Gustavo Dudamel
Gustavo Dudamel
01 August 2007
LIFE IS SWEET FOR VENEZUELAN CONDUCTOR GUSTAVO DUDAMEL, RECENTLY NAMED AS THE LA PHIL’S NEXT MUSIC DIRECTOR AT JUST 26. HE TELLS PAUL CUTTS ABOUT HIS COMMITMENT TO HIS HOMELAND AND HIS LOVE OF SALSA
Picture Sylvia Lelli
The year was 2004. The place was Bamberg, Germany - the location of the first Gustav Mahler International Conducting Competition. A fresh-faced, curly-haired Venezuelan conductor stepped onto the podium, bubbling with Latin spirit, and raised his arms in preparation for a performance of the Adagietto from Mahler's Symphony No 5. A few seconds of silence and the baton glided down, the sound of shimmering strings filled the auditorium, and Gustavo Dudamel had thrown down the gauntlet for the next generation of conductors.
The Gustav Mahler competition, which Dudamel won at the age of 23, was the start of big things for the young maestro. Shortly after winning he joined London-based management agency Askonas Holt, and quickly landed a string of high-profile engagements with major orchestras and an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon.
A year later he was named as principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, a position he takes up at the start of the 2007/08 season.
It's a testament to Dudamel's outstanding podium talent that the second instalment of the triennial Gustav Mahler competition, held earlier this year, failed to produce a winner worthy of following in his footsteps. And if he has been a hard act to follow on the competition circuit, he's also showing every sign of taking that legacy with him as he builds up his professional conducting career.
On his US debut, at Los Angeles' Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed felt he had 'accomplished something increasingly rare and difficult at the Hollywood Bowl': 'He got a normally restive audience's full, immediate and rapt attention. And he kept it. The party sitting next to me put aside its just-opened giant bag of Cheetos and forgot about it until intermission.'Dudamel never once gave the impression of being anything but in tight control over every detail and every grand sweep'
'Dudamel never once gave the impression of being anything but in tight control over every detail and every grand sweep,' he goes on.
Critics in the UK have been equally impressed. After his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra debut in January 2006, The Times' Richard Morrison referred to Dudamel as 'the hottest new conductor on the planet', going on to praise his boundless energy and poise: 'The Venezuelan sensation […], barely five foot tall (and quite a bit of that is his mass of black curls) is as jerky as a puppet on the podium. Not that he's on the podium much. Often he springs in the air and bounces like a ball for several bars.
'And though I've seen excited maestros launch their batons into the stalls before, I've never seen it happen in Mendelssohn. That's like being pulled up for speeding while pushing a pram. The boy will go far.'
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