We are now in \u201cGracias Gustavo\u201d season, and times, we are daily reminded, they are a-changin\u2019. But what remains consistent is that Dudamel begins again, in the first month of his six-month homestretch as L.A. Phil music director, by dwelling on the composer he says has meant the most to him since his earliest days as a kid conductor in Caracas. His first major recording boasted startlingly propulsive performances of Beethoven\u2019s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, with the uproarious Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, recorded 20 years ago this month. In August, Dudamel will end his L.A. Phil tenure as he began it, with Beethoven\u2019s Ninth at the Bowl.<\/p>\n
Through these two decades, thick and COVID-lockdown thin, Beethoven has been Dudamel\u2019s composer of uplift. This weekend he confronts, for the first time, Beethoven\u2019s daunting mystical and mystifying \u201cMissa Solemnis.\u201d In following weeks, he will pair Beethoven symphonies with two of the most arresting and original of the dozens of new works he has premiered in Los Angeles \u2014 Gabriela Ortiz\u2019 Glitter Revolution ballet score, \u201cRevoluci\u00f3n Diamantina,\u201d and the first part of Thomas Ad\u00e8s \u201cDante\u201d ballet.<\/p>\n
To begin the Beethoven month at Walt Disney Concert Hall, however, Dudamel turned to another Beethoven work that has long obsessed him, the rarely heard complete incidental to Goethe\u2019s tragedy, \u201cEgmont,\u201d which has the ever-relevant theme that matters most to Dudamel \u2014 the profound joy that arises from victory over injustice. For this, he had the assistance of actress Cate Blanchett and playwright Jeremy O. Harris.<\/p>\n
Here, too, Beethoven serves as a musical, spiritual and political touchstone. \u201cEgmont\u201d comes in the middle of Beethoven\u2019s career, his heroic period. The historic Egmont was a Flemish general, a hero to his people in the Netherlands who attempts to serve the 16th century Spanish emperor, Philip II, and rife for Goethe\u2019s romanticizing. A remarkable polymath, Goethe himself served as an advisor to Weimar\u2019s Grand Duke, brilliantly balancing political compromises with literature\u2019s highest spiritual callings. He admired the spirit of liberty, for instance, yet opposed the French Revolution and supported Napoleon, believing that ensuing populist disorder would then, as it turned out, require autocracy.<\/p>\n
Goethe\u2019s Egmont must learn to love before he can act to defend his people against Philip. The hero goes to his death at the point of self-realization that only in sacrifice may he ascend to and become a symbol for glory.<\/p>\n
In the play, which begins as historic epic and becomes, for Goethe, increasing personal and interior, Egmont gains perspective on the complexities of his place in politics by contemplating nature and being. Among Goethe\u2019s many passions were scientific study. He immersed himself in the natural world and befriended the pioneering German environmentalist, Alexander von Humboldt.<\/p>\n
It could, thus, have been hardly coincidence that Dudamel opened the program with the premiere of \u201cHumboldt\u2019s Nature\u201d by Venezuelan composer Ricardo Lorenz. The five-part, 25-minute symphonic poem for a large orchestra rife with percussion follows Humboldt\u2019s account of his journey to Venezuela in 1799.<\/p>\n
Symphonic glitter sets the stage of New Andalusia. Guacharo birds shriek. Latin rhythms take us to coastal regions. Sandy percussion accompanies a journey up the Orinoco River. Throughout, Lorenz\u2019s orchestra, imaginatively colored, reflects vast nature. But the score ends with the shock of humanity, as Humboldt encounters enslaved Cubans.<\/p>\n
The one thing Goethe lacked was a sophisticated ear for music (and possibly sound). But Humbolt\u2019s account could practically be the starting place for Beethoven\u2019s \u201cEgmont,\u201d begun a decade after the Venezuelan encounter. In the popular overture, elicitation of tumult concludes, with startling exhilaration, in the kind of grand Beethovenian triumph that never fails to excite. The incidental music, though, offers needed theatrical context. That includes two songs for Egmont\u2019s love, Kl\u00e4rchen, four entr\u2019actes, a melodrama for Egmont as he approaches his execution and, powerfully as only Beethoven can, a battle cry.<\/p>\n
Goethe has never lost relevance. Matthew Bell\u2019s new biography, \u201cGoethe\u2019: A Life in Ideas,\u201d has given Germany\u2019s Shakespeare new attention. One of the greatest plays of our time, Tom Stoppard\u2019s \u201cArcadia,\u201d confronts Goethe\u2019s \u201cElective Affinities\u201d with our own elective affinities. One of the greatest operas of our time, John Adams\u2019 \u201cDoctor Atomic,\u201d contemplates the creation of nuclear weapons as the functioning of a latter-day Faust, Goethe\u2019s most lasting creation.<\/p>\n
\u201cEgmont,\u201d too, readily speaks to us and it has been on Dudamel\u2019s agenda for years. While performances of the complete play with the incidental music are rare, a half-hour concert version, also rare but less so, proves effective. Dudamel did it with the Berlin Philharmonic in June, a performance of which can be viewed on the orchestra\u2019s Digital Concert Hall<\/a>. The narrator is a young Austrian actor, Felix Kammerer, who is riveting (as he is in Guillermo del Toro\u2019s \u201cFrankenstein\u201d). He adds a slight introduction revealing Egmont\u2019s indecisiveness, but otherwise sticks to Goethe.<\/p>\n Cate Blanchett narrates Beethoven\u2019s incidental music to \u201cEgmont\u201d with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.<\/p>\n (Elizabeth Asher \/ Los Angeles Philharmonic)<\/p>\n Harris, who is the author of \u201cSlave Play,\u201d has other elective affinities. He has created a new, effusively angry text for Blanchett. It begins as a dirge. Battalions are gathered on the banks of Portland, Ore.; Bethlehem; Charlotte, N.C.; Tehran; Minneapolis; Brussels. The Egmont Harris references is the historical one, not Goethe\u2019s. The text become a bald call for action.<\/p>\n Much of it was lost to the audience, since reverberant amplification gave heroic heft to Blanchett\u2019s voice at the cost of intelligibility. But her intensity, whether seated on the lip of the stage, where she begins, or standing in the organ loft where she winds up at the end, spoke for itself.<\/p>\n Beethoven\u2019s music improves Goethe, extracting its humanity and frailty, and Dudamel\u2019s performance probed its profound inevitability of good triumphing over evil. Soprano Elena Villal\u00f3n added lithe touch to Kl\u00e4rchen\u2019s songs, sung in their original German.<\/p>\n But Beethoven can do little for Harris\u2019 and Blanchett\u2018s agitprop. Theirs is the necessity of the moment to act rather than indulge an Egmont who has to feel before he can respond. Although Blanchett was the joyless conductor in the film \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d<\/a> her curious little dance in the organ loft at the moment of musical triumph may have meant recovered joy or simply that the world, in which we are no longer one, has gone crazy.<\/p>\n![\"Cate](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1771534929_680_.jpeg\")
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