The second of the Simón Bolívar SO of Venezuela’s current London concerts with Gustavo Dudamel opened with Tres Versiones Sinfónicas by Julián Orbón, a big Hispanic showstopper of the kind that made the SBSOV’s name in its youth-orchestra days.
A Spanish-born pupil of Copland, Orbón initially settled in Cuba, but later exiled himself to Mexico in opposition to the Castro government. His ritzy, eclectic Versiones, first performed in Caracas in 1954, consists of three contrasting pieces that ring changes on a pavane by the 16th-century Spanish composer Luis de Milán. The SBSOV still play this sort of music with an infectious vibrancy and an exciting, devil-may-care approach to its rhythmic complexity, though Dudamel’s deployment of a vast, youth orchestra-size body of strings resulted in occasional loss of detail. The strings sounded very grand in the central Organum, where their hovering block chords suggest the solemnities of Renaissance church music. The tricky, glamorous final movement was repeated as the encore at the end of the evening.
The main work, however, was Mahler’s Fifth, rapturously received, though an altogether more ambivalent experience. Once again, the thick-ish orchestral sound precluded detailed refinement in places, though it also permitted an interpretation over a colossal dynamic range, with some pulverising, thrillingly loud climaxes. Dudamel was particularly good in the outer movements: the opening funeral march was crushingly insistent; the finale, jaunty and bucolic, was done admirably straight, without the suggestion that its triumph is in any way ironic or forced. Yet in the middle of the symphony, things weren’t so certain: the scherzo ambled along gracefully, but was notably short on cynical humour; the adagietto, mannered and mercilessly dragged out, sacrificed intensity to solemnity. It was well played, but not greatly so.
