This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It has been 65 years since the New York Philharmonic last appointed the right conductor, so long ago that hardly anyone alive remembers it except as legend. The ensuing vacancy of imagination has meant that every well-intentioned baton since then has been held up against Leonard Bernstein’s and found wanting in every department — music, human and media.

They long for a Messiah in Manhattan

Bernstein transformed the Philharmonic. He imported symphonies by Mahler, Nielsen and Ives, promoted living American composers, reached out to young audiences as no maestro before or since and used the power of television to proselytise orchestral music across a mass audience. It helped that most viewers knew him as the super-cool composer of West Side Story.

Bernstein was music director for a record 11 years. His successors were doomed by comparison. Pierre Boulez was too ascetic, Zubin Mehta superficial, Kurt Masur heavy weather, Lorin Maazel boring, Alan Gilbert half-baked and Jaap Van Zweden an accounting error.

Under the dull Dutchman, formerly earning $5 million a year at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the NY Phil profile drifted from peripheral to provincial. Who, beyond midtown Manhattan, even knows the Philharmonic exists? Could a Hollywood conductor or avatar possibly change that? Last month’s annunciation of Gustavo Dudamel as saviour of the New York Philharmonic has excited no fewer than nine — count them — hyperbolic features in the New York Times, an uncritical outpouring of desperate expectation. They long for a Messiah in Manhattan.

Dudamel is 42, the same age as Bernstein on accession, but with a shorter roll of credits. Bernstein had composed two symphonies and a Broadway hit, conducted Covent Garden and La Scala and had his passport nullified by the State Department for suspect political views.

Dudamel has, up to this point, held just three jobs — an apprenticeship with Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, 17 lively years at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, latterly, at the Opéra de Paris, where he has yet to make a mark. Venezuelan by birth and fervour, he was groomed in El Sistema, a state musical hothouse devised by the Marxist Hugo Chávez regime to redeem children from poverty by teaching them to play an instrument. Dudamel was the poster boy of this propaganda machine, its global ambassador and true believer.

In 2013, he wept at Chávez’s death and conducted at his funeral. Those close to him say he still upholds Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialism” and remains loyal to the ideals of El Sistema. “It is a symbol of our country — beautiful,” he has said. “If I have a commitment, if I have something that I will care for in my life, it is this, art for the people.”

Dudamel’s musical abilities first came to light at a Gustav Mahler conducting competition in 2004

Ostracised since 2018 by Chávez’s successor, the crackpot Nicolás Maduro, he yearns for regime change back home while making more of a mark on the world map. In Los Angeles he adapted the Sistema playbook to La-La Land. His Youth Orchestra (YOLA) is a trailblazer in music education and social cohesion. YOLA plays concerts with the Los Angeles Phil in front of donors who give millions to Dudamel’s good causes while grudging a subsistence wage to their Latino household staff . The first law of musical Californication is never to question relative values.

Dudamel’s musical abilities first came to light at a Gustav Mahler conducting competition in 2004. On winning, he was in no rush to make a career. But Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle took a keen interest and Daniel Barenboim sent him Spanish reading lists of essential philosophers; there is no sign yet that Dudamel has read them.

He is a natural, instinctual musician, uncluttered by grand ideas. His musical preparation is uncompromising. If he struggles with a point in a score, he will ring everyone he knows in the small hours of night until it is resolved.

His singular gift is a warmth and vitality that makes orchestral musicians feel they are outstanding, even if they are not playing at their very best. He speaks English as a distant second language, heavily accented and colourless, but his people skills are phenomenal. He broke into Hollywood with a Sesame Street episode, conducting a sheep and an octopus playing a violin and percussion.

The Star Wars composer John Williams jumped on his bandwagon and Steven Spielberg signed Dudamel to conduct the soundtrack of his West Side Story film. Dudamel was blessed by the Bernstein heirs as the best on the block and when New York Philharmonic musicians were asked who they wanted to lead them, there was only one name in the frame.

So, can this shantytown socialist with a winning smile and not enough English to deliver a Harvard lecture light a fire in Lincoln Center where so many before him have failed? Dudamel has the signal advantage of a brilliantly reconstructed concert hall with a responsive acoustic and a redesign that faces outwards to the city, not inwards as before to the plutocracy.

The Star Wars composer John Williams jumped on his bandwagon and Steven Spielberg signed Dudamel to conduct the soundtrack of his West Side Story film

He has the goodwill of the musicians who will take all the risks he asks for and he has the hinterland of an uncounted Latinx population that has never been tapped or taken seriously by New York’s cultural elite.

But it’s the music that will determine if he stamps his loafers on the city and shakes off Bernstein’s shadow. An exhilarating Mahlerian, Dudamel in LA conducted no Schoenberg or any other modernist. He champions richly instrumented scores by John Adams and Andrew Norman. He is a slow learner of new works and New York will expect to be astonished.

He will do well to say nothing before his first downbeat. All that can be asserted right now is that New York has, for once in a lifetime, not picked the wrong baton.