Odyssey

This album showcases three colourful Latin American works, all composed for the Pan-American Initiative which Gustavo Dudamel instigated in 2021 as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Dudamel describes the Initiative to Apple Music Classical as “a message of union, discovering the bridges and similarities between our people, our music, our landscapes and our cultures”. With its release in 2025, the album also marks the 50th anniversary of El Sistema, Venezuela’s programme of music education for children through which Dudamel himself developed as a musician, and which created the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra that Dudamel conducts in vibrant and atmospheric performances of all three works. First, and most substantial in terms of length and sheer variety of music, is Odisea, Gonzalo Grau’s concerto for Venezuelan Cuatro (a smaller-scale version of the standard guitar). This imagines a journey from Venezuela’s east coast, where the composer’s birthplace, Cumaná, is located, to Dudamel’s hometown of Barquisimeto in the country’s western-central region. In one continuous movement, the music carries the listener through colourful and well-contrasted episodes, some dance-like and enlivened by hand-struck percussion (particularly the golpe drum which appears at several key moments in the concerto), others beguiling and atmospheric. This eventually culminates in Grau’s evocation of the hubbub of an “encrucijadas”, one of Venezuela’s crossroads where the sounds and noises of street vendors and musicians collide, effectively heralding the striking (often literally!) cadenza in which the soloist, Jorge Glem, demonstrates the extraordinary versatility of his instrument. Even more “off the beaten track” is Ricardo Lorenz’s Todo Torreno, described by Dudamel as “a journey in Venezuela in a very old, rustic car”. As Dudamel explains, Lorenz’s “very virtuoso” music well-matches its subject: “you feel the wild but beautiful landscape of the journey, driving on roads that are not comfortable but which take you to magical, paradise-like places”. Tuned percussion and brass join in Lorenz’s string-led scoring to suggest both the jolts of the rough terrain and the exhilarating dance rhythms of the region. Finally, we have Danzón No. 9 by the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, who reaches beyond his own country to refer to an old Cuban salón dance. The work is a wash of orchestral colour and Latin American rhythm, a thunderous opening fanfare giving way to an oasis of calm that shows Márquez’s mastery of subtle atmosphere. The opening drama soon returns, before a seductive, sweeping theme that forms the piece’s heart, with street rhythms and sounds growing in intensity around it. Dudamel says his relationship with Márquez “goes to my childhood” when he was a violinist: “I remember being in the National Children Orchestra of Venezuela, and in one of these workshops we received this music of Mexican composer called Danzón No. 2. I was in love. We all fell in love. We were seduced by the beauty of the music of Arturo Márquez. “Márquez and I have a beautiful friendship also because of his commitment to music education, to social transformation through music,” continues Dudamel; “I think this Danzón is a celebration of that.” Which surely is the spirit of this entire album, together with its life-affirming joy in the colour and passion of the Latin American heritage which Dudamel shares both with these composers and now passes to us.