“New York will also become my city”, launched the 42-year-old star musician at a press conference in Manhattan, two weeks after the shock announcement of his appointment to lead the “Phil”, officially in three years.
Expected in New York for the 2026-2027 season, on an initial five-year contract, as artistic and musical director, he will take on the duties of musical director delegate to the New York “Phil” from 2025, during his last season. in Los Angeles.
One of the highest paid conductors in the world and one of the best known, Gustavo Dudamel now combines the musical direction of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra (since 2009) and the Paris Opera, where he arrived in 2021 on a six-year contract. He is also director of the Simon-Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, where he was born on January 26, 1981 in the city of Barquisimeto.
“Like family”
Recognizable by his curly brown hair, Dudamel performed his first concert at the “Phil” in 2007 and has conducted it 26 times since, as a guest conductor.
Until his final arrival in New York, he will still lead him as a guest for three concerts from May 19 to 21 for Gustav Mahler’s “Ninth Symphony”.
“I believe that when I come in May, I will feel like family” and “no longer like a guest who comes and goes”, launched Gustavo Dudamel to journalists, acknowledging that “life had been very generous with him” .
In New York, “the special, cultural and energetic atmosphere (…) will be able to enrich my soul and my spirit, as an artist and a citizen of the world”, assured the star, who wrote on 7 February when he was appointed “to follow in the footsteps of Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein”.
With this recruit, the “Phil”, the oldest American musical institution created in 1842, made a big splash on the music transfer window.
It reaffirms its ambitions after the pharaonic $550 million renovation of its setting, the David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The room, which reopened this season, has a new design and much more efficient and immersive acoustics.
Access to music
“You have to remember that music is about energy and the audience makes all the difference when we’re on stage playing,” the conductor told reporters.
Fervent defender of wider access to music, Dudamel, son of a trombonist and a singing teacher, is a pure product and one of the most illustrious representatives of “El Sistema”, the national system of orchestras for the youth of Venezuela, a famous project for popular education in classical music founded in 1975.
He reassembled a youth orchestra in Los Angeles (Yola) but did not say if he would do it again in New York.
As comfortable conducting a Mahler symphony as the music of Star Wars or the latest “West Side Story” by Steven Spielberg, he is considered one of the most talented conductors in the world.
“We must educate people, but in the best way, without placing art on a pedestal”, he further promised, sensitive to the fact that by “giving an instrument to a child (…) we gives him a chance to create his own world.”
Asked if he would be the first Hispanic to lead the “Phil”, Dudamel replied in Spanish that he was “a child of Barquisimeto who had the opportunity to make this wonderful journey to one of the most emblematic institutions in the world”.
But at the cost of “hard work, a lot of discipline and love”.
