Esteban Benzecry and Gustavo Dudamel before the world premiere of "Rituales Amerindios," Canary Island Music Festival 2010 (image from video edited by Måns Pär Fogelberg)

I received an email from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a couple of days ago informing me that there would be a slight change for their October 20 & 21 programs:  instead of Tromba Lontana by John Adams, the curtain raiser will now be Short Ride on a Fast Machine (also by Adams) in a concert which also includes the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 and the world premiere of Magnetar, an electric cello concerto written by Enrico Chapela featuring Johannes Moser as soloist.

Some brief additional research revealed that the two Adams fanfares essentially swapped places with each other, with Tromba Lontana now appearing where Short Ride on a Fast Machine was originally scheduled:  on the season opening weekend concerts along with Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz.  In addition, it appears that the Stravinsky Symphony in C has been dropped in favor of the U.S. premiere of Rituales Amerindios by Esteban Benzecry.  (Both of these programs, with the changes, are also scheduled to be performed as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th Anniversary celebration concerts at Davies Symphony Hall on October 23rd and 24th).

I’m almost always up for premieres of new music, but my initial reaction was to be glad that I hadn’t yet bought tickets to the first concert weekend of the season:

1. I was really looking forward to seeing Symphony in C performed again.  Finally.  Despite the orchestra’s penchant for programming lots of Stravinsky during the past two decades, their performances of Symphony in C have been few and far between.  The most recent performance was conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen back in 1996 at the Hollywood Bowl as a ramp-up for their now-legendary residence at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.  The last indoor performance by the LA Phil was in February 1996 at both the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Segerstrom Hall (the original one) when it was the opening piece in a concert that also included Mozart’s 40th Symphony and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements; before that, Andrew Davis led a performance back in 1991. . . . I’m having a hard time remembering any local performance of Symphony in C since 1996.
2. I was also looking forward to seeing/hearing in person how Gustavo Dudamel would handle Stravinsky — any Stravinsky.   Mr. Dudamel has conducted some of the Russian/Parisian/Angeleno composer’s works with his other orchestras in Gothenburg and Caracas, but he has noticeably steered clear of them so far in Los Angeles.  The LA Phil has a sterling reputation with Stravinsky, nurtured most recently by Mr. Salonen, but  extending back to local premieres in the 1920’s and 1930’s conducted by Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, and the composer himself, among many others.  It’s seems a shame that Mr. Dudamel has yet to perform or program anything by Stravinsky when the orchestra has such a strong history with his works.  (Upon further reflection, even in some repertoire where GD’s and E-PS’s tastes definitely overlap — Mahler 3rd, La Mer, and Sibelius 2nd being the most noteworthy examples —  Mr. Dudamel seems to be avoiding works for which Mr. Salonen has been well known in LA).
3. I’ve seen Symphonie fantastique waaaaay too many times.  Mrs. CKDH and I did the math recently:  counting only concerts since Walt Disney Concert Hall has opened, we have seen this particular Berlioz warhorse performed six times; this is more than any other piece during the same time period — and we don’t even like it very much!!

Esteban Benzecry (estebanbenzecry.com)

Despite all of that, we still might go to that concert.

• First of all, CKDH, Jr., has been a huge fan of the Berlioz ever since the LA Phil launched the online Guitar-Hero-esque game featuring “March to the Scaffold” as part of the celebración welcoming Mr. Dudamel to L.A.
• More importantly, I’m intrigued enough by the new Benzecry piece to want to see it performed live.  A quick perusal of YouTube revealed a three-movement work that is reminiscent of  Revueltas or perhaps, to a lesser extent, Ginastera:  “modern” tonalities, harmonies, and structures with rhythms and melodic snippets hinting at Central American folk music.  Of course, given that the three movements explicitly reference the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, one would expect some similarities to Revueltas; however, this is not a copy of his work, and Benzecry approach takes a similar thematic origin and interprets it using his own musical language.  If anything, there are places in the final movement, “Illapa (Inca thunderclap god),” which sound a bit like La Noche de los Mayas meets LA Variations. (Videos of all three movements have been embedded at the end of this post).

I know that Brian, my distinguished fellow SoCal music blogger, is very critical of Mr. Dudamel’s tenure at the head of the LA Phil, and he reiterated many of his points of disdain in a recent post.  One of his biggest gripes is the assertion that the orchestra’s current music director “has had little to say about or has shown little advocacy for new music in Los Angeles in his haphazard tenure here thus far.”  I disagree.

If Mr. Dudamel wasn’t an advocate of new music in general, it seems extremely unlikely that he would: