SEASON OF DISCONTENT

Gustavo Dudamel at the New York Philharmonic; "Kavalier & Clay" at the Met.

- BY ALEX ROSS

John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a blistering wail of orchestral rage. Strings play a unison A that quavers under the pressure of sawing bows. Timpani, bass drums, and piano follow with a concussive thud. After a second howl of strings, the percussion delivers two more thuds in quick succession—a dark echo of the stamping rhythm of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Finally, the entire ensemble unleashes a dissonant scream, with pitiless timpani strokes recalling both Brahms’s First Symphony and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s antiwar opera, “Die Soldaten.” Corigliano wrote his symphony in the late nineteen-eighties, to lament friends who had died of AIDS and to decry indifference to those deaths. The work contains sonorous bouts of sorrow, but rage is its primary register.

Dudamel, who officially begins his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director next season but is already effectively in charge, has never been a brazenly political artist, yet politics has a way of catching up to him. A product of the Venezuelan music-education program known as El Sistema, he long remained silent about human-rights issues in his home country. Then, in 2017, he voiced concerns about the regime of Nicolás Maduro, resulting in a years-long absence from Venezuela. Now, as he ends his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and turns his attention to New York, he is brushing against a fresh wave of repression, this time emanating from the White House. This past summer, he planned to bring the Simón Bolívar Symphony, the flagship orchestra of El Sistema, to the Hollywood Bowl, but the appearances were cancelled, according to the L.A. Phil, on account of “travel complications”—presumably, Donald Trump’s travel ban.