Deutsche Grammophon
The Dude is back! Not with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra with which Gustavo Dudamel recently visited Britain and which he’s now contracted to lead for ten full years. Instead the Venezuelan volcano returns, on CD, with his first love, the young and thrusting Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.
Or so it was once called, in line with the ages of its participants, picked from the forest of youth orchestras developed inside Venezuela’s famed education system, El Sistema. But time marches on: even Dudamel, the orchestra’s pied piper, in charge of its fortunes since 1999, is now scraping 30. So a name change has quietly happened to Dudamel’s cream of the cream. Now, you note, he conducts the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezeula — a name that suggests adulthood, professional status, responsibility, people with bills to pay.
Recorded in Caracas a year ago, the new CD plunges the listener into the turbulent emotional world of Tchaikovsky’s three orchestral fantasies based on Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Hamlet: one after the other they tumble out with a dark lustre and crackling energy that immediately grab your attention.
As repertoire for a grown-up orchestra, the choice is astute. There’s plenty of passion and drama here; how could there not be with Tchaikovsky? But these are also thoughtful, at times sombre, pieces, far from the mambo dancing, jazzy outbursts and other effusions when the Youth Orchestra was in fiesta mood. Brooding atmosphere dominates the Hamlet overture, while the larger-scale Tempest, billed as a symphonic fantasy, offers a substantial romantic marine spectacle, with love themes and storm-tossed action bubbling up from the waves. Romeo and Juliet offers the liveliest musical cut and thrust, though you couldn’t confuse the overture with Bernstein’s West Side Story symphonic dances, one of the Youth Orchestra’s party pieces.
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Dudamel’s handling of this material is refreshingly mature. The composer’s succulent melodies are never oversentimentalised or phrased in distractingly fancy ways: you hear no conductor’s ego strutting. Nor is the drama so heated in temperature that the music becomes screamingly neurotic. The storms and battles inside these sturdy, often brilliant pieces are always given plenty of ballast from the orchestra’s meaty brass or the growling double-basses thrusting deep into each note. Intelligence, that’s what leaps out from this disc: as it does from Simon Callow’s booklet note, which usefully places Tchaikovsky’s pieces in the context of the Russian temperament and 19th-century views of Shakespeare.
Yet there’s a price to be paid for the polish and wisdom of these performances, and for the young players’ advancing years. You feel the orchestra’s unique personality receding a little, becoming tamed — probably an inevitable development as the birthdays passed, fame hit, hormones and metabolisms changed, and the world tours mounted up. In spots the youthful Venezuelan spunk and fire rages unchecked, in the special zip to the brass, the razor-sharp rhythms and earthy strings. But overall the players seem a little more careful and less incandescent, sculpting skilfully glowing sounds that could almost be made by any top-flight symphony orchestra as it jets with Dudamel around the world.
Sad, in a way. But I suppose you can’t mambo all the time.