LA Philharmonic/Dudamel review: Intoxicating sounds of La-la land
The Los Angeles Philharmonic has a century-long tradition of virtuoso music-making and it opened its brief Barbican residency as if determined to prove that it remains one of the world’s most intoxicating orchestras.
Its Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, started with something Latin American, Alberto Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes, predominantly exuberant but suffused with an expansive lyricism, most radiantly in a series of vivid instrumental solos.
Next came John Adams’s thoroughly North American Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, written for last night’s soloist, the extravagantly gifted Chinese pianist Yuja Wang. Flinging out phrases for the orchestra to chase, she might have been playing “catch me if you can”, and she needed every ounce of pianistic legerdemain to work her way through Adams’s sidestepping rhythms.
Sometimes the results sounded like music composed for player piano, or what Béla Bartók might have written for a stride pianist, but Wang surmounted very challenge. And then she played three encores.
In Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the orchestra’s sound was so bright it was almost dazzling. I could feel the double basses in the pit of my stomach, and even the very few moments of silence had the impact of a slap in the face. On the podium, a series of violent electric shocks seemed to be coursing through Dudamel’s body, yet he maintained perfect control over every finely etched detail.
Until November 20 (barbican.org.uk)
