The joy of "discovering" new talent
Jun 11th, 2007 by Paul Moor
The quotation marks above around “discovering” result from the frequent misuse of that term; for instance, hadn’t “the new world” already existed for quite a while prior to 1492? At the moment I think of one of the primary joys of writing about the music world: “discovering” new talents and giving them a boost at getting started in a notoriously tough profession, full to the brim of potential disappointment and heartbreak.
Over the decades, I’ve reveled in that joy on several unforgettable occasions. The first time I immediately recall came 49 years ago, when I persuaded Time-Life International that the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition for young violinists and pianists looked promising enough to justify their sending me from Berlin to Moscow for four expensive weeks, at a time when the only Soviet travel organization Intourist permitted individual visitors to travel to the USSR only in cruelly expensive “luxury” class. The Luceniks in Bonn finally said they’d hold still for air fare plus only the first two of the four weeks - and I learned later that when the violin competition failed to produce any sensation, the bureau chief in Bonn had seriously considered yanking me back out. Then when a 23-year-old fellow Texan named Van Cliburn took the piano competition totally by storm and walked away with first prize – at the height of the “Cold War”, yet – they immediately reversed themselves and had me extend my visa for three weeks in order to go on tour with Van (a.k.a. Vanya) to Riga and Leningrad (meanwhile once again St. Petersburg) and still get “out”, as the phrase went, in time to file some 60 typewritten pages from Copenhagen in time for the cover story the “Time” mother ship in Rockefeller Center planned to appear when he played his triumphal return home in New York’s Carnegie Hall, replicating his prize-winning final Moscow concert.
During my thirteen San Francisco years, I “discovered” a born 100% Californian 100% ethnic Japanese neighbor, Kent Nagano, conducting the provincial Berkeley Symphony, which gave its concerts in churches for lack of a proper concert hall, and wrote about him in a crescendo of reviews leading up to his first cover-story, for “Musical America”; Kent today simultaneously rides two major-league horses, Munich’s Bavarian State Opera and the Montreal Symphony.
After my return to Berlin (this time to stay) in 1995, the name Quasthoff attracted my attention largely because I’d never encountered it before, and when a television feature showed Thomas Quasthoff coming onstage on truncated, obviously thalidomide-disfigured legs, I reflexively flipped a videocassette into my VCR, and thus “discovered” a magnificently gifted young singer meanwhile universally established as the worthy successor to one of all history’s greatest baritones, Berlin’s legendary Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I never miss an opportunity to brag about having got three full pages on Tommy (as he signs emails) into the European edition of “Time”, giving him some of his very first American publicity.
Most recently of all I “discovered” a young conductor, now only 26, who’s launched the most brilliant and meteoric conducting career since Leonard Bernstein’s short-notice Carnegie Hall debut at 25 on the podium of the New York Philharmonic, an event so sensational that “The New York Times” reported it on its front page. I first encountered Gustavo (we’ve long since become personal friends) in 2004 when he won first prize in the Bamberg Symphony’s inaugural Gustav Mahler International Competition for young conductors. Since then he’s done not at all badly for himself; his latest triumph: coony old Ernest Fleischmann, the almost preternaturally prescient conductor-spotter who also picked out Esa-Pekka Salonen at the very start of his career and landed him as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has now seen to it that in 2009 Gustavo will take over that band when Salonen steps down. Meanwhile Sweden’s National Symphony Orchestra, in Gothenburg, snapped him up even more quickly.
The vast riches of television here in Berlin include the Franco-German satellite/cable network called Arte. (Until I actually experienced it, I couldn’t even imagine how such a bi-lingual TV network could possibly function, but Arte manages it with a few electronic tricks such as simultaneous two-channel audio, one each for French and German.) I’ve just watched a 45-minute Arte telecast I recorded Sunday evening from this year’s top-notch Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, where he conducted the orchestra that gave him his start, the Sinfónica de Juventud venezolana Simón Bolívar – and yet once again I felt my heart almost bursting with quasi-paternal pride in having contributed my mite towards launching this mind-boggling talent into orbit.
This youth orchestra consists entirely of black-eyed, black-haired, brown-skinned young Venezuelans, from all social classes but largely from the proletariat, who got accepted into the program colloquially referred to as the Sistema which also gave Gustavo his start as a teen-ager. Their Lucerne concert, cheered to the rafters, began with the Second Suite from Maurice Ravel’s masterpiece, the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé“, technically a formidably difficult test-piece, but these kids easily knocked the spots off it. In fact, by the time they got to the concluding Danse générale, Gustavo had whipped them up to such temperamental excitement that some of the finer instrumental points regrettably got aurally lost, simply too fast for the human ear to catch.
There followed a succession of more or less obligatory Latin-American comparative trivia, preceded by a surprise repertory crowd-pleaser I’d seen turn Berlin’s Philharmonie into one great seething mass of cheering. The stage lights briefly went all the way down, and when they came back up we discovered that each of the musicians onstage had done a quick-change act and now sported a zipper jacket flashing the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Let me quote a snippet from my own Berlin review for www.musicalamerica.com:
“When the lights came back up they revealed about 220 effusive young Venezuelans (naturally of both sexes) now garbed in light-weight zipper jackets flashing Venezuela’s vivacious tricolor of yellow, blue, and scarlet, spangled with white stars. From that point on, the most delectable kind of near-pandemonium prevailed.
“At appropriate points in the concluding pop-concert pieces, sections of the orchestra gave us something approximating a U.S. football-game ‘wave’. This vaudevillian leave-taking included tossing numerous instruments high into the air and then triumphantly catching them. Until that point I had slightly regretted my press ticket’s location, in front of the conductor to his left, maybe ten feet above the stage, but all regret vanished when these exuberant kids shucked those jackets, bundled them, and tossed them up to those close enough to catch them. On every feasible future occasion I intend to sport the one I managed to score simply by fouling the slightly more decrepit little old lady in the seat next to mine.”
Deutsche Grammophon, ever light on its feet, has long since signed Gustavo Dudamel to an exclusive contract. He has a wonderful wife, Eloísa, who does yeoman work looking after him in every regard (e.g., I recently heard she insists that together they speak English only, because of its status as international music’s Esperanto). He also has a crackerjack London manager, Mark Newbank, and one of New York’s shrewdest publicity aces, Mary Lou Falcone. DG rushed out Gustavo’s first CD, easily available everywhere now and showing off his home-town band in their spirited performances of two Beethoven symphonies, the Fifth and Seventh.
