"Dudamel filled the first two weeks of the season with a generous vision of America, leading works by the 20th-century New Englander Charles Ives, the unassimilated immigrant Béla Bartók, the 87-year-old New Yorker John Corigliano, and the young(ish) native Hawaiian Leilehua Lanzilotti. What unites them, and evidently excites Dudamel, is their disparateness - not just the range of backgrounds and time periods but the way they define American music as a great amalgamation."
"Each of the four sections of Lanzilotti's 15-minute piece "of light and stone" ostensibly depicts a different sibling in Hawaii's 19th-century Kalākaua royal family, but it feels more as though she's using a vast palette of orchestration to evoke a mystical landscape. Cloudy chords, meditative tintinnabulation, the whoosh of wind and rain, blocks of iridescent brass - all these discrete sonorities trundled by, like a train of boxcars with panoramas painted on their sides."
Gustavo Dudamel has held multiple roles with the New York Philharmonic and will assume the official music directorship next year. He programmed works by Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, John Corigliano, and Leilehua Lanzilotti to emphasize disparate backgrounds and eras as components of American musical identity. Lanzilotti's "of light and stone" uses orchestration to evoke mystical Hawaiian landscapes through cloudy chords, tintinnabulation, wind and rain, and iridescent brass. Dudamel highlighted the orchestra's soloists and sections, whose preparations have burnished the ensemble's sonic character. The programming presented a musical counterargument to narrow, exclusionary definitions of national culture.
Read at Vulture
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