March 28, 2007
Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra/Dudamel
Published by The Times
By Neil Fisher at the Lucerne Festival

"Two extraordinary things happened at the opening of the Lucerne Easter Festival. One was that a concert in punctilious Switzerland began a whole quarter of an hour late. The other was that it finished with the orchestra responsible receiving a cheering, stamping and roaring ovation: feedback practically unheard of at the pristine shoebox that is the town's superb Konzertsaal.

But then the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is no ordinary band. Its mostly teenage players are the elite of an unrivalled nationwide music education programme (the Sistema) that involves more than 250,000 children. And they have the 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, frenetic, frizzy-haired and infectiously charismatic, as their principal conductor.

A respectable performance of a work as demanding as Mahler's Fifth would have done the job, but this conductor - and his 150-strong orchestra - don't really do respectable. The opening trumpet solo bristled with brazenly dramatic intent, and Dudamel accordingly reshaped the ensuing funeral march as a grotesque carnival ride. He jigged about like a deranged jack-in-the-box; around him, the orchestra sweated and steamed with a passion and a spontaneity that puts several of our own orchestras to shame.

But even in the midst of one of the headlong plunges the ensemble was tight and the colours well balanced: the dancing Dudamel isn't just a showman, and his players knit together superbly.

Young man's Mahler doesn't give you everything that this neurotic composer demands. When the symphony drifted towards introspective melancholy Dudamel's grip wasn't always quite as tight, and the orchestra's hold on the phrasing and dynamics less secure. But in a lacerating scherzo and a hypercharged finale this Fifth fulfilled the whip-cracking promise with which it had begun.

Besides, those who wanted a gloomier Mahler would have found him in the first half, in the poignant Röckert Lieder. And with a smaller slice of his orchestra to manage, Dudamel's sensitive and adept touch proved a good fit for Magdalena Kozená's majestic performance. Towering over her diminutive maestro, Kozená's velvety mezzo was at its expressive best, moving from an almost girlish Liebst du um Schönheit to the dark profundities of Um Mitternacht with rapt absorption. But it was her accompanists that carried the evening: don't even think of missing their UK debut this summer".