Concluding their residency at this year’s Edinburgh international festival, Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra performed two works by Venezuelan composers, Paul Desenne and Gonzalo Grau, alongside Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 1 in D Major.
Dudamel dedicated the performance to Desenne, who died in May this year. As a cellist, Desenne was a founding member of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and, judging from his programme note, evidently possessed a sardonic sense of humour. His Guasamacabra (2018) is based on the guasa, a traditional Venezuelan nonsense song genre, and was offered as “a tribute to all Venezuelan children and youth that are suffering and struggling today”, Desenne having completed the piece while “witnessing the unbelievable final collapse of Venezuela”.
The technicolour work is full of rhythmic games in which the orchestra delighted, the unerring percussionists the linchpin.
Grau’s Odisea is a concerto for cuatro (a traditional Venezuelan small, four-stringed guitar) and orchestra, charting a journey “from the eastern coasts of Venezuela to the heart of western-central traditions.” Sporting a red hat, charismatic soloist Jorge Glem created an amazing range of different sonorities from such a small instrument. Grau’s piece plays with the concerto as a genre, as the orchestra switched roles with Glem and the cuatro becoming the accompanist. Glem returned to the stage to deliver a fun, improvised encore.
After all this excitement, the thought of Mahler seemed somewhat unfathomable. But energised by the first half, Dudamel – conducting from memory – generated an unyielding forward motion that shed fresh light on Mahler’s first symphony. The opening movement showcased the immaculate intonation and ensemble of the SBSO’s string section with some elegantly unassuming horn playing. The Ländler reprised the dancing exuberance of the first half, with a greater physical commitment to its irreverent cadences. With its minor-mode canonic version of Frère Jacques the eerie third movement suddenly resonated with Desenne, acquiring a particularly macabre quality. The finale was suitably boisterous, though at times, the brass became just a little too enthusiastic and overwhelmed the rest of the ensemble, when they might have saved something for the final climax.
