Classical
When he was about 12, Giorgi Gigashvili discovered the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. A young pianist himself, Gigashvili had recently realized he wanted classical music “to be a part of my life,” and when he came across a YouTube video of Argerich performing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, “I fell in love with both the piece and Martha Argerich,” he says.
Argerich became an idol for the aspiring Georgian musician — and, just a few years later, they crossed paths under auspicious circumstances. In 2019, the then-18-year-old Gigashvili won a piano competition in Spain, and he got to meet the head of the jury: Argerich. “That was the moment I truly believed that what I was doing was the right choice,” he says.
Such is the life of one of the global classical music community’s most lauded emerging talents. Now 24, Gigashvili has already amassed a long list of achievements: performing to a sold-out Carnegie Hall in New York, being among the 2023 winners of the world-famous Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Israel, earning the distinction of resident artist at the 2024 Beethovenfest in Germany and much more.
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But notably, Gigashvili hasn’t limited himself to the genre where he first made his name. Instead, he’s incorporated pop, electronic and experimental music, because he believes that each musical genre has a unique charm — and that none of them should be underestimated.
Ninutsa Kakabadze
Gigashvili’s eclectic taste dates back to his childhood. Long before he was playing to sold-out concert halls and amassing accolades, Gigashvili’s mother and aunt nurtured his love of classical music. “Classical music was always playing in our home, on vinyl or the radio,” he recalls. “The sound of this genre and the works of great composers became part of my memory. We had an old piano at home, and since childhood, I was drawn to touch its keys. I loved its sound.” At age 6, he started taking lessons. “For many children, learning classical music can feel like a stressful process,” he says, “but for me, it was a source of great joy.”
But, concurrently, he was developing an interest in other types of music — and the 2006 musical film Dreamgirls was a major catalyst. An older friend gave him a copy of the film, which he says he watched “several times a day.”
“The music in it was very different from classical music, but it made a huge impression on me,” he says. “This is where the period begins when my love for music and my interest in it were no longer defined by genre. The idea that classical music is isolated and its love excludes the love for other genres is a snobbish approach and has nothing to do with understanding the phenomenon of music. I think it’s wrong to believe that there is no serious genre other than classical music. I don’t divide music into serious and nonserious genres. Every genre, for me, is serious and unique.”
Ninutsa Kakabadze
In turn, despite his recognition in the classical world, Gigashvili has ventured into other genres. He’s drawn on pop, electronic and other modern styles in his repeated collaborations with the young Georgian artist Nini Nutsubidze, which have included modern interpretations of Georgian retro songs — nostalgic for older generations and an engaging way to introduce younger audiences to their culture’s musical heritage. Listeners of all ages have gravitated to the recordings.
At Beethovenfest, Gigashvili performed with Nutsubidze, where they delivered a unique amalgam of classical, folk, electronic, pop, hip-hop and Georgian retro music. “The fact that I, as a classical music performer and pianist, am involved in creative, modern experimental projects makes it even more interesting to Western audiences,” he says. “The global audience today is more curious and interested in experimental approaches.”
Gigashvili says that the creative process differs with each genre — but that these differences are what make his work interesting and diverse. “When you play classical music, the opportunities for interpretation are more limited,” he says, explaining that because classical performers “can’t subtract or add notes,” the genre relies on more subtle differences in aspects like technique and emotion. “I enjoy this limitation because it makes me think more about what I can break and where I can push boundaries. When it comes to performing contemporary music and I am at the keyboard, I am completely free. There’s no need to add my personal signature to specific pieces because I am already the author. These two experiences together create Giorgi Gigashvili.”
Ninutsa Kakabadze
Meanwhile, as Gigashvili’s platform has grown, he has used it to advance causes beyond music. Gigashvili is one of those artists who stands out for his active civic position. With Georgia’s relationship with the European Union at a crossroad, Gigashvili has spoken out supporting the country’s European future and protesting injustice.
“When I express an opinion on social issues, first and foremost, I am a citizen, not an artist,” he says. “This is my primary status. Even on the day I stop performing, I will still speak up and I will still express my position. Today, when Georgia’s European future is at risk, I believe it is every citizen’s duty to clearly express their civic position. This is especially their responsibility if they have a large audience and the right platform. If someone doesn’t have a correct civic position, for me, their art, including music, loses value.”
As Gigashvili anticipates a busy 2025 — he embarks on a tour of America, Asia and Europe in January, and he’ll soon begin recording his second album, which will feature Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8 — it is music’s utility as an inspirational tool that continues to motivate him.
“Once, after a concert, an audience member came up to me and said, ‘It seemed like I had forgotten I had emotions, but today, this music made me remember that I am human,’ ” he recalls. “I will never forget this comment. If a performance can make you cry, laugh, feel sad, make you happy or even angry, it means it is real. For me, that is the purpose of music.”
On a balmy recent August evening, Gustavo Dudamel strode onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl wearing a huge golden gauntlet on his left hand.
He wouldn’t get to use it. Dudamel is dramatic, but he’s no comic book villain; he’s the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he was there to conduct the orchestra for the world premiere of Marvel Studios’ Infinity Saga Concert Experience. So instead of wielding the power of assorted Infinity Stones to change the world, Dudamel accepted the “vibranium baton” presented to him by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige (a reference to the fictional metal of the Marvel universe) and performed some magic of his own, conducting two-plus hours of raucous music from 25 different Marvel movies, backed by gigantic video screens with 3D projections, dancers, fireworks and thousands of screaming fans.
The whole thing looked more like a rock show than a symphony concert. Then again, Dudamel is the closest thing to a rock star the classical music world has.
After nearly two decades in Los Angeles, Dudamel hobnobs with the likes of Chris Martin and John Williams, is close friends with Frank Gehry (who designed the stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall, the L.A. Phil’s home that opened a little over 20 years ago) and counts Billie Eilish, Gwen Stefani, Ricky Martin and Carlos Vives among the dozens of pop world luminaries who’ve guested under his (non-vibranium) baton. He has won five Grammy Awards (including, this year, best orchestral performance for the L.A. Phil’s recording of composer Thomas Adès’ Dante) and placed nine albums at No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums chart. His life is the subject of the documentary Viva Maestro! And, though never officially confirmed, he was clearly the inspiration behind the character of the free-thinking, mercurial Latin maestro played by Gael García Bernal in the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle, in which he had a small role as a stage manager.
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In the span of just two weeks from the end of August to mid-September, Dudamel conducted Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, Austria, and then flew to Los Angeles where, including the two Marvel shows, he led the L.A. Phil in nine concerts, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth; dances by living Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra; Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and scenes from Bizet’s Carmen; plus two evenings of contemporary Latin music with Mexican pop/folk singer Natalia Lafourcade. It’s a staggering musical offering. All told, more than 100,000 people attended Dudamel’s nine summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl with the L.A. Phil, which he will again conduct on Oct. 8 at the opening night of Carnegie Hall’s 2024-25 season in New York.
“He is unique in the classical music world because not only does he lead the orchestra and elevate the work of the L.A. Phil in terms of excellence, but he also connects the orchestra with different kinds of music, collaborating with artists [in other genres] with which we wouldn’t typically perform,” L.A. Phil president/CEO Kim Noltemy says. “The result is he brings orchestra music to so many different people. That is one unbelievably unique piece that makes Gustavo special.”
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For Dudamel, it’s part of a deep-rooted belief that music as an art, with purpose, supersedes specific forms and genres. “As an orchestral musician, you value the work of these pop artists, and likewise, pop acts have the opportunity to see that the academicism of the other side isn’t overwhelming, but rather, it’s the same thing in a different style,” he says. “Yes, there’s a fascinating technical complexity [to classical music]. But in the end, what matters is what you feel and what people perceive. We have to erase people’s fears regarding classical music. It may be intellectual in execution, but music’s power is spiritual.”
Not since Leonard Bernstein has a conductor done as much as Dudamel to make classical music accessible — or so thoroughly captured the public imagination. The two maestros share a not just persuasive but borderline evangelical approach to relentlessly promoting music as a “fundamental human right,” not just by broadening what qualifies as “classical” repertoire but also broadening the concept of the orchestra itself. Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts were central to his efforts to expand classical music’s audience; Dudamel has worked to create youth orchestras worldwide. And then, of course, there’s the hair: Bernstein’s silky pompadour flung about wildly as he conducted, and while Dudamel’s signature curly brown mop is perhaps a little less springy than when he made his U.S. conducting debut with the L.A. Phil in 2005 and is now peppered with gray, it still pops and sways with the music.
It’s a visible reminder of the personal stamp he continues to leave in a world of relatively staid personalities, and undoubtedly a factor in his broad recognizability. Dudamel is one of the few faces in classical music known far beyond the space, no doubt one of many reasons the L.A. Phil will miss him when his last season as music and artistic director ends and he officially takes over the New York Philharmonic in its 2026-27 season as music and artistic director.
When he does, Dudamel will become the first Latino to helm the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, joining a pantheon of giants that includes Arturo Toscanini, Gustav Mahler and Bernstein himself. Expectations for his arrival are so heightened, says N.Y. Phil executive advisor and interim CEO Deborah Borda, that even though Dudamel will not formally join for another season, “we saw a record surge in subscription sales, as patrons are concerned they won’t be able to secure tickets once he starts.”
For Dudamel, being the first Latino to lead the N.Y. Phil long term is a matter of “immense pride. But I feel it doesn’t have to do with a race or a culture,” he says. Historically, he notes, the great symphony orchestras in the United States and beyond have been led mostly by European men who not only represented the music they performed, but also the European migration to this country and Latin America.
Dudamel’s story is completely different. The real triumph “is about where I come from,” he says. “I don’t come from a traditional music conservatory. I come from El Sistema de Orquestas, a program where you grow up playing music with your friends.”
It’s the morning after he has conducted Carnival of the Animals and Carmen, and Dudamel has joined me for coffee in an empty Hollywood Bowl meeting room. He has traded the formal white dinner jacket of the Marvel show for offstage casual — track pants, short-sleeved T-shirt and sneakers — and his trademark mix of impish humor (accentuated by his still-boyish dimples) and deep thoughtfulness. Born and raised in Venezuela, Dudamel learned English as an adult, and though it’s grammatically perfect — albeit with a clipped, precise accent — he prefers his native Spanish, which he speaks very quickly (as most Venezuelans do) and with the erudite lingo of an intellectual, often citing the likes of Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno or Mexican writer Octavio Paz.
Today, we’re talking not just about his new appointment and the legacy he’ll leave behind in L.A. as he begins to build another in New York, but also the legacy he grew up with — one that still defines him.
At 43, Dudamel is almost as old as El Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (The National System of Venezuelan Youth and Children’s Choruses and Orchestras). Known simply as El Sistema, it was founded in 1975 by musician-economist José Antonio Abreu, who held several government appointments and built El Sistema as part of the government structure, guaranteeing its existence and funding regardless of who was in power.
El Sistema was created more than 20 years before the Hugo Chávez regime, built on the premise that music education should be free and accessible to all children, everywhere in the country. For Abreu, who died in 2018, the power of music was transformative, spiritual and lasting, particularly in a developing country rife with poverty. What started with a first rehearsal attended by 11 children eventually grew to 443 schools (each called a “nucleus” in Sistema terminology) and 1,700 satellite centers that teach over 1 million children in Venezuela’s 24 states, according to El Sistema’s official webpage.
Abreu’s philosophy — famously, he said that “a child who plays an instrument with a teacher is no longer poor; he is a child on the rise” — is one Dudamel not only espouses but assumes as his identity. He’s still the music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and will tour Europe with it next year for El Sistema’s 50th anniversary. (The tour stops are connected to cities with which Dudamel has a personal history.) He has no plans to change his commitment to it. “I would give my life for the orchestra,” he states bluntly. “It gave me everything I’m living now, and that’s why I share it as much as I can.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
But in the last few years, throughout Venezuela’s many political government crises and now, after the contested July reelection of President Nicolás Maduro — who has been in power since 2013 and whose latest reelection has been widely disclaimed both domestically and internationally as rigged — Dudamel has sometimes been criticized by other Venezuelans abroad for not speaking out more against the government.
Some critics have suggested that Maduro has used Venezuela’s youth orchestra to his political advantage. Renowned Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has long called it a propaganda tool; when Dudamel conducted the ensemble at Carnegie Hall days after Maduro’s reelection, Human Rights Foundation parked a truck outside the venue displaying the message “Maduro Stole The Election” and asking Dudamel, “How long will you continue to serve as Maduro’s puppet and henchman?” The organization explained on social media that it wanted “to remind the world of Maduro’s fraud and to call out Dudamel for engaging in shameless propaganda and providing cover for the Venezuelan dictator.”
But, Dudamel points out, he has not been silent. He has written New York Times and Los Angeles Times op-eds calling for an end to repression in Venezuela and speaking against the government’s plans to rewrite the nation’s constitution. In 2017, after Venezuelan government forces killed a young violinist during a protest, Dudamel published an open letter, writing, “Nothing justifies bloodshed. We must stop ignoring the just cry of the people suffocated by an intolerable crisis. I urgently call on the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people.”
“I am one voice,” he says today. “People think if I speak out everything is going to change, but that’s not the case. There needs to be radical change, and that will take a lot of time.
“We live in a world of immediacy, where there’s always pressure to say something,” he adds when I ask why he hasn’t spoken out more in the wake of July’s contested election. “When do people actually reflect before speaking? You have to consider the entire situation. El Sistema de Orquestas represents all Venezuela, not just a part of it… El Sistema is focused on the neediest communities. That’s the truth. Isn’t that a way to change the country, far more than shouting? So you have to be prudent because you’re part of that. I’m not an individual speaking as an individual because that’s not how I grew up. I grew up in an orchestra.”
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This was Dudamel’s mindset during his own first El Sistema experience. He started music lessons at a school in his native Barquisimeto, a quaint city of under 1 million people in northwestern Venezuela. This was the mid-’80s, still years before Chávez took power, but a decade into the existence of El Sistema, which by then was thriving.
“I was only 5 years old, but I remember it perfectly,” Dudamel recalls. “It was the home of Doña Doralisa de Medina. It was a tiny colonial house where Maestro Abreu studied as a child. Doralisa was no longer alive, but El Sistema was there. The house had a red gate with musical notes. I walked in down a passageway and then to a patio, and I heard Chopin on the piano, a trumpet, violins. I fell in love with that cacophony.”
El Sistema didn’t pluck Dudamel out of abject poverty. His father is a working salsa trombonist; his mother, a voice teacher. His uncle, a doctor, was also a gifted cuatro player who taught Dudamel how to play popular Venezuelan music: waltzes, tangos, boleros — what Dudamel calls his very essence.
Perhaps because music flowed through his family, Dudamel’s own studies were encouraged but never imposed. He started conducting by accident, when his youth orchestra’s conductor arrived late for rehearsal and Dudamel took the podium, almost as if it was a game.
While no one ever told him he would make it big, his talent would have been impossible to miss. Abreu took an early interest in him, becoming a mentor and moral compass. He’s still very much alive in Dudamel’s head — he constantly begins sentences with “El Maestro Abreu…” — as are his teachings: to think long term, to learn from mistakes, to see music as a social instrument. It was Abreu, after all, who urged Dudamel, then in his early 20s, to enter Germany’s prestigious Mahler Competition, for conducting works by the vaunted composer, in 2004. When he won, it changed his life, catapulting him from local star to global wunderkind.
Among the jurors was Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish composer and current San Francisco Symphony music director who was, at the time, music director of the L.A. Phil. “I was deeply impressed by the talent of this guy, but also, I felt he was such a good guy,” Salonen recalls. “I told him I wanted to invite him to L.A.” As he got to know Dudamel, he continues, “I became so convinced about him being my favorite person to take over in L.A. and become my successor, taking [the orchestra] in a different direction but keeping his curiosity and openness.” A mere three years later, Salonen’s wishes came true: the L.A. Phil — where Deborah Borda was then executive director — appointed Dudamel music director, effective with the 2009-10 season.
Dudamel’s personable demeanor and charismatic conducting style immediately enchanted L.A. audiences and the ensemble’s players alike — he is, after all, affectionately known as “The Dude” to both cohorts. But from the jump, his mission went far beyond the podium. “I was very young, and evidently there was a human and artistic connection with the orchestra and the administration,” he says. “But my first order of business was creating El Sistema here. That’s how YOLA began.”
YOLA is Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, the L.A. Phil’s music education program, that Dudamel created in 2007. It currently serves close to 1,700 young musicians across five sites in the city, providing them free instruments, intensive music instruction (up to 18 hours per week), academic support and leadership training. The program has inspired hundreds of versions around the world; in the United States alone, El Sistema USA serves 140 member programs, 6,000 teaching artists and 25,000 students. Dudamel also launched a mentorship program for young conductors in 2009 and now brings four each season to assist the L.A. Phil’s guest conductors.
But education and training are just part of the equation to “create identity and have people see themselves reflected in the [L.A.] Philharmonic,” Dudamel says. “Right or wrong, cultural artistic institutions are seen as elitist for many, especially those who don’t have resources. The adventure was to make of the [L.A.] Philharmonic an institution people could identify with.”
Dudamel began doing this gradually by being more experimental in his programming, adding more pop and jazz guest artists, bringing Hollywood into the mix (he has famously played multiple concerts of John Williams’ music, with Williams in attendance) and opening up the repertoire to new works and unexpected juxtapositions. A ticket buyer who might not want to hear a world-premiere commission might be lured in by Beethoven; one allergic to the idea of Beethoven might reconsider after seeing an orchestra perform with Ricky Martin.
“For me, it wasn’t only about building a good orchestra,” Dudamel says. “That already existed. But now we have one of the top orchestras in the world, respected as much for its technical level as for its proud acceptance of the repertoire and the way they perform it. This wasn’t ‘Oh, Gustavo, come in and do whatever you want.’ It was figuring out how to build it.” Dudamel had the Hollywood Bowl, Disney Hall and the orchestra. “All the elements were there,” he continues. “We just had to get the best out of them. And there’s still a lot to do.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
Dudamel conducted the L.A. Phil at the 2011 Latin Grammys and the 2019 Academy Awards. He led the orchestra alongside Billie Eilish and FINNEAS as part of the concert film experience Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, released on Disney+. And he performed at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show with members of YOLA, alongside Coldplay, Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.
“His authentic, warm connection with audiences really changes how people feel when watching a concert. Audiences are so excited to see him, and there’s a buzz around him,” Noltemy says, noting that pandemic era aside, attendance and audience diversity at the L.A. Phil have increased while the average age of concertgoers has decreased. “He’s certainly not the only conductor who has increased attendance and brought diversity, but he did so in L.A., a city that is so spread out. His concerts at Disney Hall tend to be sold out.”
Those results have occurred even as Dudamel has made a huge effort to foster contemporary composition (typically not an old-school orchestra subscriber’s favorite programming), commissioning music from composers around the world. During his tenure at the L.A. Phil, the orchestra has premiered “at least 300 new works” written specifically for the ensemble, he says, including many from Latin America.
“Latin American repertoire has to stop being [perceived as] exotic,” he says. “It’s not about ‘Wow, we’re playing Latin American music!’ No. It’s the fair thing to do. And the only way to include it in the repertoire is playing it but at the level it deserves, making it part of the regular repertoire of any orchestra.” Case in point: Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, a Dudamel mentee who was just named Carnegie Hall’s composer-in-residence for the coming season. In July, Platoon released her first full album of orchestral works, Revolución Diamantina (performed by the L.A. Phil and conducted by Dudamel), which is being submitted for Grammy consideration.
Just how much of his approach with the L.A. Phil Dudamel will be able to replicate in New York remains to be seen; as he says, he has yet to formally arrive and experience the orchestra. But in recent months, he has been working with both orchestras to forge a connection between the two.
In April, when Dudamel conducted the N.Y. Phil’s Spring Gala at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, he featured rapper Common, former New York Yankee and classically trained guitarist Bernie Williams and student musicians from several New York music schools, performing a program that also included classical works by Villa-Lobos and Strauss, as well as a premiere commissioned by the N.Y. Phil and Bravo! Vail Music Festival.
It was the kind of bold, cross-genre programming that Dudamel delights in doing in L.A. and clearly wants to emphasize in New York. “It was something completely new and wonderful. For me, that’s the kind of thing that makes the music transcend beyond the sometimes strict academic and intellectual isolation that classical music represents,” he says. “We can develop a lot in terms of repertoire and go beyond Lincoln Center and connect more with the entire community.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
The N.Y. Phil, for example, is known for its massive annual free outdoor concert on the Great Lawn in Central Park, which is always attended by no less than 50,000, and it also performs in all five boroughs during its annual Concerts in the Parks. But the L.A. Phil has the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor venue that seats 18,000 and is the orchestra’s home for the entire summer. It’s a big difference that Dudamel would like to somehow bridge.
He also joins the N.Y. Phil after the 2022 reopening of Geffen Hall following a $550 million renovation that drastically improved its acoustics. He says the new venue did not factor into his decision to go to New York, “but it was very important, especially for the orchestra. It’s been a plus to elevate the morale. Now the orchestra is in the process of building its sound with the ‘instrument’ [that is the new hall].” Optimism is also high following the Sept. 20 finalization of a new labor contract that ensured 30% raises for the orchestra’s musicians over the next three years, bringing their base salary to $205,000.
Dudamel is also taking the reins of an institution that lately has had its share of highly publicized troubles. After just one year on the job, N.Y. Phil CEO Gary Ginstling stepped down in July amid rising tensions with the orchestra’s board, according to a New York Times report. And the orchestra’s public image has been tarnished after reports earlier this year resurfaced a 2010 sexual misconduct charge made against two of its musicians. Although charges were never filed against the two men, the controversy led to the musicians being put on leave; they then sued the N.Y. Phil for doing so.
As Dudamel is not yet officially the N.Y. Phil’s music director (for the 2025-26 season, he is music director designate), he won’t comment on administrative matters other than to acknowledge that “those are problems that need to be resolved.” And although the administration of the orchestra ultimately is not his purview, “Obviously the morale of the orchestra is my responsibility, and you have to keep that morale high, taking the best decisions and advocating for justice for everyone,” he says. “That’s essential. We’re not isolated from what happens around us.”
Whatever may have occurred before his tenure begins, Dudamel is without a doubt joining an orchestra that respects him as a conductor, whose musicians have a history and rapport with him. “There was an undeniable spontaneous connection between our musicians and Gustavo, so much so that he was literally their only choice to be our next music director,” Borda says. “Selling tickets is important, but we believe this is best accomplished when you have the right artistic leader.”
Dudamel is acutely aware of the expectations now surrounding him. “It’s a challenge, but life without challenge… it’s nothing!” he says with some relish. “But I’m not a savior here. I have nothing to save. What we have to do is build, and that’s not just up to me. We have a great team.” And after all, he’s Dudamel — and by now, he understands it comes with the territory.
“People want you to scream what they scream, but no. To me, change isn’t about screaming but about building things that last, as I learned from Maestro Abreu,” he says. “I sincerely believe artists should be symbols of unity … They must guarantee that cathartic, unifying space we all need — not just here or in Venezuela, but everywhere.”
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This fall, for example, Dudamel will lead the L.A. Phil in Mendelssohn’s music from A Midsummer’s Night Dream with his wife, Spanish actress María Valverde, providing narration — music by a German composer, written for the work of a British playwright who derived it from a Nordic story, now narrated in Spanish, conducted by a Venezuelan and performed by an American orchestra. Plus, the evening will feature the premiere of Ortiz’s new cello concerto.
“It’s the kind of thing you don’t even remark upon because it feels natural. But it’s a true reflection of diversity,” Dudamel says. “When you see all these elements come together, you realize, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ ”
He speaks about this blend of so many seemingly disparate elements as if it’s destiny, or magic. But a moment like that — much like a career such as Dudamel’s — doesn’t occur by happenstance or without purpose.
“One thing about Gustavo I think needs to be said is that for someone who had a lot of success from very early on, he’s remarkable in that he never lost his center,” Salonen says. “He has never lost his ideals. He believes in music as a social cause, and he believes in music and the arts as a very central thing in keeping the fabric of society strong. And despite all the success and fame, he’s still the same guy I met all those years ago.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On a balmy recent August evening, Gustavo Dudamel strode onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl wearing a huge golden gauntlet on his left hand. He wouldn’t get to use it. Dudamel is dramatic, but he’s no comic book villain; he’s the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he was there to conduct […]
A performance years in the making became dazzling reality in August at Burning Man, when DJ-producer Mita Gami played with conductor Meir Briskman and an orchestra assembled especially for the occasion.
The hour-and 15-minute performance happened mid-week at Burning Man 2024 on the festival’s famed Mayan Warrior art car, a new version of which made its debut at the event this year after the original was destroyed in a fire in April 2023.
The Israeli conductor came up with the idea for the performance years ago and brought it to Gami, with the pair performing together since 2022 with an electronic/classical fusion show for which Briskman wrote and conducted the orchestral elements, with Gami producing and performing the electronic components.
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For Burning Man, the orchestra was assembled after the pair put a call out to players, with 123 people applying to be in the orchestra and 37 of them ultimately selected to perform. On Instagram, Briskman wrote that the performance came together “after 3 years of work, 1467 phone calls, 4356 emails [and] 5942 WhatsApp messages”
“Our search to find classically trained players that were going to Burning Man began through posting via our instagram stories,” the pair tell Billboard in a joint statement. “The message rapidly spread, and we received an overwhelming number of responses. Despite the limited rehearsal time, we embraced the challenge and turned our dream into a magical reality, delivering a complex performance that flowed effortlessly.”
The performance was managed by Amal Medina, a member of Gami’s management team, a co-talent buyer for Los Angeles-based electronic events company Stranger Than and the talent buyer/events coordinator for Mayan Warrior. Medina helped manage the orchestra and handled logistics such as vetting the musicians, organizing rehearsals in San Francisco and at Burning Man and sourcing equipment and instruments and managing the orchestra. Tal Ohana of Stranger Than helped gather equipment and staging elements for the performance, The Mayan Warrior team worked on onsite and sound and lighting elements.
The performance was well-aligned with the goals of the new edition of Mayan Warrior, with the art car’s founder Pablo Gonzalez Vargas telling Billboard in 2023 that the team was planning to “slowly transition into a more diverse spectrum of musical and cultural performances. The goal over time is to have more live acts with real instruments that can provide new experiences.”
Other performers on Mayan Warrior during Burning Man included Rüfüs du Sol, whose set is also up now.
Watch the Mita Gami & Meir Briskman Orchestra Set exclusively on Billboard.com below:
Venezuelan conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel received the 14th Glenn Gould Prize during a ceremony at Carnegie Hall on Aug. 2. Dudamel is music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and is set to become music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026.
Previous recipients of the Glenn Gould Prize, called Laureates, include Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Leonard Cohen, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Alanis Obomsawin, Philip Glass, Robert Lepage, and Oscar Peterson.
Dudamel, 43, is the first Laureate who had previously been awarded the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize, having been selected by his mentor and Glenn Gould Prize Laureate Dr. José Antonio Abreu in 2009.
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Selected by the Laureate themselves, the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize is awarded to an outstanding young artist demonstrating exceptional promise with a cash award of CDN$25,000. This year, Dudamel selected two young conductors, both also from Venezuela, to share the Protégé Prize – Andrés David Ascanio Abreu and Enluis Montes Olivar.
The Canadian Consul General to New York, the Hon. Tom Clark, and Glenn Gould Foundation executive director Brian Levine, presented the awards onstage at Carnegie Hall during a concert in which Dudamel conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.
“It is a huge honor to receive this prize,” Dudamel said in accepting his honor. “Years ago, I was a Protégé Prize winner, given to me by my Maestro Abreu. It makes me very proud, especially to be here with all these amazing young people from my country, Venezuela.”
Nominees for The Glenn Gould Prize are submitted through an open, public nomination process and can come from a broad range of artistic fields. An international jury comprised of artists and professionals from diverse disciplines convenes in Toronto, Canada (where Gould was born and where he died) to review the nominees and select the Laureate. The Glenn Gould Prize Laureate is awarded a cash prize of CDN$100,000.
The Glenn Gould Foundation, established in 1983, is a registered Canadian charitable organization dedicated to celebrating excellence in the arts and promoting cultural enrichment globally.
Gould, a Canadian classical pianist, won four Grammys and three Juno Awards. He is best known for Bach: The Goldberg Variations, which he recorded in both 1955 and 1981. The earlier recording was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1983. That same year, his digital re-recording won both a Grammy and a Juno for best classical album. Sadly, all of these awards were posthumous: Gould had died in 1982 at age 50. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2013.
Cincinnati is going all-in on getting a pop king to the Queen City. Mayor Aftab Pureval and Vice Mayor Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney were joined by leaders from the Cincinnati Opera and a variety of regional partners on Wednesday morning (May 22) at Cincinnati Music Hall to announce a full-court-press effort to persuade Paul McCartney to visit the city this summer for the Opera’s upcoming world stage premiere of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio.
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The summer-long “Come Together, Cincy! Get Paul to Music Hall!” effort aims to get Sir Paul to say “yes” to the invitation to celebrate the premiere in July after the former Beatle agreed to allow his first classical piece — a 1991 tribute to his hometown co-written with composer Carl Davis — to be staged in the city.
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“This is a special time in Cincinnati, and the world stage premiere of Sir Paul’s Liverpool Oratorio is an incredible example of the excitement building around the Queen City,” Mayor Pureval tells Billboard. “Cincinnati’s vibrant cultural community helps put us on the map, and our reputation as a world-class arts destination brings real eyes and real tourism into our region. Folks from around our community, and around the world, are ready to Come Together and celebrate a truly one-of-a-kind experience here in town.”
The Oratorio will be presented on the opera stage for the first time from July 19-27 at Music Hall. According to a release announcing the effort, McCartney, 81, endorsed the new production in a letter to the Opera, in which he wrote, “I am writing to express my wholehearted support for this project. I believe that the Cincinnati Opera is uniquely positioned to bring this work to life in a new way, and I have no doubt that your production will be an inspiring experience for all who see it.”
At press time it was unclear if McCartney was planning to travel to the city for the debut.
In the meantime, the region will be blanketed with “Get Paul” enticements in an effort to convince the singer to return to Cincy for the first time since a 2016 arena show. The project announced on Wednesday morning will include a barrage of ads this summer featuring the Opera and McCartney on Metro buses, at the CVG international airport, at Reds and FC Cincinnati soccer games, as well as a number of iconic downtown locations. The fanfare will kick off this weekend at the city’s traditional summer kick-off event, Taste of Cincinnati, which typically draws more than half a million visitors to the streets of downtown.
Local residents are also encouraged to record a video tribute to Sir Paul and to post it on their socials using the hashtag #GetPaulToMusicHall, with the release saying that tagged videos amplified by the Opera and “Come Together” partners will be shared with McCartney’s team.
“We’re looking forward to launching the ‘Come Together, Cincy!’ campaign this weekend at Taste of Cincinnati, courtesy of our partners at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber,” said Cincinnati Opera CEO Chris Milligan in a statement. “Attendees can stop by the Opera booth and record their video tribute to Sir Paul by sharing a favorite memory or singing a snippet of a McCartney tune… Let’s get Paul to Music Hall!”
The Liverpool Oratorio live album was released in 1991 as part of a commemoration of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s 150th anniversary. The eight-movement piece that follows a character named Shanty as it roughly sketches out McCartney’s life story had its American premiere in Nov. 1991 at Carnegie Hall.
Check out the full calendar of “Get Paul to Music Hall!’ events here.
The music of Taylor Swift rules Billboard’s main classical chart, as Vitamin String Quartet’s VSQ Performs Taylor Swift opens atop the Classical Albums survey dated May 18. The 16-song set, originally released in February, enters atop the chart with 3,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. May 3-9, according to Luminate. Of that sum, […]
Maurizio Pollini, a Grammy-winning Italian pianist who performed frequently at La Scala opera house in Milan, has died. He was 82.
Pollini died on Saturday (March 23), La Scala said in a statement. The announcement didn’t specify a cause of death, but Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems.
During a six decades-long international career, Pollini’s repertoire expanded beyond the standard classics. He embraced early 20th-century masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and postwar modernists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono.
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La Scala defined the pianist as “one of the great musicians of our time and a fundamental reference in the artistic life of the theater for over 50 years.”
Pollini was considered a pianist with unique intellectual power, whose unrivaled technique and interpretive drive compelled listeners to think deeply.
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He was born in Milan on Jan. 5, 1942, into a family of artists. His father, Gino Pollini, was a violinist and a leading rationalist architect. His mother, Renata Melotti, sang and played the piano, as did her brother, Fausto Melotti, who was also a pioneer of abstract sculpture.
“I grew up in a house with art and artists,” Pollini said in an interview. “Old works and modern works coexisted together as part of life.”
Pollini began giving concerts before his 10th birthday, performing Chopin’s Etudes at age 14 and then winning the International Chopin Piano Competition at 18, as the youngest foreign pianist among a group of 89 contestants.
Arthur Rubinstein, president of the jury, reportedly said that the young pianist “already plays better than any of us.”
After his first international recognition, however, Pollini put his career on hold to study, explaining that performing right away would have been for him “a little premature.”
“I wanted to study, get to know the repertoire better, play the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms,” he said.
In the late 1960s, Pollini participated in improvised concerts in factories and programs for students and workers at La Scala, conducted by longtime friend Claudio Abbado.
During his long international career, he also collaborated with other famous conductors, including Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Chailly.
Pollini performed his first American tour in 1968. From the 1970s to the ‘90s, he made a series of recordings with the Deutsche Grammophon label, becoming a celebrated interpreter of classics like Beethoven, Schumann and Schubert.
His albums won several awards, including a Grammy in 2007 for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) for Chopin: Nocturnes.
He is survived by his wife Marilisa, and his son Daniele, also an acclaimed pianist and conductor.
Byron Janis, the celebrated classical pianist who studied with Vladimir Horowitz, recorded previously unknown Chopin waltzes from manuscripts he unearthed and became a cultural hero in the U.S. after performing in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died. He was 95.
Janis died Thursday (March 14) at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, his wife, Maria Cooper Janis, daughter of two-time Oscar-winning actor Gary Cooper, announced.
“I have been blessed with the privilege for 58 years of loving and being loved by not only one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but by an exceptional human being who took his talents to their highest pinnacle,” she said in a statement.
During his 85-year career, Janis covered composers from Bach to David W. Guion and performed major piano concertos from Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Prokofiev. He occupied two volumes of the 1999 Mercury Philips series Great Pianists of the 20th Century and recorded for Philips, EMI, Sony and Universal as well.
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In 1944, Janis became Horowitz’s first student and made his orchestral debut with conductor Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. At 18, he was signed by RCA Victor Records as its youngest artist.
He performed at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 29, 1948, and Olin Downes in The New York Times wrote: “Not for a long time had this writer heard such a talent allied with the musicianship, the feeling, the intelligence and artistic balance shown by the twenty-year-old pianist, Byron Janis … Whatever he touched, he made significant and fascinating by the most legitimate and expressive means.”
During the Cold War, Janis became the first American artist chosen to participate in the 1960 Cultural Exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Later, he was the first American concert pianist to be asked back to Cuba, 40 years after his previous performance there.
Byron Yanks (shortened from Yankilevich) was born on March 24, 1928, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father, Samuel, owned several Army-Navy stores in the area but lost all but one of them during the Depression.
Janis started out playing the xylophone before moving with his mother, Hattie, and sister in 1936 to New York to study piano with Josef and Rosina Lhévinne and then Adele Marcus.
Horowitz saw Janis perform Rachmaninoff’s “Concerto No. 2” at a concert in Pittsburgh and went on to give him lessons at his home on the Upper East Side in New York for three years. “Can you imagine how exciting it was? I was the very first person he worked with,” Janis recalled in the 2009 PBS documentary The Byron Janis Story.
“He said something very interesting to me: ‘You play a bit in watercolors, but you could play more in oils.’ What he was saying was, you could be a bigger, romantic, virtuoso concert pianist.”
(Only two other pianists, Gary Graffman and Ronald Turini, were ever acknowledged by Horowitz as his students.)
In 1967, Janis accidentally discovered two previously unknown manuscripts of Chopin waltzes in France and later found two others while teaching at Yale University. The discoveries provided new insight into Chopin’s creative process, and EMI would release his Chopin Collection in 2012.
Janis performed six times by four sitting presidents at the White House, and among his awards were the Commander of the French Legion d’Honneur for Arts and Letters, the Grand Prix du Disque, the Stanford Fellowship from Yale and the gold medal from the French Society for the Encouragement of Progress (he was the first musician to receive that honor since its inception in 1906).
He composed the scores for major musical productions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates and wrote one for The True Gen, a 2013 documentary on the 20-year friendship between Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway.
His trip to the Soviet Union was important, he noted, “because the Russians were saying America can only produce cars. The total propaganda was we were totally uncultured.” He impressed the audience there and returned home a hero. (Watch him perform in 1965 on The Ed Sullivan Show here.)
Another performance that year was released in 2018 as Live From Leningrad, 1960.
“According to Janis,” John Von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “he was unaware a recording had been made until a vinyl disc transfer sent by an anonymous source turned up in a mailbox of his sound engineer. The pianist is in peak form (his Chopin ‘Funeral March’ sonata is positively hair-raising), and the restoration captures the frisson of a live performance the Russian audience obviously savored.”
A selection of original compositions from Janis will be released this year.
He published his memoirs, Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormal, in 2010.
His son, Stefan, whom he had with his first wife, June Dickson Wright, died in 2017.
When he was 11, Janis tore tendons when he accidentally put his left hand through a glass door, forcing him to alter his playing. “I had to learn a way of using my eye instead of my finger so I knew where I was going,” he once told Barbara Walters. “People thought I was finished.”
And in 1973, he developed painful psoriatic arthritis in both hands but kept it secret until 1985 when, after a performance at the White House, Nancy Reagan made his condition public when she announced his role as spokesperson for the Arthritis Foundation. He underwent several surgeries to fix the problem.
“In spite of adverse physical challenges throughout his career, he overcame them, and it did not diminish his artistry,” Maria Cooper Janis, 86, wrote. “Music is Byron’s soul, not a ticket to stardom, and his passion for and love of creating music informed every day of his life of 95 years.
“The music world, if it knows how to listen, will be constantly enriched and educated by the music created by Byron Janis, my best friend, companion, LOVE — what gratitude I have lived with every day and shall continue to do so all the rest of my days.”
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa died at his home in Tokyo on Feb. 6, 2024, due to heart failure. He was 88 years old.
A private funeral was held with his close family in accordance with the deceased’s wishes, with a memorial service scheduled at a later date.
Ozawa was born in 1935 in Shenyang, China. After studying under Karajan and Bernstein, he served as the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Ravinia Festival, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony.
In 1973, Ozawa was appointed as the thirteenth music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He became the first Asian music director at Wiener Staatsoper in the autumn of 2002, a position he held until spring 2010.
Among the many awards and accolades Ozawa has received in Japan and internationally include the Asahi Prize (1985), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class (2002), the Mainichi Art Award (2003), the Suntory Music Award (2003), honorary membership of the Wiener Staatsoper (2007), France’s Officier de la Légion d’Honneur (2008), Foreign Associated Member in the Académie des BeauxArts de l’Institut de France (2008), the Order of Culture in Japan (2008), Giglio D’Oro by Premio Galileo 2000 Foundation of Italy (2008), the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2011), the Akeo Watanabe Foundation Music Award (2011), and the Kennedy Center Honors (2015), as well as an honorary doctorate from Harvard University (2000) and Sorbonne University (2004).
In 2010, he also became the first Japanese to be bestowed an honorary membership to the Vienna Philharmonic.
Ozawa won Best Opera Recording at the 58th Grammy Awards in 2016 for Ravel: L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, recorded at the 2013 Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, in which he conducted the Saito Kinen Orchestra.
The same year, he was named an honorary member of the Berlin Philharmonic and an honorary citizen of Tokyo.
He has been an elected member of the Japan Art Academy since March 2022.