I know Brummies are hard to impress. But it’s carrying phlegmaticism a bit far to leave hundreds of empty seats in Symphony Hall when the hottest new conductor on the planet makes his debut. Isn’t this the city that gave Rattle his big chance?
Do Birmingham’s music-lovers no longer want to hear tomorrow’s stars today? Dispiriting. But, to his credit, Gustavo Dudamel gave us the fireworks anyway. The Venezualan sensation, already signed to Deutsche Grammophon, is allegedly 24 but looks about 13. Thin as a rake, barely five foot tall (and quite a bit of that is his mass of black curls), he is as jerky as a puppet on the podium. Not that he’s on the podium much. Often he springs into the air and bounces like a ball for several bars. That’s something Sir Adrian Boult never managed. 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.
So he should. Extravagant or not, his gestures galvanised the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony for once sounded less like the aural equivalent of St Pancras station, and more like the rugged depiction of craggy hills, gaunt castles and thunderous waterfalls that the composer imagined he was concocting. At the first movement’s end the chromatic flurries had real wildness; the wind blend was strong and sonorous, and the symphony’s coda went like a rocket — twice as fast as some performances I have heard.
Dudamel proved an excellent guide, too, in the hyperactive Second Symphony of the early 20th-century Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. It is 12 minutes of Copland-like fizz, based on Mexican Indian dances and spiced up by practically every exotic percussion instrument known to man, and some (such as “deer hooves” and “butterfly cocoons”) that Chávez must have invented on the spot.
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To complete this evening of travelogues, the French violinist Olivier Charlier proved to be the ideal soloist for Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. He was pungent in his phrasing, he constantly enriched his line with stylish portamentos and rubatos, and he revelled in those luscious G-string melodies, stopping just a tantalising smidgin short of caricature.