Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5; Francesca da Rimini

Album review

Despite his youth, Gustavo Dudamel is clearly a very talented and skilled conductor, and despite the youth of its members, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is likewise very talented and skilled. In this live recording of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, everything is in the right place, moving at the right speed in the right direction, with no muss, no fuss, and no mistakes. Dudamel and the Venezuelan musicians are more than merely talented and skilled. They are also extremely exciting, and the energy, intensity, and power they bring to this performance rivals, and in many cases surpasses, that of all but the very finest international orchestras. It boggles the mind that this recording was made by such a young man and such a young orchestra.
If talent, skill, and excitement were all it took to make a great performance of this symphony, this would be a great recording. But it does in fact take more, and Dudamel and the Venezuelan musicians don't have it. What it takes is maturity. The restraint not to lean into every climax, the wisdom not to push too hard in developments, and the taste, born of experience, not to make every moment the supreme moment of ecstatic bliss. Admittedly, Tchaikovsky's Fifth is not exactly a mature piece. Most of it is so far over the top emotionally and so poorly held together technically that it fairly embodies adolescence. But as conductors as diverse as Mravinsky and Abbado have shown, there is enough to the work to make it possible to turn in a performance that does more than raise the listeners' temperature. In Dudamel's Fifth, however, adolescence runs rampant, and this performance may fail to satisfy listeners who have attained their majority.
This is not to say that there are not interesting aspects to the performance. Dudamel finds unusual colors everywhere; the stopped horns in the Valse, for example. He also observes the tempo indications in the score more closely than most conductors; the Finale's Allegro vivace is truly an Allegro vivace. The Venezuelan musicians are first-rate both as an ensemble and as soloists; the strings are wonderfully smooth and the first horn and first clarinet are especially impressive. But judged only on the basis of this recording, the conductor and the orchestra have some growing up to do.
Their performance of Francesca da Rimini is neither better nor worse than most other recordings; that is, the ramshackle tone poem doesn't hold together any better for them than it has for every other conductor and orchestra to have taken it up, including even the great Mravinsky. Deutsche Grammophon's digital sound is big, clear, deep, and warm.

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