Gustavo’s farewell has begun with a fiesta, rapper and ‘Resurrection’

Let’s start with the “Gracias Gustavo” merch: T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, fridge magnets, posters, etc. There was the daylong “Gracias Gustavo” block party at Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood that included a performance by rapper D Smoke. Tuesday night it was “Gustavo’s Fiesta” at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a Los Angeles Philharmonic gala that raised a cool $5 million in donations for the orchestra, extravagantly closing out the first three love-fest weeks of Dudamel’s final season as the musical and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

And over the weekend, there were four soul-searching performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 during which Dudamel warranted any accolade (or donation) you may care to toss the orchestra’s way.

Mahler wrote this audacious, eveninglong symphonic epic — known as the “Resurrection” — as an act of suicide prevention, a death-haunted quest to find the meaning of life. We live; we love; we suffer; we die. What’s the point?

At 28 and the start of a career as celebrated conductor and misunderstood composer, Mahler questioned everything. He had necessarily converted to Catholicism the year before to get ahead in 1880s antisemitic Vienna, and in his Second Symphony gave what for him was a new, desperate notion: Give heaven a whirl.

It’s in Dudamel’s upbeat nature, however, not to dwell in doubt but to find answers. In a program note to his performances of Mahler’s Second, Dudamel wrote that playing the symphony as a kid violinist of 13 or 14 in Venezuela’s El Sistema music education program was “the closest thing … to being with God.” He was 17 when he conducted the first movement, a half-hour paroxysmic funeral march of such intensity that Mahler asks for a five-minute pause before moving on to the second of the 90-minute work’s five movements. But by that point, Dudamel says he had already arrived in heaven.

When Dudamel was 34 — the age Mahler was when he finished his Second — he led a an unbelievable performance of the symphony with a 175-member-strong Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Disney as part of his Mahler Project, an unprecedented enterprise of performing all nine completed Mahler symphonies in under three weeks in L.A. and Caracas.

The sonic extravagance of the gargantuan Bolívar Second in sonorous Disney Hall became a massive and perhaps overwrought Mahlerian drama of passing from one fraught world, though sentimental remembrance of life’s little and very big things, to another world, with a firestorm of orchestral brilliance and a large chorus proclaiming, “Rise again, yes, you will rise again … in the twinkling of an eye.”

Dudamel unleashed a more mature and surprisingly effective performance of the symphony with the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl six years ago. In February 2022, he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a beautifully somber performance dedicated to all the people affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (it is archived on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall).

As Dudamel, now 44, prepares his exit from the L.A. Phil to take the mantel of the storied New York Philharmonic, his Mahler is neither overly exuberant nor constrained by grief and Berliner decorum. This performance heralds a new Dudamel, conductor of prophetic grandeur.

That was apparent from the Second’s opening notes, in which trembling violins and violas sound as if startled awake, ushering in cellos and basses who have begun moving the furniture. There was a depth to the sound that came close to that of an out-of-body experience.

By the end of the performance, which included the mighty Los Angeles Master Chorale and superb vocal soloists Chen Reiss and Beth Taylor, “rising again” was not a matter of choice. Rather than a standing ovation, the response felt like an outside power lifting listeners from their seats. The ovation had the character not of high-pitched cheering but of an involuntary low-pitched invocation of wonderment, even disbelief.

Although Dudamel remains with the orchestra though the summer (his next Disney appearances are in February), these first three weeks feel like a victory lap. Appearance after appearance, he soaked up the love from adoring crowds. He gave performances fuller, richer, more masterful, more fulfilling than any I have heard from him over the past two decades, here or with dozens other orchestras and in venues in three continents. He is freer, more expansive, more Dudamel with the L.A. Phil in Disney than anywhere else.

The Mahler was preceded by a mostly Stravinsky program. The “Firebird” Suite blossomed in a rainbow of extravagant orchestral color, while Dudamel brought a new sumptuousness to “Rite of Spring.” He also introduced John Adams’ “Frenzy” to the U.S. In a recent broadcast of Adams conducting his exciting new short symphony with the Lahti Symphony in Finland, “Frenzy” lived up to its title in a gripping, rhythmic performance. Dudamel added suavity.

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel directs YOLA students as they perform “Batuque” by Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez on stage during a “Gracias Gustavo Community Block Party” in Inglewood.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

His busy schedule included a visit to the YOLA block party, with its live music and food trucks. Perhaps Dudamel’s proudest L.A. accomplishment is the Frank Gehry-designed Beckmen YOLA Center for Youth Orchestra L.A., which has grown to serve 1,700 young musicians from the community receiving after-school music education at no cost. In a public conversation with D Smoke, the rapper (who taught music and Spanish at his alma mater, Inglewood High School) spoke of music education as a kind of liberation. “I feel exactly the same,” Dudamel replied.

For the gala, “Gustavo’s Fiesta,” Dudamel brought 17 advanced YOLA players to Disney joining the L.A. Phil in the last movement of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. The program consisted of five short finales and looked, on paper, as the least imaginative gala in at least the last three decades. In the flesh, it was a triumph.

The movements lasted between six and 12 minutes, each an augur, a rising up not in the Mahlerian spiritual sense but in a more quotidian just-saying that however raw the world we’re in, we’ve still gotta dance.

The exultation of Falla’s “Fire Dance” from “The Three-Cornered Hat” was tempered by a propulsive but darkly tinged last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The “New World” with YOLA proved a centerpiece of pride in the future. The ending of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite glowed with sweet enchantment, while Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ “Noche de Encantamiento” from “La Noche de los Mayas” offered ritualistic enchantment.

It was with this film score, 20 years and one month earlier, that Dudamel opened his Hollywood Bowl debut. It was a night of enchantment, and by the end of Revueltas’ “Noche de Encantamiento,” with a dozen percussionists in high gear, the crowd, like the drummers, went wild. Dudamel’s L.A. career had begun.

At the gala, Dudamel oversaw controlled mayhem. What he had to buoyantly make happen two decades ago, he now makes seem like it has to happen, that there is a natural force in operation and he its enabler.

The big question remains whether this is an L.A. thing or whether that enabling, which requires copious amounts of good will, is exportable. A jubilant contingent of New York Philharmonic top brass attended the gala. If they brought home a hoodie or two that would be a good sign.