Gustavo Dudamel Visits New York With Promise, and a Warning

Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time.

The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid with his family. You could call that home. In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, though, he said that he would always think of his native Venezuela as home. And, after 15 years of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Southern California is home, too.

“I am going to New York, of course,” Dudamel said, “but L.A. is home.”

Comments like this are a reminder that, for now, New York has little claim on Dudamel. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is still very much his home orchestra: where he has led the premieres of some 300 pieces, founded an immense youth orchestra program and achieved celebrity status in a city of celebrities.

There are, perhaps, clues to Dudamel’s New York future in his Los Angeles present, which was on exhilarating display over three evenings at Carnegie Hall this week. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concerts that reflected his gift for must-hear programming and his open-minded disregard for genre, his welcome belief that at a high enough level, all music can be art.

But Dudamel is not without his weaknesses. While he can be brilliant off the beaten path, he is less distinct and perceptive in the classics. In that sense, his visit to Carnegie is both a sign of promise and a warning.

He has always been a bit uneven. His early Beethoven recordings, with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, hardly rise in a crowded field. Two years ago, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Carnegie in a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that lacked vision and precision.