Gustavo Dudamel, Usher Hall, Edinburgh By Andrew Clark / Financial Times August 14 2008 19:45 It is a measure of how steeply Gustavo Dudamel's stock has risen in the past 18 months that he was back at the Edinburgh Festival <http://www.eif.co.uk/> and the Proms <http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2008/>this week. Darling of both events last year, he has returned not with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela but with the stately Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra <http://www.gso.se/>, where he recently became chief conductor. Working regularly with musicians twice your age is different to touring the world with your own generation. Raw talent is no longer enough. Charisma can hide a lot of inexperience, but sooner or later the quality of your musical understanding will reveal itself. And the sad fact of this 27-year-old's career -- exactly like Daniel Harding's a decade ago -- is that he has had nowhere out-of-the-way to make his mistakes. Impresarios have pounced on him, promoted him and now, almost overnight, expect him to exhibit interpretative maturity. It shows how shallow and short-sighted the classical music industry can be. There's no doubting Dudamel's ability to beat his way through a score -- all from memory. He has the look of a young Simon Rattle -- the idiosyncratic left-hand gestures as much as the frizzy mop. He's got rhythm, amply demonstrated by Copland's /Appalachian Spring/. But give him anything requiring depth and substance, and he's lost. The music degenerates into extremes of loud and soft, fast and slow. Ravel's /La Valse /was punched out without a whiff of mystery. This was nothing compared to Berlioz's /Symphonie fantastique/. The opening "Reveries" were brash and frenetic. "The Ball" unfurled without a single rubato. "Scene in the Fields" lacked shape, majesty, bloom. "March to the Scaffold" was like a parade of hippos. The finale was shockingly crude and noisy. Gothenburg was foolish to engage him./ [But probably good enough for LA?] Janos Gereben www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask] *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html