A Thrilling Beginning of Dudamel's Final Season
/By Truman C. Wang
10/21/2025
Photo credit: LA Phil
Gustavo Dudamel is going out with a bang. The maestro's final season as the LA Phil's Music & Artistic Director kicked off with a magnificent triple-header that showcased everything that's made his 17-year tenure so exhilarating: bold premieres, signature repertoire, and music that connects us to something larger than ourselves.
The September 28 concert paired Strauss's An Alpine Symphony with Ellen Reid's world premiere Earth Between Oceans, and the result was nothing short of stunning. Reid's 30-minute meditation on the four elements drew inspiration from both Los Angeles and New York, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale adding wordless, instrumental textures that swelled and receded like ocean waves.
The Fire movement hit especially hard—composed on January 7, 2025, the very day devastating wildfires broke out across Southern California, it pulsed with urgent rhythm and devastating loss. Reid wove field recordings of beach cleanups into the piece, a haunting reminder of our environmental fragility. Yet, despite the darkness, Reid committed to ending with optimism, a tribute to Dudamel's "fierce positivity" and bridge-building spirit.
Strauss's Alpine Symphony took us on an orchestral expedition from dusk to dawn, and Dudamel led the Phil through treacherous mountain paths with thrilling precision. His first time tackling this piece with the orchestra, he made it feel like a homecoming.
If the LA Phil has a signature piece, it's The Rite of Spring, and Dudamel's October 5 performance reminded us why. My colleagues at LA Times once praised his ability to unleash the score's "uncontrollable disastrous forces" while maintaining "musical mastery" over its superhuman intensity – to which I would add Dudamel’s score-less conducting from memory made it even more amazing.
The evening opened with John Adams's Frenzy: a short symphony, receiving its US premiere. Written in 2023 and inspired by the agitation of processing our relentless news cycle, the 19-minute work is a fascinating hybrid of Adams's minimalist roots and classical symphonic development. Its buoyant opening gives way to quieter transparency before earning its title with a genuinely frenetic finale of choppy strings, brass tsunamis, and madly scurrying woodwinds.
Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1919) provided lyrical, colorful contrast—romance and magic where Rite offers raw earthiness. Together, the program traced Stravinsky's evolution while showcasing the Phil's rhythmic firepower.
For the third and final concert that I heard on October 11, Dudamel chose Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") – a work of such colossal ambition it requires a massive orchestra, full choir, two soloists, and an organ just to stage. Soprano Chen Reiss and mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor joined forces with the Los Angeles Master Chorale for this journey from funeral to transcendence.
Dudamel first played this symphony as a teenager and conducted its first movement at 17. Now, in his final season, he returned to this music he once described as "the closest thing to being in heaven." Having performed it with the Phil only once before (at the Hollywood Bowl in 2019), this Disney Hall performance felt like a profoundly personal statement—a fitting meditation on endings and new beginnings as one era closes and another awaits.
Mahler promised audiences would be "battered to the ground and then raised on angel's wings to the highest heights." With Dudamel at the helm, that's exactly what happened on this glorious occasion.
These three concerts encapsulated the 17 Dudamel years: adventurous programming, powerhouse performances, and an unwavering belief in music's power to connect and transform.
If this is how the season begins, we're in for one hell of a goodbye.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.