Beat by Beat | Classical & BeyondSymphonicAdventurersDudamel & OutwaterGustavo Dudamel conductingthe LA PhilharmonicPAUL ENNISGustavo Dudamel is widely considered the most exciting andgifted young conductor working today. His meteoric rise –he was appointed music director of the Simón Bolívar YouthOrchestra in 1999 at the age of 18 and he’s now already in his fifthyear as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- has beenwell documented. Winning the inaugural Bamberger SymphonikerGustav Mahler competition at 23 was the first international signpost;being named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people fiveyears later bumped up his media quotient. Two years later readers ofGramophone voted him Artist of the Year; two years after that MusicAmerica named him 2013 Musician of the Year.Toronto audiences will welcome him and the LA PhilharmonicMarch19 when he returns for the first time since 2009. Then, heconducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in support of hismentor José Antonio Abreu, at the time Abreu was awarded the GlennGould Prize for his monumental music education work in Venezuela.Having celebrated its 39th anniversary on February 12 – and yes,Dudamel was in Caracas that day, leading a youth orchestra from hishometown of Barquisimeto – El Sistema is thriving with more than500,000 students.Dudamel spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the experience ofconducting the orchestra in which he grew up playing violin, theorchestra he had conducted at age 12.“’All these young people,’ Dudamel enthused. ‘I felt like I wasstill one of them. [In Sistema] . . . We teach tolerance and respect.Whatever you think, you have to work together to play in an orchestra.Whatever your differences are, you have to solve problems to makeharmony. The best example there is of what a community can be is theorchestra. . . Elsewhere in the world, music is a philanthropic enterprise.In Venezuela it is a right.”’He’s fully committed to music as an engine for social change.Abreu’s Glenn Gould Prize sparked David Visentin to launchSistema Toronto in September 2011 with Abreu’s’s blessing. (You canread about it in The WholeNote’s March 2013 issue.) About 150-175students of Sistema Toronto will not only be attending the LAPhilharmonic concert but performing in the Roy Thomson Hall lobbyfor gala attendees in advance of the show. The Corporation of RoyThomson and Massey Hall is bringing them to the concert free ofcharge as part of its Share The Music program.Toronto is the fifth stop on a seven-city nine-concert L.A.Philharmonic North American tour, six concerts of which arecomprised of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 (1989) andTchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. It’s a heavily romantic program, thetwo works written about a century apart. Corigliano has written thathis symphony “was generated by feelings of loss, anger and frustration”after the loss of many of his friends and colleagues to theAIDS epidemic affected him deeply. He decided to relate the firstthree movements of the symphony to three lifelong musician friendsand recall still others in the third movement “in a quilt-like interweavingof motivic melodies.” He pointed out that Berlioz, Mahler andShostakovich were also inspired by important events in their lives.The current tour follows the LA Philharmonic’s recent TchaikovskyFest in which the orchestra split the six Tchaikovsky symphonieswith Dudamel’s other ensemble, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra (it lostits “Youth” tag in 2011 as its members aged), so we should expect theplayers to have an even greater familiarity with this symphonic staplewith its famous recurring Fate motif and iconic slow movement. (Onecan’t help wondering what Tchaikovsky’s fate would have been hadhe been born 100 years later.) Dudamel’s ability to reveal the soul ofa piece of music will be put to the test. But watching the conductorrehearsing Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet without a score (!) onYouTube inspires great confidence and anticipation of a passionateand uninhibited performance.Edwin Outwater and the KWSO: California-born Edwin Outwater,the music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony since2007, has also been celebrated for his work in music educationand community outreach. In 2004 his education programs at theSan Francisco Symphony were given the Leonard Bernstein Awardfor Excellence in Educational Programming. At the San FranciscoSymphony, he conducted Family Concerts as well as Adventures inMusic performances, heard by more than 25,000 students from SanFrancisco schools each year; and Concerts for Kids, which reachedstudents throughout Northern California. In Florida, Outwaterdesigned the Florida Philharmonic Family Series and its Music forYouth program, attended annually by more than 40,000 fifth-gradestudents in South Florida.In Kitchener-Waterloo, he redesigned the orchestra’s educationseries and initiated myriad community connections. He’s known forhis Intersections program. Blogging about it last November he calledit “a place for artists who didn’t fit into a particular musical category— people like violinist/fiddler Gilles Apap, composer/DJ Mason Bates,Western/Indian musician Suba Sankaran and others.”He continued: “But it quickly became a home for people whowanted to try something with orchestra: saxophonists, scientists,chefs, yogis, videographers, you name it. It became a place where anorchestra can do anything, and by my estimation, one of the coolest,riskiest endeavors attempted by any orchestra in North America.“From the beginning, people took notice. A lot of our showswere played at Koerner Hall in Toronto, thanks to the good faithand adventurous spirit of Mervon Mehta. I’ll never forget when ourmusic/neuroscience show with Daniel Levitin, Beethoven and YourBrain, sold out there a week in advance... It confirmed my beliefthat orchestras don’t exist in a vacuum, but in the world of thought,emotion, and ideas.”His innovative approach to programming is evident in the way heconstructs and rationalizes a more traditional concert such as theone featuring Jon Kimura Parker on March 21 and 22. He’s subtitledthe Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor “Brahms the Progressive” and12 | March 1 – April 7, 2014 thewholenote.com
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