Launching a concert with Strauss’s Don Juan makes quite a statement: those madcap opening seconds, the music scrambling from the bottom of the orchestra in a bravura sweep before blooming into an irresistibly cavalier and heroic melody. It seemed a very Gustavo Dudamel way for the starry conductor to begin his first London appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra, after concerts in Spain last week.
Dudamel drove the music hard and fast: it was full of firework explosions that dissolved into sparkling blurs of light. On one level it was thrilling. On another, it soon began to feel a little narrow. Dudamel let the brightest moments scythe through the texture – an ear-splitting glockenspiel, a brief but brazen trumpet solo – and yet the general orchestral sound was so thickly blended as to be almost homogenised. There was little sense of the music bubbling with detail, and a limited depth to the sound.
This might not have mattered so much had the concert not been entirely of music by Strauss and Ravel, two of the 20th century’s most meticulous musical colourists. At least the opening of Ravel’s Shéhérazade showed that the orchestra could still play quietly. The soprano soloist was Marina Rebeka. Spinning out long, fluid lines, she captured the languid quality of these songs beautifully but was less convincing in conveying the wordiness of their poetry or the sense of wanderlust that drives the first song in particular. Instrumental highlights included Gareth Davies’s flute solos in the second movement, first energised, then returning quiet and distant at the end.
The orchestral palette broadened after the interval for Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, with a beguiling softness to the mesmerising repeated figure in the first movement, and a sultriness in the Habanera that put the taut, shiny finale into relief. Finally there was the orchestral suite from Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, in which the central waltz was full of character but the climactic music was pushed onwards relentlessly. The whole concert was pacy and entertaining, but it left the impression that the LSO is a huge paintbox, the darkest and softest colours of which Dudamel has only just begun to explore.
