The two heroic figures making last week’s stunningly fine Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at The Granada Theatre were significant emigrants to L.A.’s musical culture and larger legacy. Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who appeared for the last time locally during his L.A. Phil tenure, before heading to lead the New York Philharmonic next fall, was a wunderkind from Venezuela when he took up the baton to lead L.A.’s stellar orchestra in 2009. And 20th century master composer Igor Stravinsky spent many years in his later life stage as an Angeleno, active in regional musical projects.
The composer-conductor combination amounted to a wowsome program featuring the considerable talents of both, in a potently realized presentation of a pair of Stravinsky’s ground-breaking ballets penned as a twenty-something, The Firebird Suite and The Rite of Spring, plus the U.S. premiere (Santa Barbara’s concert along with the weekend performances at Disney Hall) of John Adams’s engaging new Frenzy. Conceptual cohesion was at hand in the program, with each piece inter-relating and revealing sometimes surprising parallels to one another, with the legendary game-changer Rite of Spring at the apex.
All in all, by the cathartic close of Dudamel’s righteously crafted Rite of Spring, I had the impression that this was the strongest of L.A. Phil’s annual visits in memory, and a profound way to kick off the new season of orchestra concerts brought to us by the venerable CAMA .