Classical music's Edward Scissorhands? Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Photograph: Urs Flueeler/AP/Keystone
Los Angeles has made a good signing. And I'm not talking soccer. There has been so much hype surrounding the diminutive 26-year-old, Gustavo Dudamel, and his recent appointment as music director of the LA Philharmonic, that suspicions inevitably arise. Is this just another bit of clever marketing - for LA Phil, read LA Galaxy?
Well, there isn't a better place to put the young Venezuelan through his paces than the Lincoln Centre's Avery Fisher Hall. No lightweight can stand before the oldest orchestra in America and the most august, the New York Philharmonic, and emerge unscathed.
Dudamel not only emerged unscathed, he was triumphant. The moment he raised his baton a palpable sense of confidence rippled out from his arm, through the orchestra and out into the audience.
As a warm up, he gave us a spirited ride through Sinfonia India by the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. Then he wooed us with Dvorak's violin concerto - no mean feat, this, weaving orchestra and soloist together without standing in the way of the virtuosity of the violinist, Gil Shaham.
But it was in the third work of the evening, Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5, that Dudamel really came alive, tossing aside the score to free up his own virtuoso performance. Through the opening andante he was sinuous and flowing, and the orchestra responded in kind. By contrast, in the jocular second movement he was Edward Scissorhands, the baton flashing on all sides, but always precise.
Educationalists in need of inspiration really should take a closer look at El Sistema, the Venezuelan music programme through which Dudamel progressed. On the strength of his conducting, he is the product of a perfect combination of discipline and freedom - he liberated the music, but was always true to it.
By the dramatic finale he had everybody on his side. We in the audience gave him a standing ovation, but, more importantly, the rapt orchestra did too. For once you could feel New York looking enviously towards the West Coast, thinking to itself: how on earth did we miss that trick?
