Gustavomania!
by Nathan Walpow
So Los Angeles and environs is all atwitter (and probably a-Twitter) about the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel (who I keep calling “Duhamel” because of this man-crush I have) as music director of the Philharmonic, and last night was the gala opening concert at Disney Hall. Which included, for the unwashed masses, a simulcast of the festivities both at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and on the Music Center Plaza (you know, where the fountain is). They had a lottery for slots to view the simulcast, and by cleverly entering under both Andrea’s e-mail address and my own, I managed to snag a couple.
Upon arrival we were immediately impressed by a cadre of tuxedoed men and low-on-the-top-long-on-the-bottom-gowned women who were making their way to the hall from the same cheap lot we parked in. Mingled with the folks like us carrying our cushions and blankets and picnic bags, they made for a nice community vibe; though I suspect some of them didn’t know about the simulcast and viewed us as slightly upscale street people.
There weren’t any signs to tell us where to go; we kept walking up to people who seemed like they knew what was going on and being pointed in vague directions. But eventually we got our blue wristbands and found our spot on the plaza, with a magnificent view of a giant TV screen with the resolution of a late-1980s computer monitor. They were rotating slides of various Music Center-related activities, with captions that might as well have been in Klingon. But then it got dark and then the music started and everyone was enthralled.
More or less. The first piece was a world premiere by John Adams called City Noir. Some of it was too discordant for my taste, and some of it sounded like bad Gershwin; evidently the word noir signifies lots of honking saxophone and ride cymbal and jazz-ish bass, whether or not they have anything to do with what the rest of the orchestra is doing. But toward the end, as (to my mind) the parts began to meld more organically, it all came together into a rather rousing anthem.
(By the way, no one has ever responded to the question posed in the last paragraph of this, FourStory’s one-hundredth article; the answer: it’s a John Adams piano concerto. You can still win the prize; e-mail us.)
The camera work was excellent (though plagued by the abovementioned resolution problem); lots of closeups of individual players, letting you see what it is they’re actually doing with the instruments to produce those sweet sounds, and of sections too, with the horn shots simply gorgeous. And, saints be praised, they didn’t overdo the coverage of Gustavo; he was on-screen for no more of the time than necessary, and in that time you could see the charisma and the musical intensity and all that stuff that got the Phil to hire him; it was just enough to make you wonder how a guy half your age could accomplish all that, while you ... but enough of me.
There was an intermission, and then there was Mahler. His First Symphony, to be exact, the “Titan.” I spent the first two movements lying on the ground, looking up at the stars, not really listening to the music. (True fact: If a star appears to be very close to the Chandler’s roof and its apparent movement is in the right direction, you can actually watch it disappear from sight.) Sometime during the second movement there was a weird noise over to my left, a crinkling mostly, and I looked over and there was a guy changing the bags in the overflowing garbage cans. It took him a long time to do so, because stuff kept falling on the ground, and of course this took me out of the moment, because here was real life intruding, here was a guy working nights emptying garbage cans to make a living, while people like me could listen to music and people like the ones inside Disney Hall could play dress-up.
I got off the ground for the third and fourth movements of the Mahler. The third was my favorite; it’s like the illegitimate spawn of “Frère Jacques” and Jewish wedding music. Then it was over, and so was the fourth (with its callback to the I Spy theme, established in the first), and the applause began. It went on for fifteen minutes or so, and on the screen Dudamel seemed truly gracious and honestly into sharing the adulation with the orchestra members and just a little overwhelmed. They finally let him off the stage, and we got to see some backstage activity, the conductor hugging his musicians mostly, and a little interview with a radio station, and the fancy people in their fancy clothes didn’t get to see that, so there’s a win for the middle class.
Finally the unreadable slides came back, and we made our way past the post-concert dinner location, where the band was playing first some Latin thing and then some miserable Coldplay song (someone make them go away, please?), and then the evening was over. For us at least. The fancy people partied on into the night, I suppose, and the custodial guy no doubt went on cleaning his garbage cans.
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