Dudamel opens the New York Philharmonic’s fall season

New York — It was a quiet, while not quite silent, morning for the “Table of Silence Project” Thursday, on the plaza of Lincoln Center and in front of David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic. Commemorating the 24th anniversary of 9/11, white-robed members of the Buglisi Dance Theatre circled the plaza, a few with megaphones for chants, an occasional violin joining in, mellowing even the sounds of background traffic roaring down busy Broadway.

On this solemn but beautiful New York day and after more than two years in waiting, Gustavo Dudamel took charge, at least in practice, of the New York Philharmonic. Six decades ago, during the Leonard Bernstein era, America’s oldest and most celebrated orchestra had the city’s (and much of the nation’s) full attention in a way it hasn’t since. Could that happen again?

When Dudamel announced in early February 2023 that he would leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic to become music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2026, he became instant celebrity news here. A New York Philharmonic player gives Dudamel a cheesecake, and the New York Times writes a story.

This season Dudamel gains his first official title: music and artistic director designate. But the orchestra is basically his baby now. His photo is plastered on the orchestra’s posters and publicity. And on Thursday night, Dudamel, for the first time, opened the New York Philharmonic’s new season. After two weeks this month, he will have a sizable presence later winter and in spring, while also closing out his last L.A. Phil season with major programs.

Dudamel arrived in New York on Tuesday, having spent two weeks conducting the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela, his homeland orchestra, to open Coldplay’s concerts at Glastonbury in England, just as the newly named U.S. Department of War immediately began to live up to its name by sending warships to Dudamel’s native Venezuela and threatening regime change.

But here in New York, Dudamel paid tribute to a new city in his life with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2. In 1945, Bartók, having fled Nazi-invaded Hungary, wrote his final piano concerto in a New York apartment on 57th Street, a block west of Carnegie Hall. Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic premiere of Ives’ Second — the first great American symphony — at Carnegie, then the New York Philharmonic’s home, six years later.

Still, the first orchestral sounds that emanated from the Dudamel designated directorship turned out to be barely heard, while not silent, percussion stirrings. Following a season-opening tradition he began when he became music director of the L.A. Phil, Dudamel began the program with a world premiere.

For this, he directed New Yorkers’ attention westward. In “of light and stone,” Leilehua Lanzilotti sets the sonic stage for an evocation of Hawaii, where she resides, before statehood. She makes references to King Kalakaua, Queen Lili’uokalani and other Hawaiian nobility few in a mainland audience are likely to know. There are fragments of Hawaiian song, a dance of the wind.

Nothing settles in this four-part, 15-minute song of a land, a score that falls somewhere between history lesson and color-field sonic landscape. A whisp of a canorous clarinet or a rumbling rattle is all it takes for a kind of instant transport to a far-off time and place. New York Philharmonic audiences can be cool, but they’ve demonstratively taken to Dudamel at Geffen, and an ethereal performance appeared to open ears.

The young Korean pianist, Yunchan Lim, who became instantly hot after winning the Van Cliburn competition three years ago, was soloist in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto. Lim will be a soloist with Dudamel and the L.A. Phil this season as well as give a solo recital in Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is an exceptional pianist. He too opens ears and can transport a listener to a distant land. And Lim’s case is far more distant or far less knowable than Hawaii.

Lim’s Bartók exists in a world of the pianist’s own. Every phrase is for him an oddity, as if he had found some weird object in an imaginary world and was figuring out what he might do with it. His tools were rhythm, accents and dynamics, each a quirky new toy. The New York Philharmonic produced beauty and excitement, but Lim went his own way that wasn’t quite imaginative enough to improve on Bartók. Here we go again with an exceptional young soloist being pushed into the limelight too soon.

The New York Philharmonic owns Ives’ Second. Written in the first decade of the 20th century, the symphony offered a whole new way of thinking about American and European music and it sat dormant for some four decades before Bernstein premiered it. But that 1951 performance had a huge effect on how to transform folk music, popular music, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and what-not, twisted, transformed and tacked together. Bernstein later recorded it twice with the New York Philharmonic. The first time full of beans that revived it for good. The second time in 1987 as a glorious spiritual exercise. Hearing that performance live left me in a state of rapture.

Dudamel has made a specialty of the symphony himself, conducting it with the Vienna Philharmonic, recording it with the L.A. Phil and now going to the source. His performance Thursday night did not try to follow in Bernstein’s footsteps or necessarily Dudamel’s own. The performance flowed with exquisite lyricism and mustered a thrilling finale.

In Vienna, Dudamel was more robust. At Disney, Dudamel found exceptional expression in every little detail. That was the Dudamel that we last saw at the Hollywood Bowl this summer when he conducted Mahler’s First more vividly than ever.

That is not, quite yet, the Dudamel for New York. Here his Ives seemed to be laying the groundwork, letting his new orchestra show him what it can do before he begins, as he surely will, digging deeper.

It took a once controversial effort for Bernstein to transform an uptight virtuosic New York Philharmonic into a tight but electric one. Now it’s Dudamel’s turn for transmogrification, and he’s made a promising beginning.