From Varèse to Gershwin and a Ravel premiere, Dudamel does it all with Philharmonic
It started with a Parisian in America, and it ended with An American in Paris. But it was really about a Venezuelan in New York.
Gustavo Dudamel made a rare visit to his orchestra-to-be Thursday night, energetically leading the New York Philharmonic in works by Varèse, Ravel and Gershwin. The occasion was of course attended by fanfares, from a police siren in Varèse’s Amériques to taxi horns in Gershwin’s French travelogue.
It was to have been a double-star event, pairing the much-admired conductor and future music director of the Philharmonic with the even more popular Chinese-American pianist Yuja Wang, performing both of Ravel’s piano concertos on the same program. The French composer was born 150 years ago last Friday.
Adding still more luster to the occasion was the world premiere of a recently discovered fragment by Ravel, the Prélude et Danse from a projected cantata, Sémiramis, composed early in his career.
When illness forced Wang to withdraw, the Philharmonic replaced the concertos on the program with two familiar Ravel pieces for orchestra, the Suite from Ma Mère l’Oye and the Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloë. The Sémiramis music was unveiled as scheduled.
In Los Angeles, which is still Dudamel’s base for a little longer, a frequently heard question about actors is, “Can he carry the show?” The answer Thursday was yes, even bereft of his star soloist, Dudamel could carry the show.
His lucid, attentive direction of Amériques kept that famously cacophonous piece on track. The immense orchestra reveled in the sudden crescendos and stuttering rhythms, not to mention the sounds produced by, count them, eleven percussionists.
For this, the first piece he composed after arriving in his adopted home country, Varèse used the plural form in the title, as if to indicate the music was not simply an Ivesian street scene or even a portrait of one nation, but an evocation of, as he said, “discoveries – new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.”
Even the notorious siren was there not as a touch of local color but as a musical instrument of infinitely variable pitch, not limited to the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Like the many composers whom this piece influenced, Dudamel focused on Amériques as a composition, not an avant-garde manifesto, and for once Varèse’s musical intentions came through as clearly as that howling siren.
Anything that could successfully follow Amériques would have to be something completely different, and it’s hard to imagine anything more different than Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, originally composed for two children to play at one piano. The composer’s luminous orchestration used about a third as many players as Varèse did, but achieved effects from infinitely tender to dazzling, and rose to real splendor in the closing movement, “Apotheosis: the Fairy Garden.”
The conductor was in “Uncle Gustavo” mode throughout, gently shaping the “Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty,” “Tom Thumb” and “Conversations of Beauty and the Beast,” and enjoying the racket of Chinese-style percussion in “Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas.”
The European fascination in that era with cultures to the east also gave rise to this program’s novelty item, the fragment of Sémiramis. Composed in about 1902, apparently with an eye on the Prix de Rome competition at the Paris Conservatoire, this music had just one performance, a read-through in the orchestra class of Paul Taffanel. The score was lost for a hundred years, and then lay inexplicably unperformed for another 20, until Thursday night.
Dudamel conducted this new-old piece, like all the others on the program except Amériques, from memory, emphasizing the deep gloom of the opening pages for low instruments, and the oriental percussion that a contemporary observer noticed in that long-ago performance under Taffanel.
Ravel, like other young French composers of that era, felt the eastward pull of Russian composers such as Borodin and Balakirev. But Sémiramis also seemed to bear the stamp of Bizet’s Carmen in its bold string phrasing, impassioned cello solo and persistent habanera rhythm. At five minutes’ duration and more of a curiosity than a major addition to the Ravel canon, it at least offered a glimpse of a future master emerging from his conservatory cocoon.
The orchestra’s ranks swelled again for the spectacular Daphnis et Chloë suite. No doubt it was orchestral virtuosity on this level that inspired Gershwin to request composing lessons from Ravel, who famously advised the young American to compose “good Gershwin” instead of “bad Ravel.”
The Philharmonic, too, was pleased to display its own virtuosity in the watery ripple of woodwinds, the glowing brass and the soaring strings of the ballet’s “Daybreak” movement. Tender solos for flute and violin contrasted with robust strings in the lovers’ “Pantomime.” And Dudamel drove his fast machine to the limit, with whirling winds and rat-a-tat percussion, in the breathtaking “General Dance.”
How was the would-be pupil going to follow that? Ravel might have said, let Gershwin be Gershwin, and that’s pretty much what Dudamel did, although the excitement of Daphnis may have caused him to push the tempo of the American’s Parisian ramble a little too hard at first. (“A New Yorker in Paris,” said my companion.)
But one was pleased at last to kick back and savor the piece’s indelible “nostalgia” theme—lonely in a solo trumpet, golden in trombones, sensuous in strings, triumphant in the closing moments—and to tap along with a jazzy dance that popped up out of nowhere.
Varèse composed Amériques in 1918-22, and revised it in 1927. Gershwin came along a year later and composed An American in Paris. And that Franco-American spaghetti came full circle, in New York, in 2025.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. nyphil.org
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