DUDAMEL PUTS UP A STRONG DEFENSE
Turmoil in Venezuela has the program under fire, but Gustavo Dudamel remains a staunch believer in it.
Easter Day 2007, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel would become the music director in 2009. But he didn’t wait that long to start Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.
By fall 2007, children from South L.A., most Latino or African American, were gathering at Exposition Park to learn instruments and play in a kiddie orchestra dubbed YOLA, inspired by Venezuela’s El Sistema music education program in which Dudamel had grown up.
A few months later, Dudamel came to coach YOLA, and his appearance had all the trappings of a feel-good photo op. Civic leaders and the media gathered to watch cute kids get a quick lesson.
It proved to be stirring, serious business. Within 45 minutes, kids with rudimentary training showed such ambition that Dudamel promised to put them on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall if they worked hard enough.
Over the last decade, YOLA has gotten a lot better and gone a lot further. Dudamel has taken the young musicians, some of whom had never been outside of L.A., to play at the Barbican Centre in London and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. He got them on this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Invited to give the keynote speech for the recipients of the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama last month, Dudamel brought along a YOLA woodwind quintet.
Now YOLA embarks on its first tour, beginning Sunday at the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge with a performance led by the orchestra’s music director, Juan Felipe Molano, and culminating in Oakland a week later with a concert conducted by Dudamel.
“I’m so proud of YOLA and that we are taking this tour,” Dudamel said in his office recently. “It’s not the Los Angeles Philharmonic. No, this is a youth orchestra that has come from nothing to something. These children believe in what they are doing. It reflects El Sistema. These YOLA children are living the life I was once living.”
It’s true. YOLA has, as hoped, changed lives. Thanks to it, innercity kids are now in college and conservatory. Despite the troubles in Venezuela, 700,000 children, according to some estimates, continue to be helped by El Sistema, turning hopelessness into hope — and free lunches. The program is a phenomenal success. End of story? Unfortunately, no. Because the situation is so bad in Venezuela — a once oil-rich nation now faced with dire shortages of essential goods, runaway inflation, a high murder rate and political repression — Dudamel and El Sistema have become mired in controversy. El Sistema is operated under the executive branch of the Venezuela government.
That means that Sistema’s f lagship ensemble, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, of which Dudamel is music director, must regularly play for national functions, not unlike our “The President’s Own” U. S. Marine Band, which will be required to hail whatever new chief moves into the White House. Nevertheless, Dudamel’s appearances with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro can make the conductor appear a propagandist for an unpopular regime.
Dudamel has long contended, as he did in a Times op-ed article a year ago, that he will not allow El Sistema to be politicized. But after Dudamel opened Carnegie Hall’s season with his Bolívars this month, Zachary Woolfe wrote in a New York Times critic’s notebook headlined “Fiddling While Venezuela Starves?” that “there is no disentangling the performance of classical music from a state of political affairs that many object to.”
“This is so funny,” Dudamel responded when I asked about that. “Now we get criticized for what we are not. People try to criticize us as politicians. We are musicians.” As for El Sistema, he said: “It is not Gustavo, it’s those children.”
Dudamel points out that El Sistema has been supported by all nine regimes that have governed during the last 42 years. Some have been left, some right; some have been more generous, others less generous. But the foundation of a youth orchestra is written into the country’s constitution.
Moreover, Dudamel said that he grew up playing for Venezuelan presidents and other world leaders. “I remember all these years, as a musician that I was playing for everybody, everybody.
“I have a picture from when President Clinton visited Venezuela. I was concertmaster of the National Youth Orchestra and standing just in front of me is Mr. Clinton, Mrs. Clinton and [Venezuelan] President [Rafael] Caldera. It was for us — at 12, 13, 14 — a dream to be playing for them.”
Dudamel refuses to reveal an allegiance to any specific government and has the same intentions for El Sistema, whether the socialist regime of Maduro stays in power or a right-wing opposition party takes over. “Let’s not talk about the situation of the government in Venezuela,” he said, hoping to change the subject. “Let’s talk about the people and a way to build a better future for them.”
But as Dudamel acknowledges, it is impossible not to talk about the crisis in Venezuela and the difficulty of promoting music education when there is not enough food or medicine to go around.
“I understand the unrest,” Dudamel said. He has in fact dramatically cut down his guest conducting so that he can spend more time in Venezuela working with El Sistema, from which he takes no salary. “I understand that when you need food, you focus on that. It is a crisis, and I suffer from it too. All my family is living in Venezuela, even my son is now there.
“With what is happening right now, everybody sees that everything is bad. But in times of crisis you need more than ever to find symbols of hope. You need to understand how we got there so that we can find a better way to do things. And you need to understand that we are all in this together.”
For Dudamel, what El Sistema offers is that glimmer of hope and the vision of a bigger picture. One way to do that, he suggests, can be to look at individual stories, to see how if one person succeeds, that success will ultimately multiply.
“I will tell you something I have not said before,” he said. “When I was a child, I wanted a violin, and my grandfather bought me a very cheap Chinese violin. As I improved, I needed a better violin.
“At that time Sistema didn’t have the money to help us, so I went to my grandpa and I said, ‘Grandpa, I need a new violin.’ ‘OK, how much will it cost?’ he asked me. When I told him, he said, ‘Impossible.’ I cried a lot. And he cried too.”
Young Gustavo studied violin like crazy, and when he got into the National Children’s Orchestra and played a solo for El Sistema founder José Antonio Abreu, the maestro asked what he needed. “I said, ‘I need a violin, I don’t need anything else.’ Next week I had the violin,” Dudamel said.
“That is not a political thing. I’m talking to you from the position of a child who was playing in the back of the violin section and, being given the chance to follow my dream, has arrived at this podium,” he said, pointing toward the Disney stage.
Everywhere he goes, Dudamel’s first order of business is to start or inspire a version of El Sistema.
“The other day I was in Stockholm,” he proudly explained. “I started a program when I was music director of the Gothenburg Symphony. Now there are 7,000 children in it throughout Sweden.”
There is also Sistema Europe Youth Orchestra, and one of Dudamel’s projects is to bring YOLA to Austria to collaborate with SEYO and the storied Vienna Philharmonic.
“I will never stop spreading this message of Maestro Abreu that all the children in world must have access to beauty,” Dudamel concluded with an idealistic fervor that revealed a talent for politics were he to want it. “People can criticize me for things I am not, but I will never stop that.”