After a three-month absence, Gustavo Dudamel, longtime musical director of the LA Philharmonic, made a triumphant return to the Hollywood Bowl in late August to launch the orchestra’s final two weeks of the season with six different programs.
So potentially popular that it merited two nights (September 3 and 5) on the schedule, Carmen and Carnival with Dudamel made for a wonderfully alliterative marketing title but a very unusual and offbeat tonal pairing. From casual conversations between patrons, the audience responses and the fact that some folks left at intermission (after the glorious Carnival left town), it seemed that many in the audience were fans of either Camille Saint-Saens’s classic, often whimsical parade of animal inspired pieces OR the dramatic Bizet opera.
Fortunately, I felt like I was perhaps one of the minority who embraced both for different reasons. I enjoy the boisterous prelude to Carmen and the sly vocal expression “Habanera” because these pieces were soundtrack music to one of my favorite all-time films, The Bad News Bears.
I love Carnival of the Animals not only because Saint-Saens so artfully captured the personalities of each member of the animal kingdom, but because one of his pieces, “The Swan” is. IMHO, one of classical music’s most beautiful and transcendent compositions, all at once capturing the bird’s majestic, divinely sculpted beauty and its graceful glide through water. This piece was the highlight of the Carnival, with cellist Robert deMaine’s elegant, lyrical and richly emotional cello melody gliding on the angelic wings of Karen Lechner’s soft hypnotic piano.
Under Dudamel’s ever nuanced and intuitive guidance, the LA Phil created a dramatic, flourish-filled instrumental equivalent of a brisk 25-minute trip to the zoo or a wild animal park. Along the way, we met lions (“Royal March of the Lion”), “Hens and Roosters” (with pecking simulated by playful string accents), “Wild Donkeys” (featuring fast piano flurries), “Tortoises” (slow and measured chording, naturally), “Elephants” (with percussive, stomping piano and a low toned cello quarter), graceful, hopping “Kangaroos,” and “The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods.” The cuckoo piece and “Aviary” simulated the sounds of their subjects with quickly fluttering flutes. Amidst the whimsy were caressing moments of immersion in the elegant fluidity of the “Aquarium” segment and, as mentioned, the dreamy, ballet-like beauty of the suite’s showstopper, “Swan.”
The narrative elements introducing some of the individual pieces of Carnival of the Animals between its 2019 performance at the Bowl and this one was pretty much night and day. While the earlier one featured Emmy winning actor Sean Hayes hamming it up and adding lighthearted humor to the show, Dudamel found a magnificent way to replace that shtick with a much more reverent and appropriately childlike approach. Sounding a bit like Linus in the classic Peanuts TV specials, the conductor’s 13-year-old son Martin provided the charming voice narration to a series of animated videos for many of the animals, creating a colorful and thoughtful feast for the eyes and ears even before each piece was performed.
