The mane event

New York

Before Gustavo Dudamel’s arrival this week, members of the New York Philharmonic -- the orchestra known as the “conductor eater” -- e-mailed one another that YouTube video clip of the young maestro, the rollicking one in which he leads his Venezuelan youth orchestra in some of Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” score, with the musicians rising from their seats to shout “Mambo!” twirling their horns and finally dancing with their instruments in hand.

“That made the rounds,” said Carter Brey, the Philharmonic’s ever-elegant principal cello player, who quickly added, “I would love to get up and dance. I’d love to mambo.”

Brey was carrying a takeout cup of coffee through the employee entrance of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall during a break in rehearsal Wednesday morning, a day before the 26-year-old Dudamel’s official debut as guest conductor of the 165-year-old orchestra.

This was the players’ second rehearsal with the future music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; on Tuesday, he had been introduced to the New York musicians by their usual leader, a man who knows something about conducting prodigies, 76-year-old Lorin Maazel, who first took the podium at 8 and was holding forth in the Hollywood Bowl a year later. Then Dudamel told them how honored he was to be here and suggested they basically ignore his behavior for the first few minutes, “because my hands will be shaking,” as one player recalled the remark.

Perhaps he was nervous, or perhaps merely disarming his elders. By Wednesday, there certainly was no quiver in Dudamel’s hand or voice as he took the New York Phil through the final movement of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, the culminating piece of the concerts scheduled through the weekend, then Tuesday night. Sometimes his instructions were broad (“More dramatic, put all your soul in this place”) but other times micro, as when he used his baton to demonstrate the bowing he wanted from the strings. He showed them his Whirling Dervish conducting style too -- he didn’t hold that back for lack of an audience. At one point, his left hand became a blur, thrusting toward the violins like a Vegas blackjack dealer dishing out cards in hyper-speed. A couple of times he leaned far back on the podium, as if about to do the limbo under the bar keeping him from tumbling into the orchestra section of the Philharmonic’s home auditorium.

Those seats were empty, except for a reporter and two visitors -- a retired first violinist of the Philharmonic and his wife, who had come in from the suburbs for an advance peek at what the fuss was about. Gabriel Banat, now 81, performed on the stage here for a quarter of a century, when he and his mates gained a reputation for making life hard for snot-nosed pretenders who thought themselves worthy of wielding a baton here. The problem was that some visiting conductors had little to offer, he said -- they’d bore the orchestra -- while others were too intimidated.

“They’re afraid. This is New York. This is the Philharmonic. So they show their worst, not their best.” What else could the musicians do? “We were trying not to let them ruin themselves,” Banat explained.

Now he watched closely as Dudamel hashed out with the Philharmonic’s current lead violinist, concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, the final measures of the Prokofiev piece, when most of the strings stop playing, leaving a few principals -- including Dicterow and Brey, the cellist -- to carry the day. Dicterow thought the young conductor might be taking this part a bit too vigorously, making them go impossibly fast.

“Maybe we try this. If it works, OK,” Dudamel said. “If not, we change.”

Then he led them through those measures again -- just as fast -- and Dicterow dutifully went along, just exaggerating the frenzy of his bowing, then breaking into a laugh when they were done.

Eyes on the hotshot

It was two days before the paid critics would have their say, but from 15 rows back in the otherwise empty house, old-timer Banat was ready with his review of the classical music world’s new hotshot with the bouncing head of curls: “He’s got this orchestra in the palm of his hand,” the 81-year-old declared. “He’s got the technique of Rattle and the spark of Bernstein.”

A couple of hours after the rehearsal, Dicterow offered his preliminary take: This up-tempo program suited Dudamel well, the concertmaster said, but he’d like to see how the Venezuelan handles more “reflective” music -- Beethoven, say, or Brahms. And what was that business about saying he’d do the end slower, “then that didn’t happen.”

That said, “for a 26-year-old young man, it’s amazing,” the violinist went on. Plus, “It’s not put-on. It’s basically him. He’s so impassioned . . . with very strong opinions he puts across so palatably.” Oh yes, “he’s just a lovely human being.”

It turns out that Dicterow was so curious when he first heard of this potential conducting phenom (“they are few and far between”) that he went to Tanglewood in Massachusetts two summers ago to see him lead the Boston Symphony, then caught him recently at Carnegie Hall with his “supercharged” Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. “He paints such a wonderful picture physically on the podium. . . . He reminds me of a young Zubin,” summed up Dicterow, who came here from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his father played the violin for half a century, and where Zubin Mehta became principal conductor, in 1962, at the same age Dudamel is now.

The next day, yet another comparison was offered up.

“He reminds me of a young Abbado,” said Gil Shaham.

Shaham is the guest soloist for the four-concert series, performing Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in A minor to end the first half of the program, which kicks off with the percussion-driven “Sinfornia India” by Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. Shaham was speaking in his dressing room during a final rehearsal Thursday morning, this one open to the public at $16 a ticket. A crowd of 1,200 turned out, and although Dudamel had the orchestra play each piece through for them, he then went back over sections he wanted tweaked, seeking more of what musicians call “dynamic layering” in the Mexican piece, for instance, and asking Shaham to “lighten up the texture a bit” in the Dvorak. “The piece can be thick, muddy,” the violinist agreed after he’d finished up with the conductor a decade younger than he is.

“I’m just getting used to being older than some of the players in the orchestra,” said Shaham, who has been a soloist since his teens but now is getting up there at 36.

He had an advantage over most of the others here, having worked with Dudamel before, in Israel. “I hate to say it, when I first saw him, the buildup was so big, yeah, I was skeptical,” Shaham recalled. He also wondered whether this was one of those instances when someone is built up just to be taken down. “I was kind of like ‘I feel a little bit sorry for Gustavo. I think people are testing him.’ ”

Acid test

Though there may yet be a wave of second-guessers -- critics who say “Yes, but . . .” -- among musicians at this level, there’s no faking it, Shaham noted. So he stopped worrying about Dudamel the first time they went into rehearsal in Israel and he saw “the chops -- they’re all there.” That’s something you realize “instantly,” he said. “It takes a couple of seconds.”

Shaham got some of his training right here in the Lincoln Center complex, at Juilliard, where he overlapped with another “young” (by orchestra standards) music director-in-waiting who has signed on to a bright-spotlight job. The 40-year-old Alan Gilbert will take the baton from Maazel in the 2009-10 season, just as Dudamel takes the podium in Los Angeles. Gilbert arrives with a distinct New York Phil pedigree, with both his parents having played violin for it and with him having guest conducted it several dozen times. But no one pretends that he has Dudamel’s charisma, a fact that could be one undercurrent of this weekend, setting the stage for years of comparisons.

These four concerts initially were promoted as “Gil Shaham plays Dvorak,” but by this week the radio ads instead were touting the “electrifying” guest conductor, which was fine with the violinist. “Definitely the buzz is about Gustavo,” Shaham said before heading off, with his infant daughter in his arms, to rest up before the opening concert, just hours off.

The house was sold out Thursday evening, when the musicians got to play the program for real, without breaks to discuss which maracas the percussionists should use in the Chavez piece, which had not been performed here since 1961 (conducted by another flying-haired figure, Leonard Bernstein) or how to end the Prokofiev. The concert’s climax would be done as Dudamel wanted, at breakneck speed.

After they were done, and the applause began, Dudamel hugged the orchestra leader who’d balked at that, concertmaster Dicterow, and allowed himself a quick raised fist of satisfaction. By the fourth set of bows, Dicterow was leading the string players in rapping on their music stands in appreciation of their young guest, who was scurrying around the orchestra, shaking everyone’s hand. But after another round or two of soak-it-in time, Dudamel gave a kiss to the lead violinist and sprinted offstage for good.

By Friday morning, that night’s concert was sold out too, as was Saturday’s, and only a few seats remained for Tuesday, after which Dudamel moves on to another guest gig (in Tel Aviv), having left behind a taste of Dudamelmania and a lingering question: Why had he never asked those old guys and gals of the New York Philharmonic to mambo?

“I was expecting that,” said Dicterow. “Well, that’s something L.A.’s going to have to learn.”

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paul.lieberman@latimes.com