The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2024–2025 season at Walt Disney Concert Hall is underway. Yet following last weekend’s opening program, the orchestra is vanishing for two weeks to tour to New York City’s Carnegie Hall and Bogotá, Colombia.
It’s a strange way to begin Gustavo Dudamel’s penultimate season as music and artistic director in Los Angeles. But at least things got off to a strong start.
Leading off the concert and season on Thursday, Oct. 3, was another potent LA Phil world premiere from composer Gabriela Ortiz, who has been carving out a substantial legacy of her own while serving as curator for the orchestra’s ongoing Pan-American Music Initiative. Her new piece is called Dzonot, a Mayan word that translates to “abyss” in English or “cenote” in Spanish. (The Spanish word traces its origins to a series of underground rivers and caves throughout Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.) It’s a 31-minute concerto for cellist Alisa Weilerstein that uses elaborate yet easily grasped means to convey a simple message: Preserve natural environments in the face of climate change.
Ortiz’s piece begins with a burst of sonic glitter before creating a beautiful shimmering environment with toppings of color from the piano. The cello starts to sing, along with flutes suggesting birdcalls. All of that gives way to Ortiz’s urge to groove in the second movement, “El ojo del Jaguar.” The cello makes percussive sounds symbolizing the tread of a jaguar, matching the workout going on within the actual percussion section (whose list of instruments occupies several inches of print in the program). Such correspondence between soloist and orchestral texture occurs frequently. Later, in the third movement, the winds produce the impression of swirling water. Ortiz also gives Weilerstein plenty of solo cadenzas in which to flash some technique.
One can only hope that Dudamel’s successor at the LA Phil will keep at least some of the music Ortiz has been creating on commission. At the very least, we have the orchestra’s recording of three Ortiz pieces — including a terrific performance of her thrill-packed ballet Revolución diamantina — which was released in June.
You likely wouldn’t have known about Ortiz’s new concerto by casually browsing the LA Phil’s website, which, like the website of just about every other American orchestra, zeroes in on one presumably saleable aspect of each concert. Hence the program’s title: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream With Dudamel.”
This isn’t to belittle Felix Mendelssohn’s miraculous creation, starting with his concert overture, inspired by Shakespeare’s comedy and written when the composer was just 17. More than a decade later, Mendelssohn would pick up where he left off as a wunderkind and compose thoroughly inspired incidental music for the rest of the play.
The LA Phil performed it all brilliantly, even the tiny squibs of music placed in between passages of Shakespeare. There were swift tempos and flowing lyrical stretches. The unified strings and winds made even the hair-raising pace of the Scherzo sound easy — which it isn’t. A small group of women from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, along with soprano Jana McIntyre and mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny, made properly sweet work of the brief vocal contributions from the fairies.
The score could have stood on its own, but there were extramusical additions to this performance. Director Alberto Arvelo — who worked on the LA Phil’s recent productions of Fidelio and Das Rheingold — staged things with a light hand, limiting the set to a few black boxes in back of the orchestra for the narrator (Dudamel’s wife, actress María Valverde) to recline on. Twin images of 18th- and 19th-century paintings inspired by Shakespeare’s play were projected on the walls of Disney Hall (with the images on the right reversed from those on the left). For a local Hollywood touch during Mendelssohn’s famous Wedding March, scenes from Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film version of the play were projected.
Valverde spoke the text in rapid-fire Castilian. This is the second time in recent weeks that Dudamel has utilized a family member in performance; his son Martín did the narration for The Carnival of the Animals at the Hollywood Bowl in September. When the conductor said he wanted to spend more time with his family, he wasn’t kidding.
For non-Spanish speakers, there was a distancing effect created by all this. The English supertitles could barely keep up with Valverde, and depending upon where you were seated, the suspended loudspeakers obscured parts of the projections. After a while, I found myself tuning out the content of the texts and simply listening to the music of Valverde’s lovely speaking voice, just as one would savor the superb playing of the orchestra.
