Review: The Gustavo goodbye express keeps rolling

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Our streets are garlanded with “Gracias, Gustavo” banners and billboards.The Walt Disney Concert Hall shop has become a Dudamel-torium, aisles bursting with Gustavo T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, refrigerator magnets and this and that.

Not everything is tacky.The extra-large “Die Walküre” T-shirts sold out early, unfortunately.In the past week, Gustavo Dudamel’s sort-of penultimate week as Los Angeles Philharmonic music and artistic director (he’ll have a Hollywood Bowl grand finale in August), he officially handed the baton to his successor as the orchestra’s music director at a news conference on the Disney Hall stage.

First, though, he gave Daniel Harding a proper L.A.initiation by taking the British conductor and soccer fan to a Dodger game.Dudamel followed that with premieres by Puerto Rican composers Angélica Negrón and Roberto Sierra.

The former offered a cello concerto, “Mundillo (Little World),” with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist; the latter’s “Estudios Sinfónicos” is an effusive large orchestral work.Each was given twice on alternative days, along with a roof-raising performance of Richard Strauss “Ein Heldenleben” at all four programs.

On Saturday morning, Dudamel led his beloved YOLA orchestra at Disney.The world may have looked grim in what was also a penultimate week before elections, when the focus becomes necessarily not on joy but misery, the political premise being the winning candidate is the one who makes the electorate the angriest.But the ongoing Dudamel final fiesta, which concludes this weekend at Disney, operates on the other, insistently upbeat extreme.

Yes, joy.A love-in.

Negron’s “Mundillo,” which she calls “a work of radical optimism,” thinks big by looking at small places.She celebrates domesticity with gobs of glitter.

Mundillo, the Puerto Rican craft of weaving intricately patterned lace, becomes for her a met...