To lead, they’ve listened

Three years ago, Gustavo Dudamel entered a conducting competition sponsored by the Bamberg Symphony in southern Germany. When he gave his first downbeat to the orchestra and it played its first chord, he loudly exclaimed, “Wow!” He was 23 years old and music director of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela. He had never before stood in front of a professional ensemble.

Esa-Pekka Salonen was one of the judges. And when he arrived in Bamberg three days later for the finals, he said in an interview last week, Dudamel was already a seasoned pro. That the competition launched a meteoric career is already part of the Dudamel legend. He is now in demand everywhere. He has a fancy contract to record for Deutsche Grammophon. And Monday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced officially that Dudamel would succeed Salonen as music director in 2009.

The Philharmonic did not, of course, have to go to Venezuela to find its next music director, just as it did not have to go to Finland to find its previous one. A number of today’s leading conductors -- including Lorin Maazel, Michael Tilson Thomas, David Robertson, Lawrence Foster and Kent Nagano -- are products of Southern California or hereabouts.

But the curious thing about the choice of an inexperienced young man from a distant land is that it is not all that curious. You may think that someone local and with an impressive resume would best understand our needs, program to our tastes. The history of the orchestra, however, has not necessarily shown that to be the case.

Los Angeles and its environs are not one thing culturally -- nor two, nor 20, nor even 200. The area is not the sum of its parts -- it’s a kind of uber-multicultural metropolis. Its expanse of city and suburbs contains a vast array of cultures living side by side, interacting in some but not all ways, getting along sometimes but not always. Local, ultimately, doesn’t mean much in L.A.

Many of us speak Spanish, and a Latin American music director will obviously fit right in. But in the ‘80s, a beloved Milanese maestro, Carlo Maria Giulini, fit in too, with his elegant manners, as had his predecessor from India, Zubin Mehta, in a far flashier way.

Yet Andre Previn, so much admired and himself a flashy Hollywood figure, had, in Giulini’s wake, a rough ride. No one could be more L.A. than Michael Tilson Thomas, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and soaked up all of musical L.A., whether Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin or the ‘60s pop scene. Yet his brief stint as a principal guest conductor during the Giulini years was also difficult.

Salonen was not the Philharmonic’s first Finn. Georg Schneevoigt, the orchestra’s second music director, was. He arrived in 1929 a stranger in a strange land, and he left just as bewildered two years later. Salonen, on the other hand, has become one of us. He moved here with his wife in 1992 when he became music director. His three children were born here, and it is here that he will stay after he steps down from his Philharmonic post in two years and devotes more time to composition.

Indeed, for the most part, Mehta and Salonen made the modern Philharmonic what it is. Both, like Dudamel, arrived very young. Mehta was 26 when he became music director in 1962, and he remained until 1978; Salonen was 34 when he took over in 1994. By 2009, he and Mehta together will have been responsible for 33 of the orchestra’s previous 47 years.

It may be instructive to compare their success with the problems encountered by Tilson Thomas and Previn. The latter two are among the most naturally gifted and multitalented musicians in front of the public today. But they became oddly defensive and even rigid in front of the Philharmonic, as if they always had to prove themselves.

Mehta and Salonen both arrived here with strong European preconceptions and then had their minds blown by the West Coast. Mehta had studied in Vienna and initially wanted to make the L.A. Phil into a Vienna Philharmonic clone, creamy string tone, mellow brass and all. Salonen was closely associated with European Modernism and may have thought he was bringing us a dose of the latest thing only to find out that European Modernism was actually Old World around here.

Youth surely helped Mehta and Salonen adapt as well as they did. Mehta did get remarkably close to the Vienna ideal, which made the orchestra all the more impressive when he did his “Star Wars” shtick. To his credit, he gave the orchestra a with-it image, made it (and himself) a star and paid a lot of attention to local music. He lived here and still calls Beverly Hills home.

Salonen admits that he had to reprogram himself after he arrived. But he too became part of the community. At this point, his children probably wouldn’t let him leave even if he wanted to.

Having come from a near uni-cultural city -- the Finnish capital, Helsinki -- he started to think and listen differently as he encountered a host of accents. His rigid Modernism got infected by the likes of John Adams, and his musical language changed. With “LA Variations” -- Salonen’s breakthrough orchestral work, written for the Philharmonic in 1997 -- he found a new voice that was still rigorous but with a fresh rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vitality and sensuality. A similar transformation took place in his conducting.

What will happen with Dudamel no one knows. How can you predict the potential for growth?

Many had already written Salonen off as a flash in the pan when he first got here. Ten years ago, a young British conductor, Daniel Harding, was being hailed as the next Simon Rattle. His career did not take off as quickly as predicted, although he still seems destined for a major post.

What Mehta and Salonen have shown, though, is the need for openness, the need to let L.A. -- as much of it as you can possibly find room for -- infect you.

That Dudamel will bring something of South America with him is more than welcome. Now let’s see what other connections he can make. We must try to talk him into moving here full time.

mark.swed@latimes.com