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
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