That addictive website Arts & Letters Daily recently posted links to a collection of articles that expressed sympathy for the brilliant young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel _ and he needs it. He has fallen victim to what might be called the Obama Syndrome.
JOHN ADAMS: City Noir. Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Deutsche Grammophon DG Concerts (digital download)
His appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic received the kind of press coverage that might have been given a UFO landing in Washington, DC. He was to be a miracle worker, a magical presence that would lure audiences back into the concert hall and put classical music back on the map for younger listeners.
But, during his recent tour of the eastern US, his aura dimmed a little. The series of concerts he gave wasnt exactly his Katrina, but the critics did point out a fluffed detail here and a slightly superficial interpretation there, and there was the occasional tone of disappointment.
He fell short of utter perfection.
Ridiculous. No conductor is at his inspired best for every performance, and the recordings he has made over the past year or so, some of the best ones recorded live at a single concert so that there was no possibility to eliminate shortcomings in the editing room, make it clear that he is a major artist. Take this one, for example.
The American composer John Adams wrote City Noir for Dudamel's inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when it shared the programme with his very good performance of Mahler's First Symphony (discussed in this column some months back). It was the second symphonic portrait of their city that the LA Philharmonic has premiered recently, together with Arvo Part's Fourth Symphony (Los Angeles), performed when Esa-Pekka Salonen was still music director.
While Part's symphony was often ethereal and religiously tinged (he took the angels of the city's name literally), Adams's three-movement piece is a sensual and brilliantly scored evocation of its pop-culture side, especially movie music and the kind of sultry, dark-toned scoring, with intrusions of nervous jazz, that gives film noir so much of its atmosphere.
In his note that accompanies this downloaded recording, Adams writes that the idea for the piece was suggested to him by Kenneth Starr's Dream books, which chronicle the social history of Los Angeles.
His idea was to compose music that conveyed ``the tenor and milieu of the late 40s and early 50s as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us.''
He goes on to explain that he had in mind not only the moody scores for those shadowy movies, but also the genre of ``jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes as back as far as the early 1920s.''
The idea obviously inspired him, because City Noir is thrilling listening. Adams is an ingenious orchestrator who conjures sounds of the most subtle emotional colouring from the ensemble. After the aggressive opening of the first movement (called The City and Its Double, in reference to Antonin Artaud's concept of the dual nature of the theatre _ the thing itself and the way audiences experience it through their senses, here applied to the city as a physical entity and as an emotional experience), the music subsides (at 0:33) into a jittery texture of clicking percussion, scurrying winds, low string pizzicatos and other fleeting sounds that the composer likens to a ``late-night empty street scene''. It gathers force and dynamism, especially after a saxophone joins in at about 3:00, until a very cinematic-sounding climax precipitates a collapse into more subdued but uneasy night music, with what sounds like a quotation from Hier ist Friede, the last of Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder, at about 5:15.
At first listening it is Adams's virtuosity at creating ear-hijacking sound structures that makes the strongest impression. Listen to the way he uses Morse Code-like wind chatter to bend the mood of the long-lined string melody at 6:30 of the first movement, and the way he elaborates this idea a few minutes later. At the opening of the second movement (The Song is for You), astringent string chords melt delectably into warm string sonorities, and the mid-movement eruptions of jazz from the saxophone and especially the trombone are hair-raising.
Further hearings allow the music's strong sense of continuity to come through, and with it an appreciation of the way the composer integrates cinematic passages with introspective music that work quite differently on the emotions.
Dudamel is completely in his element with this piece, putting it across with a Bernstein-like flair for its pop music punch. The Los Angeles musicians, who know as much about film music as any players anywhere, give it their all. The sound on the digital download is good enough to let you understand the wild applause at the conclusion.
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