Search - Gustavo Dudamel :: RITE - Stravinsky / Revueltas (Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps; Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas)

Dudamel, Simon Bolivar YSO: Stravinsky Rite, Revueltas La No

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 06/03/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Okay, so.. ah, um ... yes, ... I'm a rabid fan of rising young star conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Yet...



I've so far felt that his recordings showed high promise without really leaving me all that deeply touched, satiated with energy and/or insight, or musically overwhelmed. I began to take it for granted that, well, maybe: Dudamel is one of those artists in the making whose live concerts offer something that is quite difficult to capture in most recording sessions, even sometimes in live concert recording sessions. I've enjoyed Dudamel's discs - who can spin any of those releases without nodding in happy approval of the Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony Orchestra? Still, not one of the releases to date grabbed such hold of me that I knew that disc was a slam dunk lasting keeper.



Now, we've arrived. Put the praiseful commentaries up in neon lights, soundtracked by megaphoned audiences applauding. This disc really convinces me. I take it as, at least the first, earliest high pinnacles of what now comes across like a boundless musical enthusiasm - from conductor and from youth orchestra. Plus, that enthusiasm sounds here to be matched to some impactful realization of sheer musical understanding. The Rite of Spring gives off a heady sense that mountain climbing and rock climbing may have much more in common with music making than we ordinarily credit, when we are opposing arts to sports. Le Sacre du Printemps, an extreme sport?



Let's start with obvious comparisons. I cannot imagine any youth orchestra, anywhere in the world, who would not be plenty happy to have had a widely distributed master tape that captured a similarly compelling-energized recorded reading of either Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps or Revueltas' La Noche de las Mayas. At least for these sessions, the SBYSO seems entirely involved and nearly unerring. My fav shelf already gave pride of shelf place to the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in their Mahler under Barshai (fifth, tenth symphonies). If you do not own those discs, what are you waiting for? Those JDP readings are so close to lightning in a recording session bottle. As Mahler, and as orchestral performance.



Now, Simon Bolivar lifts up high, so high, right alongside the JDP Mahler set. White hot. Readings like these hardly arrive from professional bands a lot of the time, let alone from youth orchestras.



Next up a notch, I can hardly imagine a strong regional band that would not be happy to play like SBYSO under Dudamel is playing here. Nearly all the big name professional outfits will equal or surpass - by a tad - the tonal depth, finesse, or bottomless virtuosity conjured up by Stravinsky in Rite. But few professional bands so far committed to disc have managed the sort of heart-felt, whole-hearted involvement that SBYSO gives this music, combined with such easeful-blistering virtuosity as we get, generously, overflowing.



Next up at notch, let's move to musical manners. Dudamel has so mastered and so internalized Stravinsky that his gear changes sound out an unlikely mix of spontaneous flow, wise ritualization (just missed by many, many, ,many a virtuoso reading now available). This gripping musical meld is capped off by the sort of brilliant, riotous color we used to regularly associate with the likes of Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia. Dudamel and Simon Bolivar never make a mis-step; yet still the piece comes off as more of a whole than many another very capable, virtuoso band reading. The fact that this music is ballet music is never quite out of mind, such is the coherence and structure of the pacing throughout.



Ditto, for the signal companion work by Revueltas. It often gets a stunning, virtuoso performance that bowls listeners over, just as the Stravinsky often does. But it sometimes seems like more folk and local color, melded to innumerable modernist techniques for writing for the expanded modern orchestra - as much coming across as stunning noise as stunning music - trailblazing, thundering out through the same wide open barn doors as the likes of Edgard Varese, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis.



Here, we get even more than brilliance and path-breaking noise as sound as music. The rhythm is key to the magic being conjured in the Revueltas, just as it seems in retrospect with the Stravinsky Rite. I dare anybody with another reading on their fav shelves to play it better as warm ritual celebration than Dudamel and Simon Bolivar.



Short of Barcelona-Catalunya, Simon Bolivar is making a bid in this recording to be considered one of the finest bands now playing in the Spanish-speaking halls of the global music world. Their startling virtuosity and free-wheeling energy are not so much the deeper, lingering surprise, as much as their deepening musicianship. !Que Viva, El Sistema!



So yes, go get the JDP in Mahler if you do not already own that set. And seriously consider adding this white hot fire cracker of a pocket rocket to the same youth orchestra shelves. The only thing that could improve this reading to my ears would be if we have a super audio surround sound mastering, waiting some day in the wings to be finished, pressed, released.



As it is, this PCM stereo disc easily rises to fancy music rig demonstration status. I bet that everybody from twelve years to twenty-two will end up spinning this one. Ipods, salute. Ear buds will never be the same again? Dudamel's Stravinsky rubs shoulders with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Boston Symphony, or with Eugene Goosens and the LSO (remastered in DVD audio), or with Antal Dorati in Detroit. I think the Revueltas simply now tops the list of available readings.



I would like to hear all the Carlos Chavez symphonies, provided we get to hear them played by Dudamel and the SBYSO serving up the sort of depth of musical internalization that is on display here in the Revueltas and in the Stravinsky. I'm hypnotized, grandpa gone cattywampus: Five Stars. Five stars. Five stars. Five stars."

A meteoric Le sacre adds to Dudamel's charismatic rise

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 06/02/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is the kind of CD that makes you rub your ears. These are kids from the lowest slums of Caracas, some of them as young as twelve. They have no right to sound this accomplished, and it's a wonder that professional musicians don't hide their heads in shame. I'm only half joking. However much is owed to the microphones, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orch. delivers a Rite of Spring that stands comparison with the best. Dudamel's reading is as energized and violently exultant as my old standard, Leonard Bernstein with the NY Phil. Except for the eerie opening solo from the bassoon and the hushed interlude before the maiden dances herself to death, every bar is hair-raising.



Up to now, I have been guilty of asking "what have you done for me lately?" in regards to Dudamel. We are past the wunderkind stage -- well, not quite -- and as the dust settles from the hype tornado, one wonders if brash exuberance will mature into something finer. Now that I've heard twenty or so concerts from him online, I know that Dudamel has both a charismatic and a callow side. Here, the two meld. This isn't a reflective or thoughtful Le sacre. It's Le sacre as performed by the Broadway cast of "Stomp!" Not that thoughtful is a completley desirable way to approach Stravinsky's barbaric masterpiece. Better to say that Dudamel has found his own style, departing from Boulez'a analystical disseciton, the composer's razor-sharp frigidity, and Maazel's virtuosity for its own sake. Dudamel feels the score viscerally, and you feel him.



Dudamel has made a crusade out of promoting the music of Mexico and South America. Here we get a different reworking of primitivism from Silvestre Revueltas, the visionary Mexican modernist who died just short of his forty-first birthday in 1940. Revueltas had heard Le sacre with open ears and offered a Latin descendant in his well known Sensamaya (Bernstein was a fan and made an early, riveting recording of it). Dudamel performs a suite taken from the 1939 film "La noche de los mayas," directed by Chano Urueta, a contemporary of the composer's who made films up to 1974. the style is crushingly primordial, and spookily reminiscent at times of Messiaen once the birds have flown south. Dudamel gives what sounds like a definitive performance -- or at the very least the best I'm likely to hear -- and since the youthful percussionists of the SBYO are incendiary, the listener won't miss the percussion cadenza added to the suite after the composer's death.



In all, this is a recording to make me believe, even more than I did, in Dudamel's potential and to celebrate the growth of an impoverished youth orchestra into a force for joy and light.



As an addendum, here are the notes for La noche de los mayas offered by the Kennedy Center online:





The suite assembled by Limantour stands as the largest in scale of all Revueltas's concert works, and the closest of them to a symphony. Its four-part structure also offers a sort of parallel to the similarly proportioned one Virgil Thomson produced from his own score for Pare Lorentz's 1937 documentary The River--a parallel in the sense that neither of these suites is a mere pastiche of fetching fragments, each being nothing less than a full-scale descriptive symphony, faithful both to symphonic structure and to the dramatic sense of the music's original function. The four movements of Revueltas's "posthumous symphony" may be summarized as follows:



I. NOCHE DE LOS MAYAS (Molto sostenuto) is an atmospheric piece, mysterious, brooding, suggesting perhaps mighty powers now dormant, images of volcanoes and pyramids. The middle section is brighter and lyrical, but the movement ends as it began.



II. NOCHE DE JARANAS (Scherzo, "Night of Revelry"). Jarana is not only a Spanish term for "revelry," but in Mexico the name of a particular dance form in which Spanish and native influences are blended. Experts in such matters suggest likenesses to the huapango, the jarabe and the son. This scherzo fairly bursts with activity and stunning colors, and is filled with surprising and frequently humorous turns. It is quite a workout for the orchestra, and for the large percussion section in particular.



III. NOCHE DE YUCATáN (Andante espressivo). The "slow movement" alludes to the Yucatán peninsula as home to the Mayans in their magnificent second period. This nocturne is not so much mystical as straightforwardly voluptuous and impassioned. The strings carry the main burden, with imaginative support from clarinets, horns and tuba. Less voluptuous but more touchingly intimate is an interlude in which a solo flute, accompanied by an Indian drum and rattle, introduces the gently melancholy tune of a Mayan song still sung in parts of Yucatán, the Xtoles, a paean to the day's end and twilight. When the strings resume the opening material they are muted, and this passage leads without pause to the final and most elaborate movement.



IV. NOCHE DE ENCANTAMIENTO (Theme and Variations, "Night of Enchantment") begins in an atomosphere of heightened tension and anticipation. After about a minute and a half comes the aforementioned cadenza devised by Enrique Diemecke, based on various works of Revueltas: material for guïro (a notched gourd, of Cuban origin) and native tambourine, recognizable as having come from the second movement of this suite; a drum figure from the Homenaje a García Lorca; a xylophone motif from Sensemayá. Once the variations get under way, the music becomes increasingly charged and frenzied. The listener is not likely to notice the transition from one variation to the next, but rather to be swept up in the almost frightening momentum and abandon of the music, as the brasses give out primordial chants and the percussion become more and more assertive, not merely punctuating the rhythm but driving the whole unstoppable and ever expanding force of the wild celebration--a grand sacrificial dance, perhaps, which, like the one at the end of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, does not so much come to an end as simply exhaust itself."