Gustavo Dudamel had done everything possible in his 11 years as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He conducted the Super Bowl halftime show and a Star Wars movie. Won a Grammy. Got people interested in composers who are not only not dead but also not from Europe. The wild-haired 43-year-old Venezuelan became one of the most famous people in a city filled with famous people, all of whom have the advantage of not working in high culture. He scored a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Amazon based a character on him in the TV show Mozart in the Jungle. There was so obviously nothing left to do that he accepted a job as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, starting in 2026.
Then Dudamel thought of something he hadn’t done: getting deaf people to come to the symphony.
The perfect piece for this project, he decided, was Beethoven’s sole opera, Fidelio, the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to break her husband, a political prisoner, out of jail. Choosing Fidelio only made Dudamel’s impossible task impossibler. Many venues avoid programming Fidelio because it bores even people who can hear it. But, for Dudamel, it was perfect.
“Beethoven wrote this when he was [becoming] deaf,” he said in his office at the Disney Concert Hall, taking a break from marking the score for Fidelio, yet again, in pencil. “Beethoven is the most spiritual composer of all because he was in his own world.” And it’s the spirituality, he said, that allows Fidelio’s tale of freedom to inspire people to embrace inclusiveness. An inclusiveness that includes bringing deaf people to an opera.
He got the idea when he was reading Beethoven’s scores at Princeton and understood the depth of his suffering over his hearing loss. He then thought of Coro de Manos Blancas, which has a choir of deaf performers that are part of El Sistema, the state programme for young musicians in Venezuela that he had attended. Dudamel’s wife, Spanish actress Mariá Valverde Rodríguez, has a mother who works with kids with disabilities and she was excited about the project. They decided to fund the opera through their charity, The Dudamel Foundation. They started rehearsals with Manos Blancas and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and planned a 2020 tour pegged to Beethoven’s 250th birthday.
Then Covid hit and the tour was cancelled. Which gave Dudamel time. And when Dudamel has time, he makes everything bigger.
He got the LA Philharmonic involved and approached Deaf West, a theatre company of deaf performers. He envisioned a semi-staged production in which each singer would be paired with a deaf actor who would perform the libretto in sign language. The chorus would have their words performed in sign language by Manos Blancas. It would be groundbreaking. A chance to advance an art form that’s been around for hundreds of years. It wasn’t just a performance. It was a responsibility.
“Fidelio is a message,” Dudamel told me. “It’s a symbol of integration. The deaf community are not usually in a concert hall. It’s not just inclusion. That is integration.”
“I said no,” remembered DJ Kurs, Deaf West’s artistic director. “We’ve had many requests to do opera over the years, and my fear had always been that opera really didn’t fit the deaf world.” All that repetitive, slow, simplistic acting isn’t made for people who communicate with their faces and hands. It was weird he even needed to explain this.
Eventually Dudamel talked Kurs into it, describing his understanding of the deaf community through his long association with Manos Blancas. As Kurs sat in the audience during the first performance in 2022 in Los Angeles, he knew his instincts had been right. He had allowed himself to be Dudameled. “At intermission, I was terrified. I thought I would be invited to leave my position at Deaf West Theatre.”
Kurs stood in the lobby, not knowing how he got there, suffering an out-of-body experience. Then he saw people chatting in sign language about seeing the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall for the first time. When Kurs returned for the second half, he saw them laugh at jokes in the libretto. They gave standing ovations, clapping by waving their hands, joined by non-deaf audiences waving their hands, too. The deaf patrons chatted with performers in the lobby for so long, they closed the joint down. Dudamel was so pleased that he decided to make Fidelio one of the two rotating nights of programming on the LA Phil’s 12-day tour of Barcelona, Paris and London this summer.
Selling newness to classical audiences is never easy, though, and it was possible that European concert goers would dismiss his Fidelio as gimmicky American wokeness. Also, it was unclear if deaf patrons would attend the European shows, where Kurs didn’t have the contact lists he’d built over decades. Like everything else the LA Phil tried, the success of Fidelio largely depended on the charm and energy of Gustavo Dudamel. And also whether he could keep his own orchestra committed, after ditching them for New York City.
I went with them to Europe to see how Fidelio went over, but also because I wanted to know what it’s like to travel with a circus this big. What did classical music people do in their free time? Violin shopping? Visiting the birthplace of composers? Sheet music stores?
American symphony orchestras have been touring internationally since even before conductor Arturo Toscanini took his New York Philharmonic to Europe in 1930. They have not been as proper and staid as one might assume by watching them on stage. Toscanini took that first trip during Prohibition in America, so his orchestra manager booked a French ship that served alcohol. Just three days into the voyage, the New York Evening Post’s headline read “Philharmonic Drank Ship Dry on Trip”.
That kind of bonding is a big reason orchestras tour. Normally, members race home after a show. Many LA Phil musicians don’t know all of the 106 members, only talking to the people in the section that they sit with on stage. “On tour you find out there are people in the orchestra you love,” said principal trombone David Rejano. “And you find out there are people in the orchestra you hate.”
On a tour stop in Tokyo in 2015, Dudamel was walking back to his hotel after dinner when he spotted a dozen members of the orchestra on the sidewalk and followed them to a karaoke bar where he belted out the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”. In 2012 in Venezuela, the authorities sequestered the orchestra in the hotel the entire time, due to unrest. “The hotel bar closed and people grabbed bottles from their mini bar and their kids’ snacks and threw a party in the lobby,” remembered the LA Phil’s chief operating officer Daniel Song. “You saw brass players hanging out with string players.”
Just as it’s tough to get any humans to bond in the age of smartphones, it was challenging for the LA Phil. “It’s very different than in the 1980s,” said violinist Camille Avellano, who had been with the LA Phil for 43 years and would retire on the last day of the tour. “Those of us who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s had different views on social things. Sometimes we’d have chartered flights and people would be throwing stuff on the airplane, from blankets and towels to food. A lot of the young people now are very serious.”
Dudamel had a particular challenge in getting people on this tour to live out his message of integration. He brought the largest group the LA Phil had ever brought on tour: 406. It was nearly twice what they normally travel with. “It kind of ballooned out,” admitted Song.
This travelling circus was made of many disparate groups: the orchestra; the youth orchestra that had its own shows; the opera singers; the Deaf West actors; Coro de Manos Blancas (who use Venezuelan Sign Language, compared with Deaf West’s American Sign Language); Cor de Cambra, the renowned choir from Barcelona; and Cor del Gran Teatre del Liceu, the renowned choir from Barcelona that has a long-standing rivalry with the Cor de Cambra. “Normally they’re competitive. But Gustavo has this bizarre idea that you’re supposed to collaborate in this business,” said Dudamel’s manager, Mark Newbanks.
Those were just the people on stage. There were also stage managers, PR execs, equipment managers, costumers, travel agents, interpreters, lighting designers, a Mexican composer who had written a piece they were playing, a violinist who played the solo in that piece, director Alberto Arvelo, librarians, a social-media video producer, a doctor and donors who had donated at least $50,000 this year and paid to travel with the circus. A ton of money was raised expressly for the tour.
Because this circus lived pretty well. In their first stop, they checked into the Grand Hyatt Barcelona, originally named Hotel Sofia after former Spanish King Juan Carlos I’s wife, who lived there when she was in town. When second chair violinist Nathan Cole’s grandfather, who played in the Philadelphia Orchestra, saw his first tour schedule, he said, “That’s not a tour, that’s a vacation.” In the 1950s, his grandfather shared one hotel room one night a week with another of the all-male musicians and slept on the train the rest of their eight-week tour, taking “bird baths” in the sink. “He told me that one of the tuba players would take off his tails when they got back, ball them up, throw it in the locker and say, ‘That’s another one in the can.’ By the time the next season started, the tuxedo had turned green.”
That said, Cole, who had been on more than 20 international orchestra tours, brought only one suit on tour that he would play in every night. He and his wife, Akiko Tarumoto, the fifth violinist, also brought three kids. There were five married couples in the orchestra, and one divorced one. All that child-rearing had ended the once vibrant foodie group, which had dined at places such as Alinea in Chicago and Liberty Private Works in Hong Kong, a 26-seat restaurant on the 26th storey of a skyscraper. As every fraternity knows, it’s easier to bond when you’re single.
BARCELONA
During the first Fidelio concert, Dudamel was a whirlwind, his hair and hands flying in multiple directions. He conducted, as usual, from memory, without a score in front of him. When he left the stage to a standing ovation, the deaf attendees waving their hands in appreciation, he arrived backstage to gladhand the mass of visiting musicians, composers and anyone else who had waited to pay tribute to him, spraying compliments and enthusiasm like a broken fire hydrant. He was an explosion of energy, suddenly high-fiving me, saying, “We made it! We crossed it!” And I thought, yes, we made it, we crossed it, without having any idea what we had possibly made or crossed.
He was tracking his activity with an Oura ring (which he had told me he worried would fly off his finger in the middle of a concert) and said he had once burnt 1,900 calories during a performance, far more than during any run he’s ever taken. Even if the ring was over-indexing for hand movements, he was clearly burning a lot of energy. “It’s the level of concentration,” he said. “After the concert, I get really hungry.”
Immediately after the concert, official scheduled bonding began at Cabaret, a red-velvet-drenched club hidden in the basement of the Edition hotel. There were jamón ibérico and taco stations, but 406 people was a lot of people, and by the time a third of them arrived, the party was at capacity. Many members didn’t bother. Even the donors, who want nothing more than to be around the orchestra, exited for a sushi dinner on the roof.
Some of the 23 high-school seniors in the youth orchestra were also struggling. Dudamel created the orchestra to copy El Sistema, with the same philosophy of making the arts more accessible. Almost all the seniors were the first in their families to go to Europe, getting their first passport for the trip. It was all a bit overwhelming. They hunted down what felt like “the one and only taco place in Barcelona”, said Elsje Kibler-Vermaas, the LA Phil’s vice-president of learning and one of 12 adults accompanying the group. “It took a long time to convince me that’s what we had to do. But they were homesick. They missed their mom’s food. There was a lot of, ‘Whew, this is a lot of newness’.”
PARIS
Lots of people have a romantic relationship with Paris, but — like everything else with Dudamel — his romance is more intense than most. Last May, Dudamel quit his side hustle as music director of the Opéra de Paris, four years before his contract ran out, after they cancelled a tour following a pay dispute between management and musicians. Bringing a 406-person opera here on tour was a cheeky move after quitting an opera company in part for cancelling a tour. But 15 minutes before the show, he was hanging out with friends backstage at the Philharmonie de Paris, looking very much at home. “Of course I’m relaxed. It’s Paris. I slept for 10 hours.” (I did not believe anything his Oura ring was telling him.)
That night’s Fidelio, too, accomplished exactly what Dudamel hoped, bringing in deaf audience members and receiving a standing ovation. “That’s my goal,” said Kurs, the Deaf West artistic director, “to create a relationship between the venue and the deaf community in their city.” This, he admitted, was even more important than the actual artistic creation.
On previous tours, the communications department posted newspaper reviews on a bulletin board backstage or sent them around, but the bulletin board had grown conspicuously absent. Europe’s classical music critics were not as excited about deaf opera as Angelenos are. Hardly any members of the orchestra were upset by these lukewarm reviews, because they did not bother asking about them. Musicians are hyper-focused on their own performance. Like many members, when trombonist James Miller felt like he didn’t play well during a concert, he would listen to the recording, and then practise backstage for an hour after the show. “I could play one note for 30 minutes. You’ve got the top of the note, the middle of the notes, and the bottom of the note,” he said. Then, if he still felt badly, he would often hit a bar on his way home.
After one of these concerts, the donors headed to an 11.30pm dinner at Caviar Kaspia to celebrate one of the board member’s birthdays. Their tour was organised separately, by Liaisons Travel, which had gotten them into the Joan Miró museum before it opened, Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Vicens house to serve them breakfast before it opened, and the Lalique design studio to serve them champagne and canapés. And much nicer hotels, though, of course, many would rather stay with the orchestra.
A half-hour after sitting down, Dudamel joined the table. Which was the best surprise possible for the patrons, who were as close the orchestra had to groupies. On tour, they would often lead the audiences into standing ovations. If they were different sorts of fans, they’d be flashing their breasts instead of their chequebooks. And they could party.
“We were eating potatoes stuffed with caviar at 1.30 in the morning. I was amazed that the octogenarians were the ones who stayed out the latest,” said board member Geoff Rich, 68. “They can drink. And then they can eat,” said Dudamel. Maybe it’s the Marx Brothers’ fault for sending them up, but it doesn’t seem like the patrons of the orchestra should be this much fun.
At the Gare du Nord the next morning, there was a lot of grumbling about standing in a waiting area near the platform for two hours, which was due to that night’s Champions League final in London. But Guido Frackers, who owns TravTours, which exclusively organises tours for symphonies, wasn’t worried.
Preternaturally calm, Frackers, who is Dutch, looks like Fred Armisen playing a fashion photographer, with long grey hair and chunky black glasses. He is the opposite kind of cool as Dudamel, floating above all the details he’s controlling. He lives near Palm Springs but can’t get an American green card because his passport stamps are inexplicable to any bureaucrat. He travels nearly 300 days a year and yet somehow has maintained a family. Mostly. He was recently married to Dutch Olympic swimmer Femke Heemskerk until she left him for a woman. He has a kid, a step kid, and no problems whatsoever. Most of the time. He got the grey hair from three trips to North Korea to set up the New York Philharmonic’s trip there in 2008. “If there’s ever a concert on the Moon, we’ll probably get them there,” he bragged.
LONDON
Frackers delivered the orchestra on time, as always, to London. They had a rare free day that day without a concert, thanks to Brexit. This added yet more cost to the tour. “We used to be able to do a concert in Paris and the next day do a concert in London. Now you have to put a day buffer in between because there’s no guarantee the instruments and costumes will drive straight through. Things get held up,” said COO Song.
Having free time did not guarantee that even this subgroup of 106 orchestra members would bond like Dudamel hoped. “The orchestra is like high school,” explained Song. “You have your jocks, your nerds and your student government people.” A former violinist, Song is a nerd. The woodwinds, who play more solos, are divas. The two harpists don’t go out that much. The members who know how to party are the brass section: trumpets, trombones, tubas, horns. They are known as Brassholes.
At 3pm on Saturday, the orchestra members and their luggage were refugeed in a large room off the lobby of London’s Montcalm hotel because their rooms weren’t ready yet. There was a little grumbling because they usually stay at the Rosewood, but it was booked up because of the Champions League game. Violinists sat on chairs reading books. Violinists’ children sat on the floor reading children’s books. Brassholes, however, didn’t sit around waiting for a room. They were off to the Bermondsey Beer Mile.
After a long tube ride, four brass members passed several freight-containers and breweries under the rail line before entering The Kernel, the original pub on the strip. Man-bunned trombonist Paul Radke, who wore a patterned shirt so loud that, when his wife spotted it at a Marshalls in Miami Beach, she said she was “disgusted” and then bought it for him, squeezed by a guy with a shirt that said “Two Seater” with arrows pointing to his face and crotch. When the brass members got to the bar under the giant arched ceiling, they each ordered three-per-cent table beers. Brassholes know how to pace a drinking night.
Brass players are different from string players because they tend not to have devoted their existence to classical music from the age of five. You don’t have the lung capacity to play a horn when you’re little, so brass players mainly learn their instruments in a middle school band.
“A lot of professional brass players had formative experience in marching bands. Few professional string players would say, ‘My high school orchestra was super important.’ Those are things you tolerate,” said Cole, who started playing violin aged four.
Middle-school teachers gave kids brass instruments because they had the outgoing personalities to play loudly, were confident enough to solo, and were strong enough to carry a huge instrument made of brass. The strings and woodwinds (five of whom in the LA Phil graduated from Harvard) often have cosmopolitan parents who played professionally themselves. Radke, who grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, learned on his dad’s trombone, which he had obtained in a trade for a pig.
They’re not really “brassholes”, I realised. What they were was aggressively normal. When trombonist Miller got to the orchestra in 1999, one of the brass players asked him how big his wine cellar was. Miller admitted that he didn’t have a wine cellar. The brass player shook his head. “Wrong answer,” he said, disappointed that Miller had taken him seriously. “The right answer is ‘What’s a wine cellar?’” Cole, of course, has a wine refrigerator.
Mason Soria, the 6ft 1in, 25-year-old tuba player, walked to the group’s upstairs table with a beer in each fist in hopes of catching up. Soria only played one of the two nights of programming on the tour (there’s no tuba in Fidelio). He only had 14 notes, all in the second movement of Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony. “I sit there and try not to fall asleep. I’m a professional,” he said, loudly, because the table of eight young men to the left was screaming the Proclaimers song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” as loud as one can through large puppets. But Soria took his 14 notes very seriously. “If the tuba fucks up you know who fucked up. If one violin fucks up, no one is going to notice. The stress keeps me interested. Maybe one note won’t be exactly what I wanted but it’s not bad.”
“That’s your opinion,” said principal trombone David Rejano.
Soria, who is from outside of Dallas, Texas, had never been to Europe and was making the most of it. He went clubbing with five other orchestra members, including, unbelievably, a violinist, in Barcelona. In Paris, he completed a night of drinking with other orchestra members in his room at 6am, then ventured outside at 7.30 for a snack and was freaked out by all the stuffy businesspeople in suits. Soria’s father was a weekend rock guitarist who went by the stage name JMS Guitarslinger and opened for Van Halen. “I’m living like he did,” he said. “I’m living the rock-star lifestyle.” He was a little nervous about teaching his first ever masterclass at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama tomorrow morning, but not so much that he didn’t go to the next brewery.
Over beers at the Barrel Project a few archways down, the original plan to go back to the hotel and watch the Champions League final at Wembley Stadium (where four orchestra members were in attendance) faded away. After a fourth pub, fish and chips were ordered by all but Soria, who wound up eating the majority of everyone else’s. Miller and a couple of others made it back to the hotel at 2am.
At 8am Sunday morning, while some of the brassholes were still asleep, cellist Ben Hong called an Uber to take him 40 minutes to Penge in south London for an appointment at Wiseman, which makes instrument cases. The Uber driver popped the boot, and Hong, wearing a custom-made blue seersucker suit, said he would keep the cello on his lap. The Uber driver insisted he put it in the boot, but Hong explained that his insurance wouldn’t allow it. Both Yo-Yo Ma and Hong’s cello teacher, Lynn Harrell, famously forgot their instruments in cabs, and Hong isn’t going to let that happen to the General Kyd, which the Phil had entrusted him with. Made in 1684, it’s one of the few cellos Stradivarius made that still exist and was used in the premiere of Dvořák’s cello concerto in London in 1896. A previous LA Phil cellist had it swiped from his front porch in 2004 when it was worth $3.5mn, much less than what it would sell for now. It went missing until a couple found it discarded in a skip. They considered turning it into a novelty CD rack before they realised it was the missing cello and rang the LA police’s art theft division. Hong bought the General Kyd a ticket on flights so it could sit next to him. “Sometimes they bring me two meals,” he said.
Hong said walking around with an instrument strapped to his back that costs more than a small castle didn’t worry him. “It’s a bit like riding a motorcycle. If you feel very stressed, maybe a motorcycle isn’t for you,” he said. Hong had ridden an MV Agusta for decades, sometimes to concerts at Disney Concert Hall. Though when he had his house built, he did add a vault for his cellos, which includes one he owns that was made in 1737.
Even name-dropping the General Kyd’s name in his emails couldn’t get Hong an audience with case maker Howard Wiseman. Hong had met Wiseman two years ago when they both judged an instrument-making competition at the Violin Society of America’s violin-making competition in Anaheim, California, but that didn’t help either. He eventually needed a musician friend to make the introduction. He mailed Wiseman specs he had paid to have drawn up of the General Kyd — which was made before cello sizes or the number of strings were standardised — but Wiseman preferred to see the instruments in person.
When the Uber parked on a nondescript street, Wiseman came out to greet Hong. A cheery bearded man in a shop apron and glasses hung around his neck, Wiseman started selling instrument cases to members of the Vienna Philharmonic when he was 17. Then he studied the bassoon at the Royal Academy of Music. He was also a professional handball coach. I am fairly certain that he is a character from a movie based on a children’s book.
Wiseman led Hong into a huge, tented, cluttered workshop that smelled of burnt leather, sawdust and shoe polish. He took the General Kyd out of Hong’s somewhat flimsy case and handled it gingerly. “When you think that you could buy the whole industrial park we’re in with this, it’s amazing,” he said. Though he hadn’t intended to, Hong chose a carbon fibre pyramid-shaped case that would make it look less like he’s carrying an instrument than a surface-to-air weapon. It would cost around $4,000. This did not give Hong pause, because the LA Phil was paying. Song, the COO, had no idea how expensive this tour had become.
After their first concert at the Barbican, there was a small party for the orchestra and staff in the tiny, brightly lit green room. The orchestra had spent the day mocking the cheapness of this party, vowing not to attend, but a lot of them wound up here anyway. There was an open bar serving beer and wine, and the brassholes were nearly the only ones who didn’t choose wine. When the party ended, the orchestra members raced to the Montcalm before their lobby bar closed.
Still, the bonding had not worked with everyone. The next day, cellist Jonathan Karoly sat at a table alone in the Barbican green room, eating a Pret A Manger sandwich. “I haven’t been on one single bus, train, flight or hotel with the orchestra,” he said. “I like a little independence. It feels more like a vacation. I don’t like travelling around like a herd.” Karoly was like this before he got divorced from flautist Catherine Ransom Karoly, who was also on the trip, and was sharing custody of their teenage daughter between their hotels. Though most of the time the daughter was babysitting the three kids of violinist couple Cole and Tarumoto. As Karoly ate the second half of his sandwich, several brassholes walked by making farting noises, which, it turned out, is simply how they warm up their mouths.
By the last performance of the tour, the final version of Fidelio, the orchestra was exhausted. Violinist Tarumoto woke up shivering that morning and asked tour doctor Andrew S Wachtel, a pulmonary specialist at LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who had been on almost every LA Phil tour since 1996, for a Covid test. When it came back positive, she stayed home and her husband, Cole, played with a mask on. Another violinist also cancelled due to Covid. In the end they played Fidelio two violins down. Avellano, the retiring violinist, would test positive in the following days. “If the tour lasted any longer, there wouldn’t have been anyone on stage,” she said.
Before the last rehearsal, Dudamel addressed the entire Fidelio company, some through the interpreter standing next to him. Clearly referring to the sniffy reviews the production had gotten in Europe (the London batch would grumble about messy staging) he said that true art was often dismissed when it was first presented, but it was the artist’s job to be bold and know they’re ahead of their time. The deaf actors and chorus waved their hands vigorously, while the orchestra stamped their feet.
On the final night at the Barbican, Dudamel seemed, if possible, even more animated, the audience in serious danger of death-by-flying-Oura-ring. The night before, during Dvořák’s Ninth, Carolyn Hove, an English horn player who retired that night after 36 years with the Phil, went out big. “I said, ‘I’m going to milk it for all its worth’ and Dudamel let me,” she said. That night, Dudamel let everyone milk it. But what they milked most were the silences — the long sections of dialogue delivered by the deaf actors. They had played Fidelio enough that they had relaxed into the performance. Instead of focusing on their next notes, they focused on the actors. “You could say, assuming I play this piece again, that I’ll have all we had tonight plus the voices,” said violinist Cole. “But I had the feeling that would be less than what I was experiencing.”
Dudamel left the stage to a standing ovation. He arrived backstage to another, this one from his staff and admirers. As after every performance, an assistant handed Dudamel a whisky with ice and he took a long sip. Then he kissed his wife deeply, and, with one calm finger and zero eye contact, dismissed the stage manager trying to get him back on stage to accept more applause. Mick Jagger in his prime could not do it better. He stared at the monitor so that the actors and singers could soak up as much applause as possible and then strolled back on stage for more.
María Valverde glowed backstage, post-snog. “I love that moment. It’s my favourite one,” she said of the kiss. “I love being the first person that Gustavo sees after his nirvana. It’s beautiful to see his joy.” Fidelio, she said, changed their marriage by bonding them in a new way. “It’s so beautiful to work with someone you love and make crazy things.” The craziest part is that, now, Dudamel has got to think of something even crazier to do.
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