Gustavo Dudamel
Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez (born 26 January 1981) is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist. He is currently music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He is scheduled to become Music and Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026.[3]
In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Dudamel and the second or maternal family name is Ramírez.
Gustavo Dudamel
Early life[edit]
Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, the son of a trombonist and a voice teacher.[4] He studied music from an early age. In 1986 he became involved with El Sistema, the famous Venezuelan social action music programme, initially learning the violin.[5] He soon began to study composition. He attended the Jacinto Lara Conservatory, where José Luis Jiménez was among his violin teachers. He then went on to work with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin-American Violin Academy.
Dudamel began to study conducting in 1995, first with Rodolfo Saglimbeni, then later with José Antonio Abreu. In 1999, he was appointed music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, the national youth orchestra of Venezuela, and toured several countries. He attended Charles Dutoit's master class in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2002, and worked as assistant conductor to Simon Rattle in Berlin, Germany and Salzburg, Austria in 2003.
Career[edit]
Conducting[edit]
Dudamel won a number of competitions, including the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Germany in 2004.[6] His reputation began to spread, attracting the attention of conductors such as Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, who accepted invitations to conduct the Simón Bolívar Orchestra in Veneite.[7] In April 2006 Dudamel was appointed as principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony for the 2007/2008 season.[8]
Dudamel made his debut at La Scala, Milan, with Don Giovanni in November 2006. On 10 September 2007, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time at the Lucerne Festival. On 16 April 2007 he conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Vatican's Paul VI Audience Hall in a concert in commemoration of the 80th birthday of Pope Benedict XVI, with Hilary Hahn as solo violinist, with the Pope and many other Church dignitaries among the audience.[9]
Awards and media[edit]
Dudamel is featured in the documentary film Tocar y Luchar, which covers El Sistema. Dudamel and the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar received the WQXR Gramophone Special Recognition Award in New York City in November 2007. Another US television news feature on Dudamel was on 60 Minutes in February 2008, entitled "Gustavo the Great."
On 23 July 2009, Dudamel was selected by the Eighth Glenn Gould Prize laureate José Antonio Abreu as winner of the prestigious The City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize.
Dudamel was named one of Time magazine's most influential 100 people in 2010.[29]
Dudamel is featured in the 2011 documentary Let the Children Play, a film which focuses on his work advocating for music as a way to enrich children's lives.[30]
Gramophone named Dudamel its 2011 Gramophone Artist of the Year. Also in 2011, he was inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. In February 2012, Dudamel won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, for his recording of Brahms Symphony No. 4 for the label Deutsche Grammophon.[31][32] In 2013, Dudamel was named Musical America's Musician of the Year and was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.[33] Dudamel received the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society from the Longy School in 2014 and the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award in 2016.
The character of Rodrigo in Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle was based, in part, on Dudamel.[34] In the first episode of the show's second season, in which Rodrigo appears as a guest conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel appears as a guest actor, playing the part of a stage manager.
In June 2018, Dudamel received Chile's Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit.[35] Also in June, the Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts (VAEA) awarded Dudamel the Paez Medal of Art 2018.[36]
On 18 October 2018, Dudamel was announced as the 25th recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.[37][38]
Dudamel received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 22 January 2019.[39]
At the 64th Annual Grammy Awards the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance was given to the Dudamel-conducted 2019 recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 8.
In the summer of 2019, Dudamel conducted the orchestra during the recording sessions for Steven Spielberg's 2021 film adaptation of West Side Story.[40]
In April 2023 Dudamel was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[41]
Political views[edit]
Writing for an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in 2015, he argued that taking sides in Venezuela's conflict could politicize El Sistema, which could be a threat to the institution, saying: "For those who think I've been silent too long, I say, don't mistake my lack of a political stance for a lack of compassion or ideals." After the killing of El Sistema violist Armando Cañizales during the 2017 Venezuelan protests, Dudamel condemned Nicolás Maduro's response to the demonstrations for the first time, writing in social media: "I raise my voice against violence and repression. Nothing can justify bloodshed. Enough of ignoring the just clamor of a people suffocated by an intolerable crisis."[42][43]
In 2019, in a speech accepting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he said that it should belong to Venezuela, and that "tomorrow [23 Jan. 2019] is a crucial day [and] the voice of the masses must be heard and respected", referring to the planned national protest on that date and the Venezuelan presidential crisis.[39] In 2022, he returned to Venezuela and reconnected with family and friends as well as students and teachers at El Sistema. Speaking about El Sistema, Dudamel said, "I have made it my personal mission not to rest until music is truly a fundamental human right for everyone. El Sistema has endured through seven different governments in Venezuela. It is not about politics. It is about the shared belief that art must be a part of the fabric of society". He considered that the political situation in the country had improved but that there were still problems that needed to be addressed, saying: “People have the desire to get out of this unrest — this political, ideological unrest — and really make things move forward" and that “There has been a change, but we need to keep working to make things better because they are still very difficult.”[43]
Personal life[edit]
Dudamel has been married twice. His first marriage, in 2006, was to Eloísa Maturén in Caracas. Maturén, also a Venezuelan native, is a classically trained ballet dancer and a journalist. The two had a son, Martín Dudamel Maturén, on 1 April 2011.[44] In March 2015, Dudamel and Maturén divorced.[25] In February 2017, Dudamel secretly married Spanish actress María Valverde, whom he had first met in 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada.[45] He became a Spanish citizen in 2018.[46]
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