Launching a concert with Strauss’s Don Juan makes quite a statement: those madcap opening seconds, the music scrambling from the bottom of the orchestra in a bravura sweep before blooming into an irresistibly cavalier and heroic melody. It seemed a very Gustavo Dudamel way for the starry conductor to begin his first London appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra, after concerts in Spain last week.
Dudamel drove the music hard and fast: it was full of firework explosions that dissolved into sparkling blurs of light. On one level it was thrilling. On another, it soon began to feel a little narrow. Dudamel let the brightest moments scythe through the texture – an ear-splitting glockenspiel, a brief but brazen trumpet solo – and yet the general orchestral sound was so thickly blended as to be almost homogenised. There was little sense of the music bubbling with detail, and a limited depth to the sound.
