Thursday, May 07, 2020

Gustavo Dudamel is hugely overrated

The first time I heard him, I think it was on Shostakovich's Tenth. Pretty decent on the second movement. Playing it too slow gets you fired from my list of good conductors.

I actually blogged about it, in fact. Anyway, here's the clip.

The Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony under Gustavo Dudamel (who I heard live in Dallas several years ago):



Man, that just bristles!

But, since then? Plenty to not like.

I mentioned in that previous blog post that, hearing him on the Mahler 2, he just doesn't get it. I thought maybe it was just Mahler, and him being too young.

But no.

Listen to this Bolero. You'd think a Latino conductor like Dudamel wouldn't have a semi-somnolent (and semi may be being generous) take, but he does.



Blech. Two full minutes or more longer than many takes.

Or, from the older repertoire, heard recently on Dallas classical station WRR? Eroica, at least the funeral march from it.

I'm not sure if this is the performance played on WRR, and this is only a snippet.



And, it can't all be the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Look at the good take he did on Shosty. That was with it. And his craptacularness on Bolero was with the Vienna Phil.

And it can't all be callow youth. He's nearly 40 now.

It's Dudamel. Why he couldn't bring even 60 percent of the Shostakovich energy to Bolero???? (And yet, he can have a reasonably interpreted 66-minute Beethoven Ninth with a generally very good finale. It's not fantastic, but it's above average and it's certainly not phoned in.)

Maybe he got spoiled by being named LA Phil head, to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen, before he was even 30. Or maybe he spoiled himself by resting on his laurels?

I think that's probably part of it. The Shostakovich? That was before he was named to head the LA Phil. The other stuff? All after the appointment. His Mahler, at least on the Second, appears to have gotten worse as he's gotten older. In general, the opening movements sound not stately, but ponderous, in various performances.

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