Dudamel’s Disney send-off became more than a mere party

When Gustavo Dudamel instructs the Los Angeles Philharmonic to stand at a curtain call, the players stand. He motions, sit; they sit.

Sunday afternoon, they wouldn’t stand. Again and again, they stubbornly refused. With an encouraging smile, Dudamel took the concertmaster’s arm, gently lifting him to his feet, but he sat back down when no one in the orchestra followed. Dudamel never looks nonplussed. He looked dumbfounded.

This was Dudamel’s moment, his last concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall as L.A. Phil’s music and artistic director. Those who were standing comprised the capacity audience, their cheers deafening. The orchestra lustily applauded like everyone else.

It turns out that Dudamel is both adept at saying goodbye and just as good at not meaning it. Eras don’t end for him so much as become transition points. There was reportedly Champagne flowing in the dressing room after Sunday’s matinee, but the L.A. Phil needs to buy its bubbly in bulk. Dudamel’s contract continues through the summer, and the orchestra will still see plenty of him. In August he takes the L.A. Phil on tour to the Proms in London and the Edinburgh International Festival in advance of four big nights at the Hollywood Bowl.

Dudamel then returns to Disney in December to conduct the L.A. Phil, though with three lofty new titles to his name: Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, L.A. Phil Diane and M. David Paul artistic and cultural laureate and Michael Eisner founding director and conductor laureate of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA). He’s going to need new business cards the size of an iPhone Pro Max to fit all that in.

But the effort to get his orchestra on its feet was not an idle gesture. Dudamel’s Disney “finale,” however momentous, lacked nearly all the trappings of pomp. In a Thursday night marathon, he paid tribute to the orchestra members, giving 17 players solos in various concerto movements. The one bit of unavoidable pomp was Dudamel conducting the premiere of John Williams’ “Bravo Gustavo,” commissioned by the L.A. Phil and featuring four solo trumpets — Thomas Hooten, Christopher Still, Jeffrey Strong and James Witt — in a joyous, triumphant celebration of what has become a close friendship by the master of cinematic joyous triumph.

The program itself was a potpourri of surprise, given what some of the players came up with. The long list of 11 mostly rarities featured 13 soloists. It began with a madcap movement from a bassoon concerto by Rossini (with Whitney Crockett as deadpan soloist). Among other curiosities were Matthew Howard and Joseph Pereira cheerfully pulverizing Philip Glass’ Fantasy Concerto for Two Timpanists and Orchestra, as well as Boris Allakhverdyan suavely ghosting jazz legend Artie Shaw in his Clarinet Concerto. There were too many to list and it’s too bad because this became a one-of-a-kind showcase of orchestral versatility, which ended with the premiere of another new Dudamelian orchestral tribute, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Mujer Arena.”

Patrons clap for Gustavo Dudamel as he conducts his final concert Sunday in Disney Hall.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The final subscription weekend concerts featured two large-scale works for the orchestra and an indispensable Los Angeles Master Chorale. John Adams’ “Harmonium” operates on questioning, shifting moods of introspection, humility and awe. In Venezuela composer Antonio Estévez’s “Cantata Criolla,” a song contest between a macho Venezuelan troubadour and the devil leads to the spiritual ecstasy of exorcism.

When Dudamel signed his contract to be music director of the L.A. Phil, he said his first priority was to conduct “Cantata Criolla.” He did so in his first season to help inaugurate a new festival he called “America and the Americans.” That festival idea formally and informally has been a thread throughout Dudamel’s 17 L.A. Phil seasons, at Disney and the Hollywood Bowl and YOLA, as well as on tours to Europe, Asia and Latin America.

There was also surely symbolism in beginning this Disney occasion with a work by Adams. Dudamel’s first Disney concert as music director opened with the premiere of Adams’ “City Noir,” the composer having just been appointed the orchestra’s creative consultant and a composer to whom Dudamel has become deeply committed over the years. His first concert at Lincoln Center as music director of the New York Philharmonic in September will open with Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls,” in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Written in 1980, Adam’s score “Harmonium” is ethereal and heavy in the choral settings of unsettling poems by John Donne (“Negative Love”) and Emily Dickinson (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “Wild Nights”). Adams does not stop for meaning, his early minimalist style causing the words to flow over you whether in somber reflection or the wildness of wild nights that do, indeed, stop for death.

Dudamel first conducted it at the Hollywood Bowl, where it washed over the amphitheater like a mist. In the immediacy of Disney, it sunk in as wondrous reflection on Donne’s line: “Though I speed not, I cannot miss.”

Estévez’ “Cantata Criolla” is a Venezuelan classic from 1954 but little known outside the country, despite having been championed by Aaron Copland as part of his Pan-American musical advocacy. The lushly poetic text by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba happens to have been written by the grandfather of one of Dudamel’s closest collaborators, film and theater director Alberto Alvero, who directed the L.A. Phil “Die Walküre” last month.

Dudamel’s 2010 performance of Cantata Criolla” was a theatrical event devised by Arvelo that included staging and a film and an introductory reading of a text by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, “América,” read by actors Helen Hunt, Edgar Ramirez and Erich Wildpret.

Members of YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) perform during Gustavo Dudamel’s final concert Sunday in Disney Hall as L.A. Phil music director.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

This time there was no film, no lighting and not much theater, Dudamel relying on the sheer intensity of the music. Rather than incantation, “América” was given dramatic veracity, enacted by an irresistible sextet of YOLA musicians, who also happen to be budding thespians. Their ages ranged from 10 to 20. Arriaga’s poem is a long series of names, phrases, lines from politicians and writers that encapsulate America. When a young child intones with arresting passion Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” we are made aware that the best minds of our generation will not let us stop them, period.

Gustavo Dudamel exits the Walt Disney Hall stage Sunday.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Without a break, Dudamel began Estévez’s complex cantata, which he conducted from memory, with a searing fury that did not let up for 35 minutes. The two vivid soloists were tenor Anthony León as the cocky troubadour and baritone Eleomar Cuello as the cocky devil. Hopeful adrenaline triumphed over evil but only with help from above. The marvelous Master Chorale marvelously set the moody scene for triumph.

The “Dude” who conducted “Cantata Criolla” 16 years ago was a youthful advocate, barely older than the oldest now in YOLA. The Dudamel who led this “Cantata Criolla” is now a messenger, and Sunday’s concert was not a party but a mission.

It was recorded and will be released only on vinyl as a limited-edition two-LP set and available next month only at the L.A. Phil store or ordered online.