Review: Gustavo Dudamel, Cate Blanchett and Jeremy O. Harris update Beethoven's 'Egmont'

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

It began with Beethoven.Bright yellow T-shirts reading, in raspberry type, “¡Bienvenido Gustavo!” marked Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic the first Saturday afternoon of October 2009 at the Hollywood Bowl.

Eighteen thousand tickets were distributed free for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an Angeleno “Ode to Joy” broadcast worldwide.The exultant young Venezuelan conductor’s message was: There is no North, South or Central America.

We are one.We are now in “Gracias Gustavo” season, and times, we are daily reminded, they are a-changin’.

But what remains consistent is that Dudamel begins again, in the first month of his six-month homestretch as L.A.Phil music director, by dwelling on the composer he says has meant the most to him since his earliest days as a kid conductor in Caracas.

His first major recording boasted startlingly propulsive performances of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, with the uproarious Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, recorded 20 years ago this month.In August, Dudamel will end his L.A.

Phil tenure as he began it, with Beethoven’s Ninth at the Bowl.Through these two decades, thick and COVID-lockdown thin, Beethoven has been Dudamel’s composer of uplift.This weekend he confronts, for the first time, Beethoven’s daunting mystical and mystifying “Missa Solemnis.” In following weeks, he will pair Beethoven symphonies with two of the most arresting and original of the dozens of new works he has premiered in Los Angeles — Gabriela Ortiz’ Glitter Revolution ballet score, “Revolución Diamantina,” and the first part of Thomas Adès “Dante” ballet.To begin the Beethoven month at Walt Disney Concert Hall, however, Dudamel turned to another Beethoven work that has long obsessed him, the rarely heard complete incidental to Goethe’s traged...