Like a Sound of Nature

(photo: Chris Christodoulou)

And the viola player was laughing.

I might be might be depriving myself of the opportunity to glutton away at C'fuckMJ, this year -- every band gets its 15 tweets of fame -- but I wasn't going to miss the musical highlight of the week:  The broadcast of Gustavo Dudamel's inaugural appearance as the conductor and musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Even though It's been a long while since I've paid serious attention to classical music, the noise around the 28-year-old Venezuelan phenom has been unavoidable.  His youth and enthusiasm, his New World origins, and his commitment to education have drawn obvious comparisons to Leonard Bernstein.  (To play catch-up, try this New York Times Magazine profile or this breezy 60 Minutes piece.)

This program opened with the premiere of a John Adams piece inspired by film noir (nicely rhythmic, rewarding in parts, limp through others), was headlined by Mahler's First.

Dudamel first gained international notice by winning a Mahler conducting competition, and while the world may not be clamoring for more takes on Mahler's symphonies -- especially the relatively short, audience-friendly First -- they can provide an interesting tool to gauge an orchestra leader's personality and ability.  Because the composer aspired to capture the whole of the universe in his works -- it suddenly occurs to me that Shiina Ringo's Karuki Zamen kuri no Hana has more than a little in common with Mahler's symphonies -- they are packed with details and given to sprawl.  It becomes a matter of which trees you highlight to signify the forest.

Klaus Tennstedt and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Mahler Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, First Movement (mp3)(buy)

Mahler enthusiasts are only slightly less annoying than fantasy sports fanatics.  Whole collections amassed around a very finite number of compositions provide endless, irreconcilable arguments.  (I own six versions of the Ninth on disc after having heard many more than that; (1) I am hardly in the league of the real enthusiasts (2) it is not my favorite symphony.)  It gets properly personal.

My horse in the race is one of the slowest.  East German Klaus Tennstedt often conducted a weak orchestra, the London Philharmonic, but he always managed to put everything right where it belonged in an inspired, cohesive way.  As he got older, his running times stretched -- this live version from 1990 lasts six minutes longer than his 1978 studio recording -- and some listeners find that dull and unnecessary.  These things are long enough as is!  But I find a contemplative intensity to them absent in more excited interpretations.  Tennstedt was sickly for a lot of the latter part of his life, and confronting the death-obsessed Mahler from the downside of health brought perspective.  Moments are savored.

This live recording, my #1 #1 (apparently now out-of-print on CD, available on DVD), also gives Tennstedt a better set of performers.  Those Chicago horns were spectacular, and through this first movement they're by turns regal, chipper, cruel, heavenly.   (I've always found the Mahler of the CSO's resident director, Sir Georg Solti, to be blunt and uninteresting.)

(Tennstedt's studio recordings of Mahler's complete symphonies are available in an 11-CD box set for a pretty amazing price.)

So how'd the kid do?

If not revelatory, Dudamel's First was very convincing.  It came out of the gate very flat.  The first movement managed to seem stiff without evoking the opening's rising-dew sluggishness.  The woodwind bird calls felt awkward and isolated.  It came together by the end, goosed by a few swells, but didn't seem to have anything to say.

The second movement changed everything.  Dudamel started it with a very pronounced tempo, as if the lower strings were dragging a heavy undercarriage.  As the upper strings and woodwinds joined, he'd allow the piece to accumulate a natural momentum; but every time the music returned to the lower strings' procession, Dudamel brought everything back to zero.  It's very bracing to erase forward progress like that; it took what's often a simple repetition in the score and imbued it with struggle.  It's a section of the symphony that can very easily fly off and be no more than pleasant.  By holding pauses and letting the momentum fall as instruments dropped out, it almost became an ode to wholeness.  When the orchestration is full, it's playtime.  Extremely impressive.

The third movement is a funeral march built on a minor chord variation of "Frere Jacques;" it's interrupted by outbursts of folk music.  The two parts can be played to co-mingle, so that one rises out of the other.  Dudamel emphasized the steadiness and solemnity of the former by putting his spirit into the latter.  He pursed his lips and rose up and came this close to doing a jig at the head of his orchestra.

While conducting, Dudamel seems less a method actor than a grown-up making faces at children in an effort to get them to react.  Through the ticktockier portions of the Adams piece, he tightened his joints and almost popped into The Robot.  But one of the great things about this kid is that, for all the energy and attention, he's not (despite this flash version of Dudamel Orchestra Hero) there to play rock star.  A lot of the last movement of Mahler's First is rock and roll, big whamboombammy stuff, and Dudamel rocked that.  But a lot of that last movement is also the tormented, dreamy syrup the composer dunks you in when you've earned both his worst and best.  And, as he had every element since the end of the first movement, Dudamel navigated his players through that very surely.

He's there to communicate the full joy of this music and seems wholly capable of doing so.  After the conductor flashed one of his peculiar expressions, the camera showed one of his viola players laughing.  I can only imagine he thanked her afterwards and held her up as an example.

In New York, Channel Thirteen is rebroadcasting the concert this Sunday at noon.  For other digital options and local listings, etc., search the schedule here.

Great Performances' site is streaming a small selection of the program, and they're selling a DVD.  Audio of the Mahler performance - not the Adams, unfortunately -- is available exclusively through (ugh) iTunes.

Classical archives is streaming two other Dudamel performances with the LA Philharmonic, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra and Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique.  PBS is offering two mp3s -- looks like the first movement of Beethoven's 5th and the fucking Nutcracker Suite - of Dudamel conducting his old Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra -- for free.

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"Review (n.): A form of online promotional activity. A portmanteau word, from "reblog" and "page view", coined mid 00s."

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I know this is weeks old and has been everywhere.  But even if you were to consider the entire history of Awesomeness as one single Earth year, this would earn its three-and-a-half minutes.

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"As I did nothing interesting yesterday I may as well tell you what Batman is up to at the moment. Batman is being AWESOME."

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"The first thing you need to know is that the internet is amazing." (via)

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"This marks the biggest collaboration between a vaguely transgressive 90s alt-rock star and a Fox sci-fi show since Shirley Manson played a killer robot on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles."

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"In between assignments, Martha earned WWII pin-up exposure in such magazines as Yank: The Army Weekly."

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Summing up the decade in music with mean, mean goodness:

"Early ’00s: Every boy band success story came with three mongoloid cousins in bleached tips. Creed dug up Kurt Cobain’s Eddie Vedder’s corpse, raped it, and spawned hundreds of hhhuruuurrgging monster babies. Heavy rock music became the macho soundtrack to movie sequels about revving motorcycles (that is, except for “real” rock music like the Vines). The Postal Service invented funk and soul for a generation. People convinced themselves they liked Sigur Ros for maybe a day.  Mid ’00s: Rock radio became a revolving door of sad, old ’90s bands releasing ballads you’ll maybe hear at your cousin’s wedding. Adult males wore eyeliner. Creed broke up, spawning the double-headed flaccid penis hydra of Alter Bridge and Scott Stapp solo records. Coldplay fucking existed. American Idol presented a sad farce of democracy even less convincing then the pathetic show that the American government puts on every four years. Bloggers got a sad, moronic superiority complex and convinced themselves that they ran the music industry—and they broke world-famous bands like Annie and the Octopus Project!  Late ’00s: The music industry and economy turned to dog shit… and then turned into that weird white dog shit. Labels handed out deals to whatever idiot famewhore had the most MySpace friends, and then churned out bloops in hopes that they’d sound good on a cell phone speaker that’s both smaller and worse-sounding than a spider’s balls. Your favorite band reformed as a balder, fatter version of itself, and became your fifth-favorite band. Rappers forgot they had to actually rap on songs. Creed got back together. Indie rock became so successful that Zooey Deschanel somehow found Ben Gibbard anything less than completely repulsive."

(I had trouble pulling quotes from that.  It'd be like drawing a dick on the Mona Lisa.  Click through , okay?)

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'Jessica Alba is really hot. Kind of. I mean, she is. In her face. But the more you learn about her, the less hot she seems. For one thing, she's not very good at acting, which is her job. And that's problematic. It's better when people are good at their jobs. Then they can take pride in what they do, and you can take pride with them. Yay! When they're bad at their jobs, it's just like, eesh. Not that Jessica Alba doesn't have millions of dollars to help ease the pain of her terrible case of The Eeshes. But, you know. And also, I read this interview with her once where she talked about how as a child she was riddled with health problems and how doctors didn't think she was going to live very long? The article was positing this fact as some kind of uplifting story about a girl who triumphed against all of the odds to be hot. "Doctors didn't think she was going to be very hot, but then it turned out later that she was hot. Here is a box of tissues for your tears of awe-struck joy." But the article had the opposite affect on me. Now whenever I see Jessica Alba, all I can think about is a bent over tiny child crippled by disease. I'm always nervous watching her, like she's going to collapse in a heap, phlegm running out of her nose, thin, watery blood foaming at her mouth, and big, watery, yellow eyes staring into the camera as she squeaks out a thin, barely audible plea. "Kill me. Please."'

tags: mahler  dudamel  

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