Three Weeks in, Dudamel Is Killing It

The Dudamera at the New York Philharmonic hurtled into its third week with a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 that, for all its brassy thrills and crash-bang climaxes, nurtured a refined soul. As I’ve noted, Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s freshly crowned podium prince, can let the gongs resound and the trumpets blare like nobody’s business. “I know we are afraid, because it can get very loud,” he told the players during a rehearsal last week. “But don’t worry.” And they didn’t. Yet the excitement he brought to Geffen Hall in concert relied not on volume and bombast but on everything else: the pliant charm of a ballroom waltz dissolving into a heavy-booted village dance. The seductive catch of the breath before the next downbeat. The silky sound of the violins playing a sentimental tune until raw desire bursts out into the open. The shimmering hush of the strings beneath the harp in the Adagietto.

Mahler’s symphony paints a vast landscape, and in the first of the Philharmonic’s five performances, you could hear it with the clarity of an Alpine summer morning. Warm, weightless themes rose like thermals, shaking loose a shower of staccato droplets in the woodwinds. The third movement’s opening horn solo, played by newcomer David Cooper, cast a golden light over the hall. And even though I’m flitting around from detail to detail out of order, each of these glints took their place in a long and fluid arc. At every moment, you could feel Dudamel’s multilayered control — over the pacing, careening tempo changes, and the complicated sense of spaciousness. 

There’s almost never just one thing going on in Mahler’s Fifth. Moods clash; serenades and angry outbursts overlap. The epic and the banal compete for our attention, and a good conductor helps us to hear it all happening at once. Like the Old Masters in Auden’s poem, Dudamel doesn’t forget that every shattering event “must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

Amid all this panoramic delirium, the Philharmonic sounded tight and refreshed, its timing precise, its timbre warm. In recent years, the musicians have adjusted to an influx of new members, an effectively new home, an all but absent music director, and then no music director at all. A little raggedness might be expected. Instead, they’ve settled into the acoustics of Geffen’s rebuilt auditorium and kept their esprit de corps tended for the new boss. If all of that survives the flush of these passionate first weeks, New York’s hometown band could once again become what it should have been all along: essential.

The New York Philharmonic will perform the Mahler Fifth through September 29.