Bravo! The Free-Spirited, Freewheeling Gustavo Dudamel Arrives at the New York Philharmonic
It’s spring, and the onetime wunderkind conductor—now a respectable 45—is still a few months from becoming the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. Since the appointment was announced in 2023, he has been making a long and ecstatic first impression on his new metropolis. In April, at an annual fundraising gala, the philanthropist Barbara Tober spoke of Dudamel as “our gift from God.” A few weeks later, a friend whose musical tastes lean more Shaboozey than Schubert posted a selfie from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, with Dudamel’s signature curls bouncing in the background.
At the end of a concert I attended this spring, women with hearing aids hooted and hollered. A man in a tux stomped his feet. After a requisite encore, hordes of people spilled out onto the plaza at Lincoln Center, buzzing over the ethereal arrangements of Igor Stravinsky. Today, at the United Palace theater in Washington Heights, Dudamel is received by an audience of more composed staffers.
“Hola, maestro,” says a porter as Dudamel strides across the lobby. The Venezuelan-born conductor greets him in return. He has arrived to rehearse the first-ever joint performance by the 184-year-old New York Philharmonic and the 25-year-old Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Dudamel will hold the baton, combining classical and salsa music with the loving finesse of a musician raised on both.
The conductor has long reveled in genre mash-ups
The conductor has long reveled in genre mash-ups that might otherwise sound like AI prompts. What would a collaboration between Foo Fighters and Beethoven sound like? His repertoire at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent the past 17 years, included rousing renditions of Mahler and Philip Glass, as well as the Star Wars score. He has conducted at Coachella, voiced a character for the Trolls World Tour movie named Trollzart, and has inspired, it’s said, the book and series Mozart in the Jungle.
This past summer, he conducted the Muppets in a version of “Seven Nation Army” at the World Cup Halftime Show. Later tonight, the two orchestras will perform Leonard Bernstein’s Times Square: 1944 (“New York, New York! / It’s a helluva town!”) and Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s vivacious Toccata. Dudamel and I meet before the rehearsal in his dressing room—stocked with Brazil nuts and popcorn—where a clutch of assistants and flacks awaits his instruction.
Still, he brushes off reports of Dudamania. “It’s not only that I move beautifully my hands in front of an orchestra,” he says, using the lilting syntax of someone who still translates from Spanish to English. “It’s that we have to go deep, and they have to feel that it’s honest.”
Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto, one of Venezuela’s bigger cities. His father, Oscar, is a classically trained trombonist and sometimes performs with him.
(He’ll be among the musicians at the United
(He’ll be among the musicians at the United Palace.) His mother, Solange, sang. He picked up his first instrument as a preschooler, tapping out a rhythm on a güira, a percussion instrument, while his father was playing. “Who’s that?” his father asked, hearing the beat. He insists that he demonstrated no outsize talent then, but his interest was obvious, and it occurred to Oscar to enroll his son—now with a violin—in El Sistema, Venezuela’s beloved and famed nationwide music program for children.
His grandparents adored Gustavo, but they worried about his prospects. “Who will be able to stand all the noise in the house?” his grandfather once asked. A professional musician uncle was more encouraging, introducing him to the organ and the cuatro, a Latin string instrument. “He said, ‘Look, son, you’re going to play all of this music around the world,’ ” Dudamel recalls.
At El Sistema, intensive rehearsals were held over the weekend, and Dudamel made his closest friends in the program. One morning their conductor was late, so Dudamel stood in front and mimed the motions. His peers responded to him—he could command a room. El Sistema founder José Antonio Abreu took Dudamel on as a protégé, moving him to the first chair position in the violin section, then encouraging him to conduct.
Abreu told his pupil he had duende, literally
Abreu told his pupil he had duende, literally Spanish for “goblin” but more lyrically meant to describe a force animating great artists. “It is this kind of instinct,” Dudamel recalls Abreu telling him. “That’s duende.”
Dudamel was just 23 when he emerged on the international circuit, winning a prestigious conducting competition in Germany and immediately radiating the kind of star power more often associated with pop princes and athletes than classical musicians.
Orchestras from all over the world began to invite him to perform with them, appearances that earned both press and speculation about his future. So lavish was the praise that Matías Tarnopolsky, now the president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, then the orchestra’s newly appointed artistic administrator, asked Dudamel if he could visit him in Caracas. “I got on a plane in 2006, within weeks of starting the job,” Tarnopolsky recalls.
Dudamel ferried him around in a Mustang, and the two established an easy connection—Dudamel playing folk music for the Buenos Aires–born Tarnopolsky that he hadn’t heard since childhood while his passenger gripped the dashboard. (“I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to die here,” Tarnopolsky remembers.) Dudamel made his debut in New York in 2007. He performed in Chicago around the same time, and in the midst of the audition was whisked away after his first rehearsal on the private plane of then president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Deborah Borda, who was eager to sign him.
She flew him back to Chicago the following
She flew him back to Chicago the following morning, with the unsuspecting orchestra having no idea he’d been hired out from under them. Dudamel officially joined the LA Phil at 28 and went on to hire almost half of its current musicians over the course of his tenure. The feel of the orchestra quickly shifted. He was loved “from day one,” says Julie Andrews, who happens to be on the board.
“They moved, and they swayed, which they had never done before. He freed them up.”
One of the achievements that most heartens Dudamel, however, is his part in creating the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), which he modeled on El Sistema. The group provides instruments and music education to children from all across Los Angeles, including from its poorer neighborhoods. Not long after it started, Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the iconic composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, encountered a clip of Dudamel conducting YOLA’s rendition of the mambo from West Side Story.
“Some of them looked like they couldn’t have been more than 14,” she recalls of the musicians, “and they were just playing the daylights out of it. I thought, Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this before. And then I thought, Oh, it’s the same vibe as my dad.” She went to Venezuela to meet Dudamel, and the two have been friends ever since. Years ago she surprised him with one of her father’s vests.
He just put it right on, she remembers
“He just put it right on,” she remembers. Jamie is not the first to compare Dudamel to Bernstein, a titanic predecessor and the only other conductor whose name might reasonably appear as a Jeopardy! clue. Bernstein understood that classical music needed an evangelist and a face; it’s Dudamel’s charisma—not his knack for interpreting Chopin—that compels a lunch table of high school students to look up from their sandwiches when he passes them at Lincoln Center during the photo shoot for this profile and shriek.
His signature hair helps too. (He confirms he has never used a gel or mousse, but he does make an effort to patronize salons that are familiar with its texture. Once, in Sweden—land of the tall and towheaded—a hairdresser refused to touch a single strand. “I think he saw an alien,” Dudamel says.)
Dudamel is humble, but not blind. “Artists have an ego, and it’s natural,” he says a few days later.
He and I are talking about the perils and paradise of Los Angeles, where stars and their self-regard can run wild. Dudamel inherited his mentor Abreu’s conviction that music can build bridges and illuminate a better world. “What happens in an orchestra is fascinating,” he says. “Different instruments, different cultures, different visions. Different people with different political views.
This is the thing we need
This is the thing we need in the world.”
Dudamel’s resolute optimism has, at times, looked to his critics like willful blindness. In years past, he faced sharp criticism for continuing to work in Venezuela as its then president Nicolás Maduro suppressed dissent and plunged the population into a series of humanitarian crises. Despite functioning as one of its most prominent, if unofficial, cultural ambassadors, Dudamel remained silent while Venezuela descended into chaos.
He resisted the pressure until 2017, when he did at last break with the regime in an op-ed denouncing its antidemocratic crackdown. The government then made clear that he should not visit. When Abreu died in 2018, Dudamel missed the funeral. Even now, he resists commenting on Venezuela’s political situation, deflecting to say that his focus is on El Sistema, which relies on government funding, and humanitarian aid.
In August, his final performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be a benefit concert for earthquake relief. “There’s still a lot of hope there,” he says. He’s not naive, just disciplined and decades older than he was when classical music greeted him as a savior. His riot of curls has started to gray. Sometimes, it falls to his teenage son, Martín, to introduce him to new music.
(Martín’s mother is Dudamel’s ex-wife, Eloísa Maturén; he
(Martín’s mother is Dudamel’s ex-wife, Eloísa Maturén; he married the Spanish actress and director María Valverde in 2017.) It occurs to Dudamel in the midst of our conversation at the United Palace that he should be exercising more diligently, the better to keep up with his frantic pace. More than once, his emphatic gesticulating has caused tennis elbow. With perspective, he thinks more now about where orchestral music is headed.
“We have to break the idea that classical music is not connected with the present,” he says. He can’t resist noting that Timothée Chalamet—who overshadowed his own Oscars campaign last year when he said that he didn’t want the film business to become something “no one cares about anymore”—was in the audience when Dudamel brought the LA Phil to Coachella. “It’s important to show that classical music, ballet, all of these art forms are alive,” he says with a grin.
“It’s our responsibility as a new generation of artists to understand that we cannot be lazy.”
Change is inevitable, even when it’s hard. He feels this as he prepares to wrap up his long goodbye to Los Angeles, where he has made an incredible number of friends and collaborated with several of them, including Natalie Portman, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the chef and philanthropist José Andrés, and Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett—each played conductors in Maestro and Tár, respectively.
Blanchett tells me that she has never been
Blanchett tells me that she has “never been in the presence of an artist who leads with such joy, such love.” He will miss LA, although pieces of it—and people from it—are coming with him. He and his wife have been renting an apartment on the Upper West Side and are planning to remain near Lincoln Center. Julie Andrews laughs when she tells me that she just relocated from Los Angeles to Sag Harbor, New York.
Not for Dudamel, she assures me, but it does mean that she will still be able to see him in concert. When I wonder whether it’s difficult to acclimate to New York’s fitful weather after decades in temperate LA and tropical Caracas, he thinks for a second and then smiles. Dudamel is attuned to a different kind of atmosphere. Amid one of last winter’s blizzards, he sought cover at Tarnopolsky’s house, where the president and CEO was at the stove, cooking.
“Yes, it was snowing, but it was so warm inside.”
In this story: grooming, Levi Monarch; tailor, Tae Yoshida for Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Produced by Boom Productions Inc.
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