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Gustavo Dudamel’s return to the Hollywood Bowl on Aug. 5 was more than just another summer concert — it was a homecoming to the venue that helped launch his North American career two decades ago. The ovation when he walked onstage was thunderous, and the scene was a rare one: the 103-year-old amphitheater teeming with roughly 15,000 people, an unusually large turnout for a Tuesday night classical program. Programs reportedly ran out before the music even began.
Yes, Duke Ellington’s music was on the bill, and yes, superstar pianist Seong-Jin Cho was set to perform both of Maurice Ravel’s piano concertos — a double draw for any audience. But Dudamel was the magnetic force here, especially with rumors swirling that these might be his last appearances at the Bowl as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Originally, his tenure was set to close with concerts later in the month, but the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela had to cancel its Aug. 12–16 shows due to “travel complications,” prompting Dudamel — and his scheduled soloist Yuja Wang — to withdraw as well.
If there was uncertainty about his future on this stage, Dudamel’s conducting left none about his mastery of Ellington’s idiom. His reading of Harlem (or A Tone Parallel to Harlem, in Maurice Peress’s orchestration) swung hard enough to test the Bowl’s structural limits. The performance had a gritty swagger, with the central theme rolling along in a languid, bluesy sway. The visiting saxophone section was all slur and smolder, the brass reveled in plunger-muted growls, and the trap drummer locked into a Sam Woodyard-style groove that pushed the Afro-Cuban finale into a full boil.
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The evening’s other Ellington work, Black, Brown and Beige, proved a trickier proposition. Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943 at a sprawling 50 minutes, the suite was repeatedly trimmed by Ellington in response to mixed reviews. Peress’s now-standard 18-minute symphonic version condenses the material into a more manageable frame, though at the expense of some of its richest episodes — gone are the effervescent “West Indian Dance,” the sultry “Blues,” and Billy Strayhorn’s cosmopolitan “Sugar Hill Penthouse.” Even with its episodic nature and recurring refrains of “Come Sunday” and “Work Song,” Dudamel shaped the suite with the same rhythmic conviction he brought to Harlem, finding plenty to savor.
Between these Ellington bookends came Cho’s marathon pairing of Ravel concertos — the brooding Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and the glittering Piano Concerto in G. Both show the composer’s fascination with jazz (the G major concerto wears it more flamboyantly), making them surprisingly natural companions for Ellington’s sound world. Ellington once told critic Alfred Frankenstein that he wanted to compose from “the inside” of Black American life; Ravel, by contrast, approached jazz from the outside, crafting his own sophisticated translation.
Cho dove into the Left Hand Concerto’s thunderous opening with muscular intensity, matched by Dudamel’s dense, saturated orchestral colors. In the G major concerto, Cho navigated the first movement’s sharp rhythmic edges with crisp attack, before leaning into more lyrical touches in the finale. Dudamel drew sly, witty asides from the winds and brass, underscoring the work’s playful character.
The audience clamored for an encore, but Cho left the stage without one — a decision that, after his dazzling double-concerto performance, felt entirely justified.
