THE GUARDIAN UK: Simón Bolívar SO of Venezuela/Dudamel review – unrefined but rousing - 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. CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE REVIEW! theguardian/music/2015/jan/11/simon-bolivar-so-venezuela-dudamel-review
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:42:11 +0000