Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Perhaps Borda’s boldest notion is to give visiting composers such as Adams and Thomas Ades the same royal treatment that is extended to the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell; Borda talks about “hero composers.” A 2007 performance of Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music in the orchestra’s Casual Fridays series—a shortened program in which the players skip formal dress and mingle with listeners afterward-drew a nearly full house. Borda’s big-guns approach has invigorated the orchestra’s long-running new-music series, called Green Umbrella, which Fleischmann established in 1982. In the early days, it drew modest audiences, but in recent years attendance has risen to the point where as many as sixteen hundred people show up for a concert that in other cities might draw thirty or forty. In 2006, the Australian composer Brett Dean walked onstage for a Green Umbrella concert and did a double take, saying that it was the largest new-music audience he’d ever seen.

  One area in which the orchestra has done less well is in promoting younger composers. Speaking at an education conference in New York, Salonen said, “Institutions tend to play it safe. They are less willing to commission a large work by a young composer. They don’t want to take the risk. It’s the same old names that keep being circulated all the time.” This is precisely what any number of composers who are not Adams, Ades, Stucky, or a half-dozen others might say about the Philharmonic itself. As the “hero composers” concept takes hold, the orchestra might want to challenge its own philosophy by taking chances on twenty-six-year-old composers, as it has on twenty-six-year-old conductors.

  The Philharmonic is trying to solve the ultimate mystery of the orchestra business, which is how to attract new listeners without alienating established ones. The core audience will always be longtime lovers of classical music who mainly want to hear symphonies of Beethoven and concertos of Rachmaninov. Then there are Salonen’s “people who basically use their brains more”—who ought to be at classical concerts but usually aren’t. To serve both audiences, the orchestra becomes, in effect, two institutions folded into one: a museum of masterpieces and a gallery of new work. A number of music directors in other cities—notably, David Robertson in St. Louis, Robert Spano in Atlanta, Marin Alsop in Baltimore, Osmo Vänskä in Minneapolis, and, since 2009, Alan Gilbert in New York—are moving in the same direction. Suddenly, it no longer makes sense to generalize about the hidebound attitude of the American orchestra.

  As for the players themselves, their greatest resource is flexibility. The great orchestras of Cleveland and Chicago may possess a more flawlessly polished sound, but no American ensemble matches the L.A. Philharmonic in its ability to assimilate a wide range of music on a moment’s notice. Ades, who first conducted his music in L.A. in 2006 and has become a regular visitor, told me, “They always seem to begin by finding exactly the right playing style for each piece of music-the kind of sound, the kind of phrasing, breathing, attacks, colors, the indefinable whole. That shouldn’t be unusual, but it is.” Adams calls the Philharmonic “the most Amurrican of orchestras. They don’t hold back and they don’t put on airs. If you met them in twos or threes, you’d have no idea they were playing in an orchestra, that they were classical-music people.”

  One day, I followed Ben Hong, the assistant principal cellist, as he went about his daily duties. A shaggy-haired thirty-eight-year-old who commutes on a motorcycle, he had been playing in the Philharmonic since he was twenty-four. He arrived at the hall at 9:00 a.m. to coach two students in a studio in the building. One of them was working on Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and Hong, after working through issues of bowing and phrasing, tried to get his student to think about the piece in terms of “lost innocence” and the legacy of war.

  Just before eleven, Hong reported to the main floor of Disney to play a matinee concert. The program consisted of Brahms’s First and Third Symphonies, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnanyi, who was visiting for two weeks. “We’ll sell some tickets,” Borda said of this concert in advance. “Plus, it will be good for the orchestra. Christoph will pick everything to pieces, rehearse in great detail, go back to basics.”

  After the concert, Hong had lunch with a few younger players: Eric Overholt, who had been playing French horn in the orchestra for only a few months; Ariana Ghez, the principal oboist, who had also started that season; and Joana Carneiro, the assistant conductor. They talked about the audition process (“It’s pretty brutal, probably the most difficult thing you have to do as a musician,” Hong said), the limits of a conservatory education (Ghez studied English at Columbia alongside music at Juilliard), and the intellectual pleasure of playing new works. Some orchestra veterans had never relished Salonen’s favored diet of twentieth-century and contemporary fare, but several of the younger musicians identified it as one of the main attractions of the job. Ghez noted that older listeners no longer run for the exits when a little Ligeti appears on one of the regular programs. Instead, she said, they have been trained to say things like “I guess you have to take it like a Jackson Pollock.”

  Hong was thinking more deeply about the gaps in his conservatory training, and wondering what he might learn from other kinds of music-making. In particular, he had taken an interest in improvisation. After lunch, he drove up some twisting roads in the Laurel Canyon area to the home of Lili Haydn, a session violinist, singer-songwriter, and former child actress, who has been giving him guidance on how to improvise in a semi-jazz, semi-Indian style. This activity falls far outside his usual work with the orchestra, although it fits into the expanded mission of Salonen’s Philharmonic, improvisation having a role in much avant-garde music after the Second World War and in quite a bit of alternative-minded contemporary work.

  Hong joined Haydn in her studio, which was outfitted with wall hangings and antique lamps. There was a faint smell of incense. First, they worked on a track that will appear on Haydn’s forthcoming album. She sang, “We all saw the water sweep the streets with the force that carried Noah.” Hong played a doleful, arpeggiated accompaniment. Then the two improvised for twenty minutes or so over an Indian tamboura drone. Hong seemed hesitant at first, locking himself into a repeating figure or falling into rapid up-and-down scales that seemed exterior to the mood.

  “Find the magic in the intervals,” Haydn told him. She asked him to take hold of a figure of two or three notes, bend it this way and that against the regular rhythm, and then savor the effect of adding one more note. Hong promptly took off on a ruminative minor-key flight that sounded a little like the cello lines in Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela and, for a minute or two, became lost in music of his own invention.

  He said at one point, “After a few sessions, I’m hearing things in a different way. I am feeling the nuances of each note in a more intense way. It’s like when I was growing up—they’d say that you must chew each mouthful of rice seventy-two times to really taste the sweetness of the rice. There’s something to that. Sometimes in classical music that’s lost. This has taught me to be more appreciative of each note.”

  Hong deftly related all this back to the Brahms he had played that morning. He launched into a free rendition of the grand chromatic line that soars through the orchestra at the beginning of the First Symphony, giving each note a slightly different color and weight. He stopped at the topmost B flat, letting the note float out over the canyon.

  To spend time with a musician like Hong is to realize that the effect of a conductor on an orchestra is easily overstated: the L.A. Philharmonic is the sum of a hundred distinct personalities. Salonen knows this as well as anyone; as a youth, he was skeptical of his future profession. “I had no great desires of becoming a conductor,” he says. “In fact, I thought conductors were disgusting. I very much disliked this image of a conductor like Herbert von Karajan, riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, conducting Ein Heldenleben. I thought that was really bad. I still do, actually. I thought that conductors get so much attention for almost no reason and the really important guy, i.e., the composer, is the worst-paid one and the one who alwa
ys stays in the worst hotel and is kicked on the head by everybody else, and I thought that was rotten. I still do, actually.”

  For several years, Salonen had been making semipublic noises about leaving the Philharmonic. He had set himself various goals—to move into the new hall, to find an artistic vision befitting Gehry’s space, to elevate the orchestra’s playing, to cultivate its financial health. “Bit by bit,” he told me, “all this started to become reality.” He had thought of stepping away after the opening of Disney Hall, but he couldn’t yet give up the heady experience of conducting in that space. “I thought, This is too much fun. It felt like the harvesting time. There also was a new level to the relationship with the orchestra. I quite often felt as though they were reading my mind—they would do something just as I was vaguely thinking of it. A lot of warmth and good feeling on both sides.” Still, even when he was on a break, he sensed the obligations of the job pressing on him.

  In the spring of 2006, while Minimalist Jukebox was going on in L.A., Salonen was in Paris, leading the world premiere of the opera Adriana Mater, by his old schoolmate Kaija Saariaho. In Paris, Salonen started making sketches for a Piano Concerto, which the New York Philharmonic had commissioned from him. Work proceeded in fits and starts over the summer and through the fall, and the score was finally finished over Christmas. As he reluctantly stole away from his family into his studio, he felt more acutely the need to give up the directorship of the orchestra.

  The concerto was written for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, one of Salonen’s closest friends and a leading interpreter of Rachmaninov. Salonen was determined to confront the legacy of the virtuoso Romantic concerto, and he indulged in cascading double octaves, wide-spanning chords, and, at the end of the second movement, a certifiable Big Tune. At the same time, the musical language of the piece feels very up to date; there are bopping rhythms, trickily shifting beats, alarms and noises, malfunctioning machine patterns, and a fabulously eerie section that Salonen characterizes as “Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds.” In a lively program note, he connects that last episode to a “post-biological culture where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore.” In all, it’s a plausible reinvention of the Romantic concerto, and Salonen’s most assured work to date.

  Bronfman had to learn the solo part in a few weeks, and initially he complained about its punishing difficulty. (Subconscious feelings of guilt may have produced a cryptic dream that the composer reported having one night, in which Bronfman was falsely accused of the murder of the actress Helen Mirren.) Salonen conducted the premiere himself, appearing with the New York Philharmonic for the first time since 1986. The performance took place on February 1, 2007, and the audience responded with more wholehearted enthusiasm than is normal for a New York subscription-series premiere. An elderly couple was observed holding hands during the slow movement.

  Afterward, Salonen was more confident about his choice to step down. “I felt that this is the way to go,” he later told me. “Now I’m ready for the next project.” He had long talked of writing an opera. He was also planning a piece for chorus and orchestra, possibly based on Joseph Brodsky’s final poetry collection, So Forth. Some lines from the Brodsky poem “New Life” seemed relevant: “Ultimately, one’s unbound / curiosity about these empty zones, / about these objectless vistas, / is what art seems to be all about.”

  The Philharmonic players were keenly interested in the question of who might come next. “We’re cresting a wave—it’s just amazing,” Meredith Snow, a member of the viola section, told me in January 2007. “The transition from Salonen scares us. But it feels like our management is really looking out for that.”

  I asked Snow and David Allen Moore, a double-bass player, which conductors had made a good impression. The list of names was relatively short. “There’s such a vacuum,” Snow said. “We’re so desperate for the quality of honesty. At least in this orchestra, there’s no baggage of people prejudging conductors. It’s, like, ‘Please be good.’ We’ll participate if you show us what you want, emotionally and musically.”

  Dudamel’s name was the first one they mentioned. “He was great,” Snow said. “He has it all. This orchestra was on fire with him.”

  Moore added, “It’s not just about a mythical being on the podium who by his own will makes everything somehow happen. It’s not so much about the cult of personality of the maestro anymore. Esa-Pekka clearly has a strong personality and all that, but with him it definitely feels more collaborative.”

  Borda had observed how other orchestras underwent protracted searches for new music directors, replete with internal politicking for one conductor or another, speculation and second-guessing in the press, hurt feelings as renowned musicians were reported to have “not gone over well” with the players, and so on—all the result of the empowerment of musicians as adjudicators in recent decades. She decided to do a “stealth search,” gathering evaluations and reviewing them with the Artistic Liaison Committee. The musicians would have a say, only they wouldn’t quite know it.

  Some players were already chattering about Dudamel’s future with the orchestra after his very first rehearsal as guest conductor, in 2005, at the Hollywood Bowl. “I was tempted to go for him right then,” Borda says. “But I wouldn’t do that.” Instead, over the next year and a half, she regularly traveled to hear Dudamel conduct, getting to know him and his wife, Elosa, and commandeering his schedule with various projects. Somehow, she managed to do this without attracting undue notice from music-industry professionals. “I’m quite short,” she joked.

  All this wouldn’t have mattered if Dudamel hadn’t won over the players when he returned to conduct at the beginning of 2007, in a program of Kodaly, Rachmaninov, and Bartók. Halfway through the first piece, Salonen, who was sitting in the audience, leaned over to his wife and whispered, “This is the man.” The contract was signed at the end of March in Lucerne, where Dudamel was on tour. “We did it about two in the morning someplace,” Borda told me, relishing the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the operation. “I don’t think anybody knew, even with the crème de la crème of the European managers dancing attendance.”

  Dudamel’s contract was for five years. “Someday he may go on to be the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic,” Borda told me. “But I’m not going to worry about that. We have a tradition of people starting young, staying for a long time, and then going on to the next thing. Part of what we do here is we’re nimble.”

  The new director was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1981. His father played trombone in a salsa band. He studied music from an early age, learning the basics of notation and theory before he took up an instrument, the violin, at the age of ten. He showed an interest in composition, and, at one of his early conducting gigs, at the age of fifteen, he led his own Trombone Concerto. Conducting quickly took over, and by his late teens he was leading ninety concerts a year with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, the chief ensemble in Venezuela’s youth-ensemble system. Venezuela has a music-education system unmatched by any in the world; since the seventies, the composer Jose Antonio Abreu has been building up an organization called the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, or El Sistema. There are now 250,000 students in the system. Abreu has managed to maintain support for his system through various regimes, including that of Hugo Chavez.

  Having won notice at the Bamberg competition in 2004, Dudamel found himself in the tricky position of being hailed as a savior of classical music. It only added to the furor that he was a non-Caucasian face in an industry suffering from the appearance of elitism. Deutsche Grammophon recorded him leading Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with the youth orchestra. My first reaction to the disc was skeptical; the interpretations were expertly handled, but there was nothing obviously extraordinary about them.

  What the recording didn’t reveal was the electricity that crackles around Dudamel in performance. Just before his Philharmonic appointment was
announced, he conducted a program with the Chicago Symphony that included Mahler’s First Symphony, and I stopped over on my way to L.A. to hear it. The conductor made smart choices throughout, managed tempo changes fluidly, shaped phrases with an idiomatic hand. At every turn, though, the players responded with unusual intensity, until the performance became an event. As Salonen told me, “He lets music be what it is, but somehow puts it on fire in some mysterious way.” Dudamel did not seem to be outside the music, imposing his ideas on it; instead, he appeared captive to it. During the coda of the Mahler, he jumped around with a boyish, Bernstein-like glee that would have appeared a bit ridiculous if you weren’t also hearing the regal roar of the orchestra in front of him.

  A thunderous ovation greeted Dudamel at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. More than a few people in the hall—including members of the orchestra—believed that he could be their next conductor. In fact, he was about to fly to Los Angeles. Late the following day, he looked around the Disney stage and conferred with Borda in her office. The story had broken in the Los Angeles Times that morning, and people were already congratulating him; several of the guards offered greetings in Spanish.

  Dudamel is a warm, exuberant man, and he responded to every well-wisher with a torrent of phrases along the lines of “It is wonderful,” “This is so special,” and “I am so happy for this big opportunity.” His English was not yet fluent, but he expressed himself gracefully, wittily, and, when necessary, with artful vagueness. He deflected questions about Chavez, apologizing for being “politically disconnected.” When I asked him about his intentions with the Philharmonic, he said that he needed to gain more experience with the orchestra and its repertory before he could think about programming. He said that he had long admired Salonen. When he was eleven, his mother bought him the conductor’s recording of Stravinsky’s Rite and Symphony in Three Movements, and he was amazed to find such a “very young conductor” leading a major orchestra. “‘Oh, my God, who is this guy?’ From that time he was an idol for me.” When Dudamel repeated that anecdote at the press conference, Salonen looked suitably embarrassed.