and transformation are theimportant components of this story, and by drawing on his entire repertoire of experienceas a dramatic composer Adams depicts these with searing humanity.
But his unflinching portrayal of the human condition is only part of The Other Mary’s vast spectrum. Operating on twosimultaneous planes – the biblical and the contemporary – his score goes to the heartof its often disturbing subject matter with a keen psychological intuition, particularly in the portrait of the work’s title character.“Of all the arts music is by far the mostpsychologically precise,” Adams has saidabout his work as a composer.
“The subtlestharmonic shading or melodic twistcan completely color and influence howthe listener feels about and perceives aperson or event. Music being above andbeyond all things the art of feeling, it is thecomposer’s role to give emotional and psychologicaldepth to a character or a scene.No other art form provides such potenttools.”This is a Passion not only of Jesus, butof a family who loved and were loved byhim: Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha,and their brother Lazarus. Its creatorsreject the conventional “reformed prostitute”version of Mary Magdalene, consideringit a baseless identity foisted onher centuries after the fact. They presentinstead a woman of rich emotional complexity,a psychically damaged womanwhose turbulent inner life and hard pastgo hand in hand with her deep powers of intuition and volatile sensuality.

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic MAHLER 9

Gustavo Dudamel's historic Mahler Project was a highlight of music-making in early 2012, for he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela in Gustav Mahler's nine completed symphonies, in a series of critically acclaimed concerts. The first CD to be issued from the marathon event is Deutsche Grammophon's 2013 release of the Symphony No. 9 in D major, one of the most challenging of Mahler's works to interpret and one of the most satisfying to hear when it is played with insight and originality. Dudamel and Los Angeles give this symphony a coherent and compelling performance that makes sense on the small scale of the score's details, which they deliver with sensitivity and clarity, and on the larger scale of form and the work's over-arching trajectory, where the conductor's pacing and phrasing carry the work to its inevitable goal. While some conductors choose to make the music jaggedly pointillistic, abruptly expressionistic, or just plain neurotic, Dudamel looks past such conventional approaches to make this Ninth a long, sustained song, rather in the spirit of Das Lied von der Erde. The expressions are overwhelmingly passionate and brooding, with plenty of acerbic bite and sardonic wit interjected to make the piece identifiable as Mahler's own, with all his obsessions and quirks. Yet Dudamel brings a special logic and steadiness to the welter of emotions that make it clear that the Ninth is still music with its own message to communicate, and not a confessional autobiography. It is refreshing to hear the piece played with real melodic sweep, and to understand that Dudamel's vision of the symphony is organic, developed, intensely lyrical, and mature. Deutsche Grammophon provides spacious and resonant sound that captures every note with wonderful tone colors. (Blair Sanderson)

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic THE INAUGURAL CONCERT (mp4 / AAC 320 kbps)

LOS ANGELES — That Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a free concert last Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl, a multicultural community love fest, will always be a point of pride for citizens here.

Mr. Dudamel’s much-anticipated official inaugural came on Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a formidable program with Mahler’s First Symphony and the premiere of a new work by John Adams. This was a black-tie gala, complete with a red- carpet procession of celebrities and patrons, and a South American-themed post-concert dinner in a makeshift tent set up outside the hall, smack in the middle of South Grand Avenue.

For all of Mr. Dudamel’s innate abilities to connect with audiences and inspire young people, he was hired to conduct a major American orchestra. The 10-minute ovation that erupted at the end of the Mahler made clear that supporters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic are thrilled with their new 28-year-old music director. But this was an exceptional and exciting concert by any standard.

Making a telling artistic statement, Mr. Dudamel began his tenure conducting the premiere of the new Adams piece, “City Noir,” a bustling, complex 35-minute work in three movements: the final panel in a triptych of orchestral works inspired by what Mr. Adams calls the “California experience,” its “landscape and its culture.” (The first two are “El Dorado” and “The Dharma at Big Sur,” a violin concerto.) 

The piece was suggested, Mr. Adams has written, by the richly evocative books on California’s social history by Kevin Starr, especially a chapter called “Black Dahlia,” which explores the sassy, shoddy and sensational era of the 1940s and ’50s, which gave rise to film noir. It is not easy to evoke the milieu of an era in music. But this score was also inspired by jazz-inflected American symphonic music of the 1920s through the ’50s, from Gershwin to Copland to Bernstein, something that is a lot easier to evoke.

Mr. Adams does so brilliantly in this searching, experimental de facto symphony. The first movement, “The City and Its Double,” begins with a wash of orchestral sound, murmuring motifs and rhythmic shards. Scurrying figurations break out and whirl around, getting stuck in place one moment, spiraling off frenetically the next. Is this harmonically astringent be-bop or weird echoes of a Baroque toccata?

Eventually the violins begin a winding, sometimes aimless-sounding episode of fitful, churning lines. Mr. Adams has become a master at piling up materials in thick yet lucid layers. Moment to moment the music is riveting. Yet, as in some other Adams scores, I found it hard to discern the structural spans and architecture of this one.

The pensive second movement, “The Song Is for You,” with its hazy sonorities, slithering chords, sultry jazzy solos and undulant riffs, does somehow convey California. The third movement, “Boulevard Night,” begins languorously but soon erupts, all jagged, quirky and relentless. Call it “The Rite of Swing.”

Mr. Dudamel, gyrating on the podium and in control at every moment, drew a cranked-up yet subtly colored performance of this challenging score from his eager players. He seemed so confident dispatching this metrically fractured work that I was drawn into the music, confident that a pro was on the podium.

Like Mr. Dudamel’s Beethoven Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl, the Mahler performance was not what you might expect from a young conductor. For all the sheer energy of the music-making, here was a probing, rigorous and richly characterized interpretation, which Mr. Dudamel conducted from memory. The suspenseful opening of the first movement, with its sustained tones and cosmic aura, had uncannily calm intensity. But when bird calls and genial folk tunes signaled the awakening of nature, the music had disarming breadth and guileless tenderness. And Mr. Dudamel was all ready-set-go when Mahler’s wildness broke out.

In the rustic second movement, he captured the music’s beery, galumphing charm, and milked the Viennese lyricism with the panache of a young Bernstein. He and his players uncovered the slightly obsessive quality of the songful slow movement, with its droning repetition of tonic-dominant bass patterns. And he viscerally conveyed the fits and starts of the mercurial finale, building to a brassy climactic fanfare almost scary in its ecstasy.

The musicians were with him all the way, though the playing was rough at times, with patchy string tone and scrappy execution. For all the important accomplishments, of Mr. Dudamel’s predecessor, Esa-PekkaSalonen, he was not the most gifted orchestra builder. The vitality of the playing was always inspiring. No one wants the slick virtuosity that some orchestras are content with. Still, Mr. Dudamel and his players may have work to do.

At the end, as a confetti shower of Mylar strips fell from the ceiling, Mr. Dudamel returned to the stage again and again. But he never took a solo bow from the podium. Instead, he stood proudly with his players on stage. (By Anthony Tommasini / Published: October 9, 2009/ New York Times)

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic BERLIOZ Symphonie Fantastique

An international sensation and instant star in Deutsche Grammophon's stable while only in his twenties, Gustavo Dudamel won kudos worldwide for his extraordinary musicality, wide expressive range, astute technical mastery, and acute perception of what works in a score, and he has brought great vitality and excitement to his performances of the Romantic symphonic repertoire. His 2007 release of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela brought critical praise, and his live follow-up with Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with the  Los Angeles Philharmonic is sure to do the same. What both recordings reveal is Dudamel's amazing ability to reshape whole passages of overly familiar music into fluid and seemingly spontaneous renderings that sound almost like re-creations and make listeners really think about what they're hearing. You may not always agree with Dudamel's choices, and his handling of the music may at times seem a bit too calculated, but once you are caught up in a performance, you are compelled to pay attention to everything this conductor does. Since the Symphonie fantastique is one of the most famous warhorses ever, it is always up to conductors to make something new of it, though few think it through as clearly or manage it as creatively as Dudamel, who makes the scenes of this programmatic symphony really feel like vignettes in an especially vivid film. He also finds ways to make sense of Berlioz's quirky rhythms, disjointed figurations, disorienting counterpoint, and sudden "scene changes," so that even the first-time listener can follow the piece's trajectory and make the necessary musical connections to the hallucinatory narrative. But beyond the specific touches that make this performance extraordinary, one has to appreciate Dudamel's artistic audacity and brilliance with the orchestra, which is completely inspired and utterly willing to play its collective heart out in this electrifying performance. Deutsche Grammophon's sound is spectacular from start to finish, and the enthusiastic ovation at the end of this recording is totally warranted. (Blair Sanderson)

Gustavo Dudamel ADAMS City Noir

City Noir was first suggested by my reading the so-called “Dream” books by Kevin Starr, a brilliantly imagined, multi-volume cultural and social history of California. In the “Black Dahlia” chapter of his Embattled Dreams volume Starr chronicles the tenor and milieu of the late Forties and early Fifties as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us:

“...the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still, for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy. It was, among other things, a Front Page kind of town where life was lived by many on the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir.”

Those images and their surrounding aura whetted my appetite for an orchestral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films, might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of the era. I was also stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes as back as far as the early 1920’s (although, truth to tell, it was a Frenchman, Darius Milhaud who was the first to realize its potential with his 1923 ballet La création du monde, a year before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York).

The music of City Noir is in the form of a thirty-minute symphony. The formal and expressive weight of its three movements is distributed in pockets of high energy that are nested among areas of a more leisurely—one could even say “cinematic” – lyricism. The first movement, “The City and its Double,” opens with brief, powerful “wide screen” panorama that gives way to a murmuring dialogue between the double bass pizzicato and the scurrying figures in the woodwinds and keyboards. The steady tick of a jazz drummer impels this tense and nervous activity forward – a late-hour empty street scene, if you like. After a broad and lyrical melodic passage in the strings, the original scorrevole movement returns, charged with increasingly insistent impulse and building up steam until it peaks with a full-throttle orchestral tutti. A surging melody in the horns and celli punctuated by jabbing brass “bullets” brings the movement to a nearly chaotic climax before it suddenly collapses into shards and fragments, a sudden stasis that ushers in the second movement.

The title, “The City and its Double” is a backward glance to the French playwright Antonin Artaud, who in his writings is said to have “opposed the vitality of the viewer’s sensual experience against [a conventional concept of] theater as a contrived literary form.” Hence my “city” can be imagined not just as geographic place or even as a social nexus, but rather as a source of inexhaustible sensual experience. As a child watching the early days of television I remembered well the program that always ended with the familiar tag line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one.”

As a relief to the frenzy of the first movement’s ending, “The Song is for You,” takes its time assembling itself. Gradually a melodic profile in the solo alto sax emerges from the surrounding pools of chromatically tinted sonorities. The melody yearns toward but keeps retreating from the archetypal “blue” note. But eventually the song finds full bloom in the voice of the solo trombone, a “talking” solo, in the manner of the great Ellington soloists Lawence Brown and Britt Woodman (both, fittingly enough, Angelinos). The trombone music picks up motion and launches a brief passage of violent, centripetal energy, all focussed on a short obsessive idea first stated by the sax. Once spent of its fuel, the movement returns to the quiet opening music, ending with pensive solos by the principal horn and viola.

“Boulevard Night” is a study in cinematic colors, sometimes, as in the moody “Chinatown” trumpet solo near the beginning, it is languorous and nocturnal; sometimes, as in the jerky stop-start coughing engine music in the staccato strings, it is animal and pulsing; and othertimes, as in the slinky, sinuous saxophone theme that keeps coming back, each time with an extra layer of stage makeup, it is in-your-face brash and uncouth. The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film—the kind who only come out very late on a very hot night.

John Adams