Barquisimeto (Venezuela), 1981
By Fernanda Gdynia Morotti
Conductor, composer, and prodigious violinist, he was appointed at the age of eighteen as director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. He stands out for the originality with which he approaches traditional classical music. He is a promoter of El Sistema, a method of social inclusion through music, developed by the Venezuelan conductor José Antonio Abreu.
The son of musicians—his father was a trombonist and his mother a singing teacher—he began studying violin at El Sistema, the System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, and continued his training at the Latin American Violin Academy under maestro José Francisco del Castillo. He began training as a conductor in 1995, and by 1999 he was already the music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the National Youth Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.
In 2004, he won the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Germany, and the following year, in the same country, received the Beethoven Ring Award at the Bonn International Beethoven Festival. In 2007, he was decorated by the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and was named patron of the Misión Música, an institution that brings music education to more than one million young people through El Sistema. Also in 2007, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time at the Lucerne Festival. He then embarked on a concert tour of Europe with the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, including a season at the Royal Albert Hall in London. When invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic in a series of concerts, Dudamel was handed the baton of legendary American conductor Leonard Bernstein to lead the performances.
His third album, Fiesta (2008), which includes compositions by Latin American musicians, was nominated for a Latin Grammy. In 2012, he won the Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for conducting Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LA Phil). In 2010, in Bogotá, Colombia, he conducted the Binational Concert with one hundred Venezuelan musicians and one hundred Colombian musicians. For the bicentennial of Venezuela’s independence, he led an orchestra of four hundred musicians and a choir of 1,200 voices at Plaza Diego Ibarra in Caracas. At the funeral ceremony of President Hugo Chávez, he conducted the performance of the Venezuelan national anthem. In 2007, he also conducted the Stuttgart Symphony Orchestra in Austria, which performed in honor of Pope Benedict XVI’s 80th birthday.
He has been the music director of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden since 2007 and the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the United States since 2009.
