April 16, 2010
Rehearsing The MIT Symphony Orchestra
and
April 17, 2010
In discussion with composers John Harbison and Tod Machover (moderated by journalist Maria Hinojosa)
Kresge Auditorium
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
As an example of what El Sistema, Venezuela’s brilliant and visionary music education program has produced, he is not only an individual musical wonder but a representative of a social one as well. A brief film biography that was shown before both events gave an overview of El Sistema, and Dudamel was able to effectively amplify on it in answering questions during the panel discussion.
It was a real pleasure to watch the Venezuelan conducting phenom Gustavo Dudamel rehearse with The MIT Symphony Orchestra. He seems to be a fun, sweet and natural guy and conveys all of that exceedingly well to the orchestra and to the audience. He’s vibrant and electric in his gestures, but his musical sophistication extends well beyond his obvious charm.
From what he indicated to the orchestra in rehearsing Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 (“Prague”) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, it is clear that he wants to identify the source of, and have his players go to, the root of what’s enjoyable in music. On the surface, that expectation may seem like an obvious one, but it is not. Dudamel is an exciting director and conveys vibrancy in his directorial gestures. But, more than that, he conveys, through guidance and instruction, a pedagogy of vitality which is extremely interesting.
Go to the root of musical enjoyment and you will find musical vitality, he seems to say. And, though easily said, it is not so easily done.
Even though the world of contemporary classical music is filled with innovators, it is far less frequent that one finds a musical phenomenon with the vitality of Dudamel. And less frequent than that one finds a music director who not only exhibits, but tries to convey an approach to, such vitality and seeks to give a path to generating it.
The MIT Symphony Orchestra is a decent university orchestra, but it is by no means a professional ensemble. Instead of harping on issues about wrong notes, Dudamel chose to emphasize the quality of the music itself. From the beginning of the rehearsal, he gave the orchestra a workout in tonality and phrasing. With the first violin section he went over, repeatedly, a few passages in the Mozart, and emphasized the need to build tension between the articulated sounds and the silences that stretch between them. He spoke beautifully and poetically about the quality of sound produced when one cultivated and honed that tension.
I remember, some years ago, seeing a film on TV about Tina Packer and Dennis Krausnick, the artistic directors of Shakespeare and Company, a noted theatre and center for theatrical education in Lenox, MA, working with new students. At the start of their training, there was a general meagerness and incomprehensibility in the way these students declaimed Shakespeare. Though I listened to all the Elizabethan words, I really didn’t hear many of them, and just did not get what they meant. Over the course of an hour, the film followed the deliberate and painstaking process by which Packer and Krausnick tutored the students to add depth and feeling to the lines. In the end, the film showed the same students declaiming the same speeches with which the program had begun. The change was remarkable. All of a sudden, I heard words with meanings and it was pure delight.
The same was true of Gustavo Dudamel’s work with The MIT Symphony Orchestra. Before he began to work with them, their sound was OK but somewhat thin. As I listened to, and watched, him massage, shape, prod, nudge and joke them through the phrases, I heard a new texture emerge. Not all of the technical details were worked out in this short time, but the sound that began to surface was entirely different.
What’s more – it was fun! Dudamel is a gas. He’s endearing because he seems to love what he does and to feel it down to his bones. This was particularly evident in the Rimsky-Korsakov, a robust classic in the Hispanic style. Dudamel gestured and danced and stomped. It was a pure delight.
Just as delightfully from a personal point of view, he announced beforehand that he had never conducted the piece. It is not so good for a conductor to admit this, he said as he turned to the audience – but this was just part of the overall charm.
Dudamel is a product of an amazing development in Venezuela of the past several decades. El Sistema is a nationwide effort, initiated by José Antonio Abreu, to bring children – particularly poor and disenfranchised ones – from all over the country – into the world of classical music. It’s hard to believe, but apparently 250,000 children have been involved. This has spawned student orchestras all over the place, and, in Dudmel’s telling, it sounds like a miraculous social force. Dudamel, himself, started on the violin and graduated to conducting when he was in his teens. He remains the music director of The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Venezuela, and also, in 2009, was named the music director of The Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The day after the rehearsal, Dudamel appeared in a panel with noted composers John Harbison and Tod Machover, who are on the faculty at MIT. Maria Hinojosa (of public radio fame), moderated a discussion which gravitated mostly to questions about El Sistema and speculations about possible implementations of it in this country. (And, in fact, in his first year year in LA, apparently, Dudamel has been very active stimulating similar community-based programs for children there.)
Machover spoke warmly and personally about his getting his initial love of music from his mother, a creative and individualistic piano teacher.
Harbison, whose reputation extends far and wide in the contemporary music world, was modest and down to earth in his comments about the immediate demands of musical creativity.
When, however, Harbison spoke personally about the deep influence upon him of Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts during the 1960s – Machover energetically corroborated the feeling – he put forward the idea that Dudamel would be the obvious choice for doing something similar in the current era. The idea exhibited true enthusiasm from both Harbison and Machover and brought strong agreement from the audience.
Both Harbison and Machover are innovators in modern classical music and practice the particular forms of invention that go along with their compositional endeavors. But they are no fools – in Dudamel they see a kind of performer’s vitality that is hard to come by very often and which, in a short time, has re-energized the entire landscape of contemporary classical music. They, along with so many others, appear to be galvanically drawn to this young man and his musical verve, his artistic vision and his personal charm.
– BADMan
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