Gustavo Dudamel

December 1, 2016 at PST

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition

An impressionistic masterpiece, conducted by Dudamel. The maestro explores Mussorgsky’s images and promenades in this glorious orchestration, brought to vivid life via the cool brass and uncanny string sections of the Wiener Philharmonic. “The Old Castle” sounds as mysterious and sensual as ever in this excellent reading.

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August 31, 2023 at PDT

Rachmaninoff: The Piano Concertos & Paganini Rhapsody

There are few finer places in which to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s birth than Los Angeles, the city in which the composer himself once lived. Over two consecutive weekends in February 2023, Yuja Wang recorded all four of his piano concertos, plus the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, before sellout audiences at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Some pianists perform the complete sonatas, but to have recorded the complete concertos—that’s something cool,” Wang tells Apple Music Classical.

It’s also an impressive feat, considering the emotional and technical demands of these works, all of which Wang takes in her stride (she’s performed the fiendish “Rach 3” more than 70 times.) “Every concerto has a color, each has a vibe of its own,” she says. “When you play them in one go, you realize just how rich and deep this repertoire is; each concerto creates a different world—you never get tired.”

Rachmaninoff himself performed these showpieces and it’s his grasp of the piano’s capabilities that shines through each concerto. “What I love about his playing is that it’s so classic and transparent,” says Wang. “The phrasing is very refined and sincere, and that’s what I’m trying to bring out: not the clichéd, golden Hollywood kind of playing but the classiness, the nobleness of Rachmaninoff.”

Read on, as Yuja Wang takes us on a personal tour of Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and the Paganini Rhapsody.

Piano Concerto No. 2
“This is the most popular of the Rachmaninoff concertos and it’s the only one that starts with the piano. In the others, the orchestra invites me in, but here I’m completely alone, so it’s a great way to draw audiences into the recording.

“The melodies are so heart-wrenching, yet his phrasing and his dynamics are extremely classical. Once you delve into the key changes and the structure, you see how inventive Rachmaninoff is: Hear how the strings at the opening of the second movement range across keys, moving from C Minor to E Major, for example.

“The concerto is the first work he wrote following the failure of the First Symphony, and Nikolai Dahl, the psychiatrist who helped Rachmaninoff through his depression, was also a viola player. That’s why the second theme of the third movement is written for viola—and it’s so beautiful.”

Piano Concerto No. 1
“Completed when he was 18 and a student at Moscow Conservatoire, the First Concerto is filled with chromaticism. The opening of the ‘Vivace’ first movement is very episodic, it’s like: ‘OK, here we have this little agitato mood, now here’s a little lyrical mood,’ and that makes it extremely challenging to play.

“The ‘Andante’ second movement is wonderfully reflective and full of fairyland color as it develops, while the third movement is rhythmically brilliant. Rachmaninoff later revised the Concerto, changing its textures and rethinking its form, and it’s this later 1917 version I play here.”

Piano Concerto No. 4
“Rachmaninoff revised this piece, too—the one you hear here is the last version he wrote—but even though he simplified the textures it’s still very hard to play. It makes real demands on your memory because the ideas are so integrated and everything’s offbeat.

“You can hear the influence of George Gershwin: it’s almost like playing jazz. One standout theme for me is the opening of the second movement. It has a lilting kind of rhythm, a gospel-choir feel to it. It’s just so simple but then he takes in all these key changes and finds different ways to harmonize it. In the end you’re thinking, ‘Where are you going, Rachmaninoff?’”

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
“This piece is short, exciting—and audiences love it. I like the way the medieval Dies Irae plainchant theme shows up: first very quietly on the piano (in Variation 7), and then marching (in Variation 10) before it goes off-beat and jazzy. And listen to the way the harmony changes before it opens up into the famous 18th Variation, in which the main theme is turned upside down. The last Variation, No. 24, has so much humor with its playful leaps in the piano. I think Rachmaninoff must have been a great improviser to have come up with this; it has such spontaneity.”

Piano Concerto No. 3
“There is real enjoyment—physical, emotional, and psychological—to be had from performing this work. The piece is so well written, especially the balance between piano and orchestra (for me, No. 2 has too much orchestra; it’s like a symphony with piano accompaniment). In the Third Concerto the piano is given prominence, but you also hear it integrated with the orchestra.

“Listen to the second movement, for example, where every time the soloist comes in, it disrupts the peaceful atmosphere that the orchestra has created, and each time it falls into a new key. It’s waves and waves of different emotional states, almost neurotic, and in the last movement you get the playful side of Rachmaninoff again; it’s such an exciting finale.”

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November 15, 2018 at PST

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, Op. 71, TH 14 (Live at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles 2013)

Gustavo Dudamel delivers a performance of striking class and imagination here. Drawing full-bodied and gloriously detailed playing from an energized LA Phil, Dudamel is always alive to the magical score’s fabulous array of colors and textures. He conveys the faux-serious drama with an almost operatic sense of theater, bringing everything to life with considerable flair. This is conducting of stature from a musician who has really matured during his years in LA. Well recorded in the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s lovely acoustics, this is a modern Nutcracker to cherish.

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March 14, 2019 at PDT

Celebrating John Williams (Live At Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles 2019)

John Williams has always chosen the finest orchestras to record his soundtracks, and it’s thrilling to hear the magnificent LA Phil in some of his best-loved scores—including music from Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, and Schindler’s List. The orchestra’s charismatic musical director, Gustavo Dudamel, enters into the spirit of things and gives us real performances of this invariably powerful and often highly inventive music. Williams loves what an orchestra can do and he throws these terrific musicians plenty of challenges. A stunning collection.

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July 28, 2022 at PDT

Dvořák: Symphonies Nos. 7-9

These live performances of Dvořák’s last three symphonies, recorded in February 2020, show Dudamel’s view of the 19th-century Czech composer to be intensely thrilling. In the much-recorded “New World” Symphony, he draws playing of burnished splendor from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with a poignantly shaped cor anglais solo in the haunting “Largo.” The finale of the Eighth Symphony is another feature, its rollicking high spirits alternating with exceptional sensitivity in the reflective interludes. The darker-hued Symphony No. 7 is trenchantly projected but never overheated, with unflinchingly articulate playing in all departments. Throughout the set, Dudamel’s expert balancing of the orchestra yields a tingling clarity of texture, offering an unrivaled insight into Dvořák’s resplendent soundworld—and his artful orchestration.

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September 13, 2023 at PDT

Fandango

Gustavo Dudamel is on a mission to change perceptions of Latin American music. The Venezuelan conductor proves its striking creative and expressive breadth with the world premiere recording of Arturo Márquez’s Fandango, a spectacular new violin concerto written for Anne Akiko Meyers. He underlines the message with the album’s companion piece, Alberto Ginastera’s ballet Estancia in its rarely heard complete version. The results, recorded live at the Hollywood Bowl, celebrate the work of two original voices, one from Mexico, the other from Argentina, both in tune with the rich folk idioms and musical traditions of their homelands.

“This music belongs to my DNA,” Gustavo Dudamel tells Apple Music Classical. “And it’s part of my mission to bring Latin American music to where it deserves to be. It’s crucial for me that Latin American music is seen not just as an exotic thing but as part of universal culture, like Beethoven, Brahms, or Stravinsky.” His Márquez and Ginastera album, released to coincide with Latin Heritage Month, conveys the strength of a continent’s music. “Our culture is very beautiful; it can be very expressive. And I would say this is part of the whole of Latin America.”

Alberto Ginastera’s one-act ballet Estancia (Ranch), written in 1941 for the American dance company Ballet Caravan, is usually distilled into a suite of four dances. The full work was inspired by and includes extracts from José Hernández’s epic poem Martin Fierro (1872), a hymn to rural Argentina and its famously brave, often rebellious gauchos. Dudamel’s interpretation propels a parade of big emotions with rhythmic precision. He and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are equally on point as partners to Anne Akiko Meyers, who spearheads a commanding performance of Márquez’s fabulous Fandango.

Read on, as Gustavo Dudamel takes us on a personal journey of each of the works on this thrilling album.

Fandango for Violin and Orchestra (Arturo Márquez)
“When we first rehearsed this amazing piece, you could see the fascination on the players’ faces. This interaction of inspiration and joy really gets inside you. Of course, it needs precision. But there must be freedom within that control, a free action of the human spirit. After each note, you feel like you’re touching the beauty of the folk music that Arturo Márquez has written. I’ve been a big admirer of Maestro Márquez since meeting him when I was 12 years old, playing his Danzón No. 2 in the children’s orchestra, and we’ve built a strong relationship.

“In Fandango’s first movement, he remembers those Baroque pieces built on the repeated ‘La folia’ chord pattern. In the second movement you have this meditative, melancholic moment of quiet reflection. There’s a very fast Venezuelan dance called Pajarillo, where violinists often improvise something before it begins—I think Arturo Márquez pays homage to that improvisation in his concerto’s final movement. He’s created a wonderful journey through the history of the violin as a Latin folk instrument.”

Estancia (Alberto Ginastera)
“Listen to the first bars of Estancia, and you’ll feel the spirit of La Pampa, the Argentinean grassland. You’ll sense the soul of this vast, beautiful land, full of joy and full of drama. I think Ginastera deeply understood that landscape. Sometimes in music, sound lets a composer interpret something that’s visual, a flavor, something you can almost touch.

“Estancia is a statement about Ginastera’s understanding of his world. I think this music gives you space to contemplate, which is something that our generation and the world we live in is not used to. To really contemplate and take the time to understand the rhythm of the Earth, that’s the great genius of this piece.”

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February 12, 2017 at PST

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5

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June 6, 2021 at PDT

Mahler: Symphony No. 8 in E-Flat Major "Symphony of a Thousand"

Dudamel: “There are no words to describe the immersive, overpowering experience of being a conductor. Share with me this monumental live performance with my beloved LA Phil, remastered in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos audio technology in rich, remarkable 3D sound.”

Recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May and June of 2019, this landmark performance marked the end of the LA Philharmonic’s centennial season. Known since its debut in 1910 by the nickname “Symphony of a Thousand”—because of the overwhelming number of performers it calls for—Mahler’s 8th features 346 here, Gustavo Dudamel enlisting the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Pacific Chorale, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, National Children’s Chorus, and soloists Tamara Wilson, Leah Crocetto, Erin Morley, Mihoko Fujimura, Tamara Mumford, Simon O’Neill, Ryan McKinny, and Morris Robinson to realize his vision. It’s still plenty powerful. Mahler wrote that he intended for the listener to “imagine the universe beginning to ring and resound”—and that sense of scale is captured fully here with help from Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Every flash of brass and flurry of strings and weave of towering voices sounds as though it’s close enough to touch and comprehend, ringing and resounding all around you.

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April 16, 2020 at PDT

John Adams: Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (Live)

John Adams wrote his third piano concerto for Yuja Wang, who gave its premiere in Los Angeles—recorded here—in March 2019. It takes its name from a phrase in a New Yorker article that piqued Adams’ curiosity: “The phrase suggested a ‘Totentanz’,” he wrote in the program notes, “only not of the Lisztian manner, but more of funk-invested American-style.” And that’s precisely what he responded to: a rhythmically driven, harmonically complex three-section piece that plays to Wang’s astounding technique and personality, and the LA Phil’s corporate virtuosity. It’s destined to become a modern classic. The solo “China Gates” is a perfect little encore

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July 16, 2007 at PDT

Bartók: Concerto For Orchestra (Live From Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles / 2007)

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May 19, 2022 at PDT

Mahler: Symphony No. 5

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December 31, 2011 at PST

Discoveries

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March 13, 2013 at PDT

Debussy: La mer / Stravinsky: The Firebird (Live at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles / 2013)

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May 18, 2008 at PDT

Fiesta

Gustavo Dudamel and his remarkable Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra introduced many to the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, whose infectiously catchy Danzon No. 2 they made one of their signature pieces on their electrifying 2007 tour of Europe and the United States. The Márquez work is just one of a host of energetic, rhythmically vibrant pieces on this spectacular album. The young Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra plays with a zest and color that is totally infectious. From the opening Sensemayá by Revueltas—a fascinating and mesmerizing piece of orchestral magic—to Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, you won’t stop tapping your toes and humming these timeless tunes for days.

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August 27, 2020 at PDT

Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies

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May 27, 2021 at PDT

Mahler: Symphony No. 3

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June 6, 2024 at PDT

Gabriela Ortiz: Revolución diamantina

Gabriela Ortiz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic go back a long way. To 2003, in fact, when the orchestra’s then music director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the premiere of her percussion concerto Altar de Piedra (Stone Altar). Two decades later, the relationship is stronger than ever, as Revolución diamantina (Glitter Revolution), this new all-Ortiz release, vibrantly demonstrates.

Visceral colors and a dynamic rhythmic impetus are central to Ortiz’s music, and a large part of what audiences find attractive. But in the ballet score Revolución diamantina a strong social justice element is at work too. The piece’s title references a march which took place in August 2019 in Mexico City, following the alleged rape of a teenage girl by four police officers. Pink glitter was thrown at the local Security Minister in protest.

“Feminicide is a major issue in my country,” Ortiz tells Apple Music Classical. “In Mexico and Latin America, every single day a woman is killed by a man, and there are mothers whose daughters have disappeared or whose bodies are found in the desert. When I got the opportunity to write a ballet, I wanted to write something really strong, and immediately I decided to use voices in the composition.”

Eight women’s voices are woven into the textures of Revolución diamantina, and some of what they sing is based on recordings made at women’s protest marches in Mexico. “They are part of the orchestra, not soloists,” says Ortiz. “They represent all of the women who are fighting these injustices.”

Imaginative sound combinations are also a feature of Altar de cuerda (String Altar), the violin concerto which opens the program, performed here by violinist Maria Dueñas, for whom it was written. Its middle movement meditates on the “open chapels” built for indigenous peoples to use in 16th-century Mexican churches. “As a metaphor, I wanted to create open spaces for the orchestra, from the lower register to the higher register,” Ortiz explains. “And I needed something really mysterious and enigmatic for that, and the sound of the glasses melted into these really slowly growing chords.”

The ebullient tone poem Kauyumari, a piece commissioned to celebrate emergence from the pandemic, completes the album. It’s a project Ortiz is extremely proud of, and she heaps praise on the LA Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel for the outstanding qualities they bring.

“The drama and the energy of live performance is all there, something you can never get in a studio recording,” she says. “Gustavo, you know, he can read my mind, he understands everything about my music. And working with the musicians of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is one of the most incredible things that ever happened in my career.”

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August 6, 2015 at PDT

Brahms: The Piano Concertos (Live)

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October 11, 1999 at PDT

The John Adams Edition

It says much for the Berliner Philharmoniker’s enlightened programming that it can present a feast of performances of John Adams’ music, recorded in a single season (2016–17) under a host of top conductors. Harmonielehre and the violin concerto Scheherazade.2—with Leila Josefowicz as the magnificent soloist—are conducted by the composer. Alan Gilbert gives us a thrilling Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Gustavo Dudamel conducts the atmospheric City Noir, and Simon Rattle takes on The Gospel According to the Other Mary superbly. Meanwhile, Rattle’s successor as the orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director, Kirill Petrenko, gives us the intensely moving The Wound-Dresser with Georg Nigl as the powerful soloist. Glorious, idiomatic playing throughout.

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April 20, 2023 at PDT

Thomas Adès: Dante

First staged in 2021 by The Royal Ballet in London, Thomas Adès’ Dante—based on the medieval Italian writer’s epic poem The Divine Comedy—has drawn favorable comparisons with classic ballet scores of the past by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and others. This premiere recording of the three-part work confirms Dante’s reputation as an instant modern classic. From the lacerating string figurations and woozy brass glissandos of “Abandon Hope” in “Inferno” to the celestial closing measures of “Paradiso,” Adès’s music teems with invention, summoning strange and intensely vivid images of the spiritual afterlife. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel draws vibrantly expressive playing from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose commitment to Adès’ vision seems total.

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August 29, 2019 at PDT

Norman: Sustain

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January 8, 2017 at PST

New Year's Concert 2017 (Neujahrskonzert 2017)

Dudamel leads the Vienna Philharmonic’s historic concert series.

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June 20, 2011 at PDT

Brahms: Symphony No. 4 (Live At Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles / 2011)

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October 1, 2015 at PDT

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9

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