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”.
