If there’s one thing sure to make a critic as prickly as a hedgehog, it’s a
record company proclaiming that a boy who’s hardly old enough to shave is
the biggest thing to hit music since Beethoven. So you can imagine the
reaction two years ago when high-and-mighty Deutsche Grammophon announced an
exclusive contract with a 24-year-old conductor most critics had never heard
of, let alone heard. What’s more, he came from Venezuela! “Here we go
again,” was the general groan. “Another photogenic glamour-boy flogged to
undiscerning punters, then cynically dumped.”
But you might not guess what happened next. One by one, tough critics who had
come to scoff filed raves instead. “This guy’s the real deal,” the Los
Angeles Times shouted. “Da boy is da man!” said the Orange
County Register. “Terrific!” the Boston Globeyelled.
Comparisons with Simon Rattle, or even the young Lenny Bernstein, flowed
from pens usually dipped in vitriol.
I had to check for myself. One cold January night last year I trekked to hear
the young man conduct Rattle’s old band, the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, in a half-full hall. The aura couldn’t have been less glamorous.
But what I experienced was sensational. His name is Gustavo Dudamel. He’s
not much over 5ft tall, thin as a rake, and could probably get away with
paying half-fare on the bus. But in that half-full hall he produced enough
electricity to light up Birmingham.
It wasn’t just that he spent more time in mid-air than on the podium. Or that
at one point his baton left his hand, looped over his bouncing black curls
and landed in the stalls, where it was gracefully caught by an agile
pensioner. No, it was the sounds that emerged from the band. They were
playing a solid old Mendelssohn symphony. But galvanised by Dudamel they
turned it into molten lava. This was old music hurled out like an anarchist
manifesto, the ink still drying. And his first Deutsche Grammophon recording
– Beethoven symphonies, of all presumptuous things – has exactly the same
quality. I hate to say it, but the Orange County Register is right.
Da boy is da man.
Last week I met him. Again he was in Birmingham on a cold night. But a year is
a long time in the life of a whiz-kid, and the world has now woken up to
this phenomenon. Three months ago Dudamel made his New York debut, a month
later he conducted for the first time at La Scala, Milan. Tonight and
Saturday he is in London (Queen Elizabeth Hall) with the Philharmonia. In
the autumn he takes up his first appointment outside his native land: as
maestro of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.
Of course there are precedents. Toscanini, Klemperer and Rattle were all in
their twenties when they hit the big time. Even so, 26 is terribly young to
be commanding the world’s top orchestras. As the Boy from Barquisimeto
ascends to giddier and giddier heights, I ask him if he feels the nerves,
the suffocating pressure of expectation?
He lets out a roar of laughter. As with his music-making, Dudamel’s talk has a
disarming spontaneity. “No, no!” he chortles. “I don’t feel nervous in front
of any orchestra. I feel only excitement, adrenalin, pleasure. I love to
conduct. It’s what I was born to do. It’s what I have done all my life.”
That’s almost literally true. Dudamel was conducting dolls in his parents’
little house in west Venezuela when he was 7. “My mother gave me a stick and
I put on records of the world’s greatest ensembles. It was amazing what fine
performances I got!”
Just five years later, at 12, he had graduated to the real thing, and three
years after that he was named director of a state youth orchestra. Such an
astonishing progression would be impossible in Europe. To understand how it
happened in Venezuela – and how a country with huge problems of crime and
deprivation has become a musical hothouse – a brief history lesson is
needed.
Less than 40 years ago, Venezuela had just two orchestras, almost entirely
staffed by foreigners. “It was impossible for young Venezuelans to play in
them,” Dudamel says. “There was no way to be trained.”
José Antonio Abreu changed that. Not just a conductor but an economist and
politician too – the youngest congressman in Venezuelan history – he had
musical expertise, contacts, and a near-religious zeal. “He started a youth
orchestra,” Dudamel says. “For the first rehearsal he had seven kids. Two
weeks later, he had 150.”
Then he started another, and another. He tweaked consciences in big business
and politics, portraying music as a way of keeping kids in the tough barrios
off the streets, of instilling teamwork and a sense of belonging. Abreu
wasn’t just a born Pied Piper. He was also a great salesman. Subsidy flowed
in. Thus was born the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of
Venezuela, or “El Sistema” as everyone calls it.
That was 30 years ago. But Abreu’s sistema continues to
flourish. Some 250,000 children now receive four hours of musical tuition
after school each day – yes, each day – at 120 local centres. The sistemaemploys
15,000 teachers and runs 200 youth orchestras. Kids have instruments thrust
into their hands at 3. Teaching and practising is done communally, like a
sport. And because the kids are playing for 20 hours a week, they make
extraordinary progress.
“Thanks to the sistema, street kids change weapons, from knives
and guns to clarinets and violins,” Dudamel says. “Many boys from my school
got pulled into gangs and drugs. But those who came along to the sistema
were saved. In a youth orchestra you must be in harmony with those around
you. This makes you a good person, I think.”
But spectacular though the social benefits have been, it’s the musical
achievements that have resonated round the globe (Scotland is the latest
country to adopt Venezuelan methods). Simon Rattle called the sistema“the
most important thing happening in music anywhere in the world”, and it’s
hard to argue when you hear the results. The flagship ensemble is Dudamel’s
own: the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, which he began conducting when he was 17.
Although its youngest members are only 14, its vivacity is stunning. (It
plays in Europe next month at the Lucerne Easter Festival.) But individual
Venezuelan musicians are also making a huge impression abroad. One is
Edicson Ruiz, a double bassist who has joined the world’s greatest
orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, at the age of 17.
The sistema’s most spectacular product, however, is Dudamel himself.
His dad was a salsa trombonist, but the toddling Gustavo’s arms weren’t long
enough for that instrument, so he started on the violin. His debut as a
conductor came when the teacher of his youth orchestra was late for a
rehearsal, and the eager 12-year-old was told to stand in. “I still remember
the concert: Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and the Capriol
Suite by Peter Warlock.”
From that moment, barely a day passed without him conducting one ensemble or
another. No wonder that when he took his orchestra on a European tour a
dazzled Simon Rattle invited Dudamel to be his assistant in Berlin. That was
in 2003. The next year Dudamel won the Mahler Conducting Competition, and
the rest is history.
He says emphatically that he will never desert his beloved Simon Bolivar
Orchestra. “We improve together, step by step,” he says. “I want to be with
them all my life.” But he’s realistic enough to know that big offers will
flood his way (the New York Philharmonic already has him lined up, it’s
said, to replace the unloved Lorin Maazel in 2009) and he would be mad not
to go with the flow. “Of course! It’s like having a wife but needing to
dance with other girls.”
Last year he acquired a real wife, Eloisa. “A beautiful, beautiful girl!” he
declares. “A ballet dancer anda journalist. I adore her. I
want to have a big, big family with her.”
He grins wildly – a young man with boundless talent, deeply in love, and the
world at his feet. And despite all that, I find myself liking him enormously.
