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Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Description: Gustavo Dudamel conducts Ravel's La Valse, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and the UK premiere of Anders Hillborg's Clarinet Concerto (Peacock Tales), featuring Martin Frost.
Phone: 0207589 8212
Website: www.royalalberthall.com
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 9, 10, 52, 360 
Extra info: Food, Pub
A mood of manic uproar crackled round the auditorium last night the moment the Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel cantered on to the podium. Though best known for his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, Dudamel first appeared at the Proms three years ago with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, of which he is principal conductor. This was the group, now on a UK tour, he brought to the Albert Hall for a performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, written when the composer was 27 years old - the age Dudamel is now.
This was an explosive, if uneven reading of the five-movement, opium-hazed study of the artist's troubled life. Dudamel cuts such a beguiling figure, living every detail of the hero's dreams, passions and despair with magnetic gesture, you sometimes need to force your eyes elsewhere to see if your ears are hearing the same story. Often they weren't.
The Gothenburg musicians clearly adore their young conductor, who takes up the post of Chief Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic next year. They play with zest rather than finesse, at their best in exciting fortissimo gusts and storms thatmade up for some poor woodwind intonation and less than tip-top ensemble throughout.
Dudamel, too, has his idiosyncrasies. In the third movement Scene in the Country, the pace was so leisurely that the two shepherds, depicted by oboe and cor anglais, nearly had the rest of us counting sheep. But the March to the Scaffold was full of fire, with brilliant belching dissonances from tubas and trombones, surely some of the rudest noises ever made by Swedes, and the melodramatic finale was breathtaking.
The concert opened with Ravel's La Valse, neatly nodding towards Berlioz's Ball scene in the symphony. Again this was at its best in the crazed grand culmination but stiff up to that point. The party piece was the UK premiere of Anders Hillborg's vivid but protracted Clarinet Concerto, with Martin Frˆst as versatile soloist.
The crowd had no intention of letting Dudamel go. With foot stamping even more thunderous that the hammering of quadruple tymps in the Berlioz, they demanded an encore. The musicians obliged with a radiant account of Stenhammar's The Song/Interlude, hymn-like music from their Swedish homeland.
Then all hell broke lose with a massed Tico Tico Latin romp in which 6,000 near hysterical people obeyed Dudamel's magic baton. This man could make a terracotta army conga.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
