How Gustavo Dudamel brought Latino crowds to the L.A. Phil
The first time Gustavo Dudamel enthralled Los Angeles, he did it with music from Latin America.
It was Sept. 13, 2005, and the then 24-year-old from Venezuela was making his U.S. debut at the Hollywood Bowl as guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the program that evening was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony; but before it came “La Noche de los Mayas,” a 1939 composition by Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas that served as the score to a film of the same name.
The crowd was immediately enamored.
“With the opening bars of Silvestre Revueltas’ ‘La Noche de los Mayas,’” observed Times music critic Mark Swed in his dispatch from that concert, “the party sitting next to me put aside its just-opened giant bag of Cheetos and forgot about it until intermission.”
If that’s not commanding someone’s attention, I don’t know what is.
“As a Latin conductor it has always been very important [to me] to play our music, Latin music,” Dudamel, who’s now 42 and has been music director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic since the 2009-2010 season, recently told me.
We were sitting in his office in the administrative wing of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and I had just asked him if there was any intentionality behind the Revueltas selection. He revealed that there was, that it was his belief that Latino culture was an integral part of this city, so why shouldn’t its cultural institutions reflect that?
“I think that was the opening door for me to really connect with Los Angeles,” he said.
And connect he did — at least with Latino audiences. As my colleague Reed Johnson reported back then, perhaps no other group embraced Dudamel’s arrival more than the Latino Welcome Committee, a volunteer group of 60 Latino professionals — doctors, lawyers, business leaders, etc. — who organized shortly after his appointment was announced in the spring of 2007.
In his 14-year tenure, Dudamel has done an admirable job at incorporating Latin music into the L.A. Phil’s programming, all while justifiably earning a reputation of being a once-in-a-generation conducting virtuoso. Under his direction, the esteemed orchestra has performed the music of Latin American composers such as Arturo Márquez and Alberto Ginastera. Dudamel also counts the “Americas & Americans” Festival, which featured the music of South and North America, among his favorite achievements.
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He’s a true believer of the idea that music belongs to everyone. It’s a principle he first learned in El Sistema, a social program launched in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu that has brought free music education to hundreds of thousands of children in Venezuela since its inception. Dudamel is the program’s most accomplished alum and proselytizer — the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, which was launched by the L.A. Phil in 2007, is modeled after El Sistema and has given free instruments and music education to the city’s underprivileged children, many of whom are Black or Latino.
“He was a visionary,” he said of Maestro Abreu, who died in 2018. “Anyone can have an idea, but if you don’t have a vision, that idea goes nowhere.”
Dudamel has also brought countless popular Latin artists to the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Hollywood Bowl — from Panamanian salsero Rúben Blades, to Venezuelan acid pop rock act Los Amigos Invisibles, to Puerto Rican rapero/reggeatonero Residente.
This summer, the L.A. Phil welcomed the legendary rock en español band Cafe Tacvba to the Hollywood Bowl for a sold-out, two-night residency. According to Dudamel, everyone was dancing that night — from the rockeros to the classical music aficionados, Latinos and non-Latinos alike.
Most recently, Dudamel invited a veritable who’s who of Latin indie vocalists for “Canto en Resistencia,” a series of concerts at the Walt Disney Concert Hall celebrating the protest music of Latin America. I attended last Thursday’s performance, which featured Ana Tijoux, ChocQuibTown’s Gloria “Goyo” Martínez, Monsieur Perine’s Catalina Garcia, Ely Guerra and Lila Downs.
It was an unquestionably Latino affair, one in which the crowd itself became a part of the show. Every song was followed by the thunderous roar of clapping and hollering. At several points in the evening, I saw someone wave a Mexican flag with such unadulterated joy in their face, you would have thought that El Tri had finally made it to the fabled fifth game at a World Cup.
“That’s what I admire about Dudamel, that he often takes the risk of trying to unite two different worlds through music,” Omar Vicentini said in Spanish. Curious to get his perspective and drawn by his glam paisa fit (straw sombrero, multicolored sequin jacket and botas vaqueras), I approached him during intermission.
“There’s people that are here to watch Lila Downs, and they’ll leave here charmed by everything else they’ve seen,” he added.
As I made my way home that evening, still buzzing from the energy of that collective experience, it dawned on me how fortunate I felt to have been there. Era como ver un Messi or Maradona — a genius-level talent that also happens to be one of us — en su prime.
That’s what makes Dudamel’s looming 2026 departure — he’s heading east to lead the New York Philharmonic — a bitter pill to swallow.
He sees it otherwise.
“I will never leave this place because we created an identity together,” Dudamel said. “This next chapter is to create even more bridges. There’s always been a wall between the coasts, so why not build a strong bridge between them?”
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