Classical rock star

Andrew Gumbel

• Last Updated: November 23. 2009 8:37PM UAE / November 23. 2009 4:37PM GMT

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel has said he sees the conductor as more of a collaborator than a leader. Los Angeles Times photo by Lawrence K Ho

Gustavo Dudamel may have a reputation as the world’s most wildly exuberant ambassador for classical music, but at this precise moment he has his audience in the palm of his hand and is reducing them to an absolute hush.

The scene is the Walt Disney concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, and the occasion is a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, one of the young Venezuelan conductor’s first engagements in his new job as the musical director of the LA Philharmonic.

The capacity audience has come to witness a phenomenon, a bona fide celebrity to match Hollywood’s finest – a 28-year-old wunderkind who has taken the musical world by storm like nobody since the young Leonard Bernstein.

They are not to be disappointed. Dudamel graciously accepts the rapturous applause as he springs across the stage to the conductor’s podium. Then he raises one hand above his head, closes it into a fist, and slowly brings it down to reduce the hubbub to silence so the first tender strains of the Requiem can achieve their full impact.

The effect is stunning – at least until the magic is broken by the ringing of a cell phone somewhere in the first few rows of the stalls. Undaunted, Dudamel waves his baton across his body to stop the music in its tracks. Then, without pausing to look over his shoulder or betray any sign of lost concentration, he raises his hand once more, forms that fist and recreates the moment of perfect silence to begin all over again.

Like the Requiem itself, Dudamel does not stay calm for long. As the extraordinary drama of the piece unfolds, every inch of the young maestro’s body becomes animated. He bounces up and down, throws his arms in all directions, and guides the chorus through each and every word it sings with outsize, almost cartoonishly impassioned mouthing gestures. At times – during the apocalyptic opening sequence of the Dies Irae, for example – it seems that his springy dark curls will simply fly off his head, or that his feet will take their leave from his shiny black dress shoes.

In the concluding section, Libera Me, the chorus lowers its voice to an intense prayer for deliverance from eternal death, and that magical hush returns. As the last chord sounds, Dudamel keeps everyone in a trance-like silence for 10, 20, 30 seconds. Nobody coughs, or rustles a programme, or moves so much as a muscle. Finally, the conductor lowers his head ever so slightly, the violinists begin to dip their instruments, and the silence gives way to deafening applause – and no fewer than four curtain calls.

This was the triumph the Los Angeles audience was hoping for – proof that, at least sometimes, the hype and Hollywood razzle-dazzle accompanying the arrival of a new star are more than mere hot air. Not only is Dudamel the hottest new thing in town. He is breathing new life into classical music-making, inspiring and teaching young people to follow his example and putting his own stamp on LA’s ambition to be regarded as a fully rounded cultural metropolis beyond just the bright lights of film and television.

Ever since his first concert as musical director in this city, a free night with fireworks under the stars at the Hollywood Bowl in early October, Dudamel has taken southern California by storm. His name is on billboards and the sides of buses. The city’s most famous hot dog stand, Pink’s, has come up with a creation in his honour, the Dudamel Dog – with guacamole, American and Swiss cheese, fajita mix, jalapeño slices and tortilla chips.

The LA Philharmonic has given him a dedicated website, complete with video retrospectives and a Bravo Gustavo computer game. The Disney Hall shop has his likeness splashed on T-shirts and mugs.

In the crude celebrity parlance of LA, Dudamel is, quite simply, a rock star. (Perhaps to illustrate the point, the special guests at his Hollywood Bowl debut included Jack Black, the actor and amateur rocker, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and Flea, the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.) To his Spanish-speaking fans – a big and important constituency in this city – Dudamel is, simply, “El Dude”.

His irrepressible musical talent is only part of the story. Both on the conductor’s podium and off it, Dudamel exudes an infectious energy and joy – personal qualities that give him an appeal far beyond the LA Phil’s core subscription list. He is as much a teacher as a music-maker, a role model giving hope to poor and disadvantaged kids much like those enrolled in El Sistema, the celebrated classical music training programme that nurtured him back home in Venezuela. Already, he has made an impact on the Philharmonic’s own training initiative, the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, or Yola.

All this has had a heady effect on the Philharmonic itself – an orchestra that has enjoyed one huge boost after another to its international reputation since the inauguration of Frank Gehry’s architecturally audacious Disney Hall in 2003.

“We’re just delighted – he’s marvellous,” the second violinist Guido Lamell said of Dudamel’s arrival. “He’s the real McCoy – enormously talented, highly intelligent, completely modest, brilliant, charismatic warm … Everything I can come up with in terms of nice human qualities – they are all there.

“You don’t usually find that, especially among top talents. They tend to build up a big ego. But he is completely unassuming.”

The love affair between Dudamel and the City of Angels has been going on a long time – stretching back to 2004 when Dudamel made his first big international splash by winning the Gustav Mahler conducting competition in Germany. Among those in attendance was the LA Philharmonic’s then musical director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who reported back excitedly that he had witnessed a “real conducting animal”.

The Philharmonic’s president, Deborah Borda, began her courtship of the budding young superstar right away, inviting him to Los Angeles on a regular basis and then, in early 2007, announcing his appointment as Salonen’s successor without launching the usual international search for candidates.

Borda’s relationship with Dudamel has been compared to that of an old-style Hollywood studio mogul and a star actor or actress – she has marketed him to perfection, giving her audience just enough of what they want while always leaving them hungry for more.

The roll-out began at the Hollywood Bowl (signature piece: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), then continued with his debut at Disney Hall (Mahler’s First and a new work by the minimalist American composer John Adams), followed by a packed and varied programme including the Verdi Requiem, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and more.

Borda has taken a 21st-century approach to promoting a form of music more commonly associated with the 18th and 19th centuries, spanning numerous arenas and media platforms. Just days after Dudamel’s Hollywood Bowl debut, a documentary film about El Sistema – in which he features prominently – was released on DVD. The founder of El Sistema, Jose Antonio Abreu, then launched a US-based initiative based on his work in Venezuela called the Abreu Fellows programme.

Dudamel is the superstar product of a training scheme that has given free tuition to more than a quarter of a million Venezuelans over the past 32 years. He had music in his blood from the start – his father played trombone in a salsa band in their hometown of Barquisimeto, 150 miles west of Caracas. In fact, he had ambitions to play the trombone himself, except that, as a four-year-old newly enrolled in El Sistema, his arms were too short.

He turned to the violin instead and spent his pre-teen years training with orchestras as an accomplished player. From very early on, he also harboured ambitions to conduct – imagining himself as the man with the baton as he listened to recordings of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics.

He got his first chance to conduct when he was 12, taking over for an orchestra conductor on a temporary basis. By the age of 15 he was studying conducting full time and by the age of 18 he was in charge of the jewel in the Sistema crown, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.

His age never seems to have been an obstacle to commanding the respect of his players, not even when his childhood dream came true and he found himself as guest conductor of the formidable Vienna Philharmonic a few years ago. The reason for that no doubt lies in his irrepressible personality, and in his emphasis first and foremost on the music. Dudamel has told interviewers he sees the conductor not as a leader, with the musicians acting as his subordinates, so much as a bridge between the composer and the players. In other words, he is just one collaborator among many.

It is an attitude the musicians seem to love. Lamell, the LA Philharmonic violinist, told how, a couple of years ago, he invited Dudamel to his home for an evening of chamber music with a handful of orchestra members. Dudamel said yes, an answer Lamell took only semi-seriously at the time. A few months later, however, Dudamel duly showed up at Lamell’s family house near the beach in Santa Monica, bringing his violin and all his infectious enthusiasm. “It was absolutely delightful, a wonderful evening,” Lamell recalled. “There’s no downside to his celebrity, because it has not affected him at all.”