Gustavo Dudamel / Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela BEETHOVEN 3 "Eroica"

Gustavo Dudamel has always had a special relationship with the music of Beethoven, as have many Venezuelan musicians. In 2006, Dudamel and what was then the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela recorded the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies for DGG. It was a remarkable disc. “Since 2006,” Dudamel noted “we’ve taken out the word ‘youth’ from our name but the young soul remains. It’s the same orchestra, you can still see very young people, but it’s a step in a new direction. Our commitment to the core repertoire, and also to the great genius of Beethoven, remains, as well.”

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica”, which Dudamel and his orchestra have been touring of late, was completed in 1803. The previous autumn the 31-year-old Beethoven had drawn up his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, the confessional statement in which he confronted the trauma of his growing deafness, contemplated suicide, and stoically rejected it. It was against this background that he began work on the “Eroica”, a symphony whose scale, emotional power and narrative reach transformed the medium.
The symphony’s informing idea can be traced back to 1801 and the music Beethoven wrote for the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. The subject was a lofty one. Prometheus, the heroic benefactor of mankind, drives “ignorance from the people of his age” and gives them “manners, customs, and morals”. In stealing fire from the gods, he acquires that divine spark which man-kind itself can harness only through suffering and struggle. This Promethean ideal fed into Beethoven’s own determination to outface suffering and despair. To which he added what at the time was his admiration for the heroic deeds of Napoleon Bonaparte. (An admiration that turned to ashes when Napoleon declared himself Emperor in May 1804.) 
It is clear when we hear the opening notes of the“Eroica” that we are dealing with music on a titanic scale. If we examine Beethoven’s sketchbooks for the work, we see the sweep of his imaginative vision; how, at a quite early stage in the planning, the melody’s dissonant C sharp in bar 7 is already linked to the D flat [= C sharp] in a visionary bridge passage which will somehow usher in the movement’s recapitulation. At the time of those first sketches, Beethoven had no more idea how to cross the 400-bar space between than a mountaineer who first glimpses a distant peak from the valley beneath.
Some of Beethoven’s most powerful effects seem bewilderingly simple. The two opening chords act both as gesture and as rhythmic markers, allowing the E flat major theme in bar 3 an ease and impulsion it would not possess without them. The sonic ferocity of the symphony is signalled at the end of the exposition in a mass of misplaced accents and dissonant tonic-plus-dominant chords as shocking as anything in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. The dissonant climax of the devel- opment section is even more ferocious, after which an entirely new melody sings out in the remote key of E minor. (“A song of pain after the holocaust”, as Leonard Bernstein once memorably expressed it.)

Maximiano Valdes / Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela CARAMELOS LATINOS

This is a charming disc of popular Latin American music. The disc opens with a suite of dances by the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri. They are characteristic dances bearing the titles Brazilian Dance, Savage Dance and Negro Dance, which sounds like it could have been written by Elmer Bernstein.

They were composed over a twenty-year period and were originally written for piano. The orchestral textures are rich and colorful. Guarnieri studied in Paris with Charles Koechlin and was a guest conductor at the Boston Symphony. Guarnieri composed Encantamento in 1941. The music comes close to his the evocative music teacher Koechlin. It begins with an atmospheric melody evocative of nature, but the music quickly builds into languid dance and then to the percussive rhythms of Brazilian folk music. The first hypnotic melody returns and the work ends quietly.
The short piece by Alberto Ginastera - Overture to the creole Faust - was based on the story by Estanislao del Campo and dates from 1943. The overture has begins with a sinister melody that quickly turns into a dance, somewhat reminiscent of Estancia. The music settles into a reflective melody, developing into a more dramatic melody to close the work. 

The short piece, The Wandering Tadpole of Silvestre Revueltas, is not well known. This is a dance from a larger ballet for children. The music has a nice sense of humor with various instruments darting back and forth with bits of melody, and there are echoes of a mariachi band.
Venezuelan composer Inocente Carreno's Margaritena receives a spirited performance. The music is centered on a folk song Margarita es una lagrima, which Carreno skillfully weaves into a rhapsody. Juan Bautista Plaza, also born in Venezuela, was considered one of the founders of Venezuelan national music. The fuga romantica for strings, from 1950, was written as homage to Bach. 

The selection closes with a work by Jose Pablo Mocayo - Hupango. Hupango is a corruption of fandango and is a dance performed on wooden planks. A brilliant score captures the essence of the dance.
This is a great selection of Latin American music nicely performed by the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra under Maximiano Valdes. Highly recommended. (Amazon.com)

Dudamel WAGNER

When I hear Wagner's music, I always think of the sunrise from Nietzsche's Zarathustra – the crescendo of colours, the epic naturalism, the illumination of a huge spirit. It sweeps you away, like great cinema. Metaphorically, of course, dawn also expresses an anticipation of the future. In the history of music, we have many great composers: Bach, Mozart, Brahms, some of the greatest geniuses of all humanity. But then, there were the composers who not only wrote extraordinary music, but whose music fundamentally changed the way we listen: Monteverdi, Beethoven, Stravinsky, the Beatles... and Wagner. Music after Wagner was never the same. With new approaches to melody, harmony, rhythm and orchestration, Wagner's operas pushed music to its physical and emotional limits, and, like a sunrise, provided a view into the future – paving the way not just for composers like Mahler and Richard Strauss, but for everything from Star Wars to Metallica.

Wagner is epic and powerful, modern and daring, yet can be loving and tender at the same time. The scores are so well written, so brilliantly conceived, the orchestration is amazing, the harmonies so full of expression. Every note means something - sometimes many things at once. The challenge for conductor and orchestra is finding the balance between the very big and very intimate. With this recording we have had the additional challenge of capturing, in just a few excerpts, the huge intellectual and emotional architecture of Wagner's dramas without singers, using only the voices of the orchestra.

For my family in the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and for me, just as Wagner transformed music, music has transformed our lives. This fact makes it very special for us to perform and to record Wagner's music. We pay homage to the tradition of Bayreuth, while at the same time feeling the contemporariness of the ideas in the Ring and the passion of Tristan. These visions and expressions speak to us. For us, music is energy, that, like a river, is always moving forward, that never ends. Wagner's endless melodies and gripping harmonies tap into this infinite stream of energy with a unique, magical spirit. The great spirit and love we share for music is reflected in the spirit and love within these pieces. For the Bolivars and for me, sharing this spirit, with each other and with the world, is one of life's greatest joys. Thank you for joining us on our journey with Wagner. (Gustavo Dudamel)

Gustavo Dudamel / Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela TCHAIKOVSKY SHAKESPEARE

Hot Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel has renamed his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela simply as the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. This may somewhat diminish the "Waiting for Superman" aspect of Dudamel's celebrity, but the good news is that this disc delivers just what's needed in establishing him as a worthwhile star over the long term. The Tchaikovsky & Shakespeare album reproduces the program of a widely advertised and rebroadcast concert Dudamel conducted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, recruiting Hollywood stars to read relevant passages from Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. The studio recording may be the superior idea, for Tchaikovsky's works, with the exception of the perennially crowd-pleasing Romeo and Juliet, are only loosely programmatic, and the orchestra's young musicians, products of the famed Venezuelan music education program known as El Sistema, acquit themselves admirably. Indeed, the strength of the performances lies in the orchestral playing: the bronze glow of the low strings in the comparatively rare Hamlet, the scintillating brasses and big themes of The Tempest. Dudamel somewhat tamps down the overdoses of sheer sentiment in Romeo and Juliet, which many listeners will find all to the good. What this release shows is that, whether he's Superman or not, Dudamel is shifting the center of excitement in the symphonic scene of the Americas definitely westward and southward.

Yuja Wang / Gustavo Dudamel RACHMANINOV # 3 - PROKOFIEV # 2

Deutsche Grammophon's dramatic pairing of Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor with Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor makes this CD a brilliant showcase for pianist Yuja Wang and maestro Gustavo Dudamel, two of the biggest sensations on the label. Wang previously released Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Piano Concerto No. 2 with Claudio Abbado conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble that seemed nearly ideal for accompanying her delicate and often intimate style of playing. However, the usually robust sound of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela is reined in somewhat on this recording of the Third, if not to be more subdued for Wang's playing, then perhaps to control the effect of Rachmaninov's thick orchestral writing. For whatever reason, Wang's playing is clear and generally well-balanced in the audio mix, though there is some artificial boosting of the volume. In terms of clarity and orchestral density, the Prokofiev Second is a different matter entirely, for the solo part is always audible, and the accompaniment is, for the most part, quite transparent. Wang is shown to better advantage here, and Dudamel has more options to work with, so this exciting performance really deserves top billing, despite the overwhelming popularity of the Rachmaninov work. (Blair Sanderson)