Caracas diary: A sweet Mahler's Fourth and Dudamel-mania

What doesn’t kill you will make you fat, the Venezuelans are said to joke.

With a day off in Caracas between performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony on Saturday night and Mahler's Fourth on Monday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on its first visit here, got a taste of that saying, so to speak. This is not a town in which a visitor might safely roam, and especially not on an election day, as Sunday was. So the players took it easy in their hotel.

Because raw foods and unpeeled fruit are not recommended (there has already been a case of food poisoning), available Venezuelan cuisine has tended toward things high in fat and calories. Sugar is plentiful. But maybe that hasn’t been such a bad thing.

The performance of the Mahler Fourth had a relaxed but potent sweetness Monday in the Teatro Teresa Carreno that it hadn’t when Gustavo Dudamel began his Mahler Project with the symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall exactly one month earlier.

Music review: Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Concert Hall

Now and then, you may hear a Bruckner symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, but did any of Bruckner’s big choral works ever receive a performance there?  The answer is: Not until Sunday night, when Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale took on Bruckner’s somewhat peculiar Mass No. 2 in E minor.

And what kind of a sensibility would program a Bruckner mass alongside a piece by Stravinsky?  An iconoclastic one, yes, but also a practical one, since both the Bruckner mass and to a large extent Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” are powered and colored by wind and brass ensembles.

While Bruckner’s First and Third Masses bear the distinct signatures of the symphonies all over the place, you have to listen hard to find streaks of his sound in the Second Mass, with its backing by a small wind band and throwbacks to the choral styles of the Renaissance. 

The piece sounds as if it was tailored to the acoustics of a cathedral; some of the wind timbres even seem to imitate certain stops on a pipe organ.  A cathedral Disney Hall is not, yet Gershon’s fast tempos were appropriate for this less-reverberant space, as was the Master Chorale’s fresh, bright, plush, not-at-all-ascetic singing.

The Master Chorale is no stranger to “Symphony of Psalms” -– this was the piece the chorale memorably sang at Esa-Pekka Salonen’s farewell concert here in 2009 -– and Gershon carried out another inventive programming scheme by prefacing Stravinsky with a brief, luminous a cappella Bruckner motet, also set to a psalm text, “Os justi.”

Yet this performance (of the Stravinsky) could not quite generate the cool yet paradoxically emotional fervor of the sequence of magically heartfelt, dense chords near the close of Part 3. Gershon tried, slowing the tempo down as marked to let the passage breathe, but it didn’t work.

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Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil start things in Caracas

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-– Richard S. Ginell

2010 photo of Grant Gershon and the Master Chorale. Credit: Lee Salem Photography

 

Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil start things in Caracas

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

After the end of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s excitable and radiant performance Saturday night at Teatro Teresa Carreño of Mahler’s hauntingly elegiac Ninth Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel stopped to sign autographs for screaming fans who ran up to the foot of the stage of Caracas’ main concert hall.

The L.A. Phil had arrived in Venezuela late the night before, and the orchestra's caravan of buses had been given a police escort from the Simón Bolívar International Airport to the orchestra’s hotel. More motorcycle police accompanied the players Saturday afternoon on the 5-mile drive from their hotel to the first of five performances in the country’s capital.

Not only is the L.A. Phil the first major international orchestra to visit Venezuela in more than two decades, but the Venezuelan conductor and his L.A. orchestra are rock stars here. So popular is Dudamel that Frank Gehry was commissioned to design a concert hall for Dudamel's hometown of Barquisimeto that the town wants to name after the 31-year-old conductor. It will replace a soccer field and serve the kind of youth orchestras Dudamel played in while growing up.

On the other hand, a police presence may have also been a wise precaution in a country notorious for its violent crime. Venezuela averaged 53 murders a day last year.

Grammy Awards 2012: Gustavo Dudamel, L.A. Philharmonic win

 

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic won a Grammy Award on Sunday for their recording of Brahms' Fourth Symphony. It marked the first Grammy win in Dudamel's career.

No single album dominated the classical categories this year, but the list of winners featured a few major names, including composer John Adams, singer Joyce DiDonato and the group Eighth Blackbird.

The classical awards were handed out Sunday afternoon as part of a pre-show ceremony at Staples Center that was broadcast online.

Full Coverage: 54^th annual Grammy Awards

The L.A. Philharmonic's album of Brahms' Fourth Symphony was released last year by Deutsche Grammophon. The recording was part of the orchestra's Brahms Unbound series last season at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic are currently on a concert tour in Venezuela and were not present to accept their award.

Al Pacino, Andre Watts among National Medal of Arts winners

Actor Al Pacino, pianist Andre Watts, visual artists Will Barnet and Martin Puryear and art philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer are among the winners of the 2011 National Medal of Arts, to be bestowed Monday by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House.

Also announced Friday were winners of the National Humanities Medal -- including classical music scholar Charles Rosen.

The ceremonies will be streamed live Monday at 10:45 a.m. (Pacific) on the White House website.

Pacino, famed for wide-ranging film and stage roles that include the sympathetic gay bank robber of “Dog Day Afternoon,” mob boss Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” trilogy, and Shakespeare’s Shylock and King Richard III, is being cited for his “signature intensity” and as “an enduring and iconic figure, who came of age in one of the most exciting decades of American cinema, the 1970s.”

Watts, who is not expected to attend the ceremony, according to the White House, is being recognized as “a perennial favorite with the most celebrated orchestras and conductors around the world,” his performances marked by “superb technique and passionate intensity.”

Barnet, a New York City painter and printmaker who turned 100 last year, was cited for “nuanced and graceful depictions of family and personal scenes” that are “meticulously constructed of flat planes that reveal a lifelong exploration of abstraction, expressionism and geometry.”

Pasadena Symphony announces its 2012-13 classical season

The Pasadena Symphony’s 2012-13 season will feature five classical programs at the Ambassador Auditorium led by an array of guest conductors, plus a holiday concert at All Saints Church.

Among  the soloists will be teenage pianist George Li, who’ll be 17 when he plays Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Mei-Ann Chen (above), music director of the Memphis Symphony and the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducting the season-opening concerts Oct. 6. The program also includes Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9.

Chen led the Pasadena Symphony’s season opener last October. Another recently announced Southern California engagement for Chen will find her conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and pieces by Chinese composers for the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa in April 2013.

Edwin Outwater, music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony in Ontario, Canada, will conduct Tchaikvosky’s Symphony No. 4, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Huang Li’s Spring Festival Overture (Nov. 3), with piano soloist Rueibin Chen (no relation to Mei-Ann).

Tito Munoz, a former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor who recently became music director of Opera National de Lorraine and the Orchestre symphonique et lyrique de Nancy in France, conducts a Brahms and Sibelius program (Jan. 12, 2013) with violinist Carolyn Goulding. Nicholas McGegan, music director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, will conduct Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and the Mahler Symphony No. 4 (Feb. 9, 2013) with soparano Yulia Van Doren and Donald Foster, the Pasadena Symphony’s principal clarinetist.

Music review: Leif Ove Andsnes recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall

The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes gives good taste a great name. His playing displays no vanity. In a program of Haydn, Bartók, Debussy and Chopin at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday, Andsnes combined aspects of the introvert and extrovert, the Romantic and Classicist, while remaining fully at the service of each composer’s musical style.

In the opener, Haydn’s moody Sonata in C minor, the pianist made the score’s irregular phrasing sound natural and inevitable. His articulation and dynamic shadings in the opening movement were finely judged, and his warm, rounded tone in the slow movement and finale captivated.

Andsnes employed a more resonant and textured sound for Bartok’s rhythmically engaging Suite for Piano, Opus 14, his varied attacks placing the work’s playfulness, drama and mystery into sharp contrast. In a stunning rendition of Debussy’s Images, Book I, Andsnes’ delicate touch, timing and rhythmic steadiness in “Reflections on the Water,” “Homage to Rameau” and “Movement” quietly drew the listener in. He proved a superlative Debussy interpreter.

In the all-Chopin second half, Andsnes began with graceful readings of Four Waltzes, three from Opus 70. In the more technically demanding and showy Waltz in A flat major, Opus 42, speeds were perfectly judged. Andsnes’ relaxed, serene accounts of Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 and Nocturne in B major, Opus 62, No. 1, were paradoxically gripping. His artful pedaling in Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor lent an expressive intensity to its unstoppable forward drive. He dispatched its fearsome coda with apparent ease.

As encores, the pianist offered Chopin’s enchanting Waltz in A flat major, Opus 34, No. 1, and Granados’ lovely Spanish Dance, Opus 37, No. 5 “Andaluza,” both performed with bravura poise and muscular clarity.

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Above: Leif Ove Andsnes. Credit: Felix Broede

Album review: Kronos Quartet: Music of Vladimir Martynov

Kronos Quartet: Music of Vladimir Martynov
Nonesuch

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s addictive three-week Mahler Project is over. Now what? There is always cold turkey. But there is also, courtesy of the Kronos Quartet, Mahler methadone.

In the string quartet "Das Abschied," by a 65-year-old spiritual Russian composer too little known in the West, Vladimir Martynov extends the final passages of the last measures of Mahler’s symphonic song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” to a heavenly length of 40 minutes.

This is Mahler for those who never want one of his most movingly ethereal passages to stop.

Also on the recording is another magnificent example of how Martinov’s mystical obsession with time and history music has led him to step outside of reasonable temporality and human concerns. He is, in his own description, a "posthumous" composer of “post-opus” music.

In this spirit he wrote his "Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished)," a stirring meditation on Schubert’s magnificent Quintet in C, three years ago for Kronos and its former cellist, Joan Jeanrenaud. It is not so much a post-opus as a Postmodern, Minimalist masterpiece. The performance, exquisitely recorded, is radiant.
 

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Photo: The Kronos Quartet with Jean Jeanrenaud in the world premiere of Martynov's "Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished)" in Berkeley in 2009. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

 

Watch Gustavo Dudamel make music on 'Sesame Street' [Video]

What did the conductor say to the Muppet?

Watch below to see Gustavo Dudamel make his musical “Sesame Street” debut.

During the minute-and-a-half segment, which premiered Monday on PBS, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, accompanied by Elmo, demonstrates the meaning of "stupendous" with a violin-playing sheep, an octopus percussionist and an all-penguin choir.

L.A. Phil 2012-13: John Adams, 'Wild Things,' 'Angels in America'

This post has been updated. See below.

After sating itself with super-sized helpings of Gustav Mahler this winter, the Los Angeles Philharmonic won't be curbing its appetite for large-scale undertakings next year.

The Phil's 2012-13 season, which will be officially announced later Monday, is a combination of large- and medium-size projects (some new, some evolving from its current season), along with the return of several familiar faces (Esa-Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta).

And although there'll be nothing like this season's nine-course banquet of Mahler symphonies, the composer's Symphony No. 5 will be performed in October under guest conductor Daniel Harding. 

The season also will have a distinctly operatic flavor, featuring several staged or semi-staged works. They include the second of a planned trilogy of Mozart/Da Ponte operas, "The Marriage of Figaro," conducted by the Phil's music director, Gustavo Dudamel, with sets designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel and costumes by couturier Azzedine Alaïa.

Deborah Borda, the Phil's president, said in an interview that the Mozart project, which the Phil conceived with architect Frank Gehry, grew out of Dudamel's belief that "an orchestra needs to play Mozart, for purity of sound, and they also need to play opera once in a while, to be nimble."

The project is allowing the Phil to continue to explore the spatial and staging possibilities of Gehry's iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall. Rather than opera sets, Borda described the planned Mozart designs as "installations."