Carnegie Hall’s fall season kicked off to an ebullient start last week with a gala performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, played by Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and conducted by the boisterous, floppy-haired young conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who also directs the Los Angeles Philharmonic.The enthusiasm of the performers—most of whom have been playing together since they were children, but rarely on a stage as gilded and grand as Carnegie Hall’s on opening night—spread to the crowd as it awaited the hair-raising bassoon solo that famously opens the Rite. The thundering timpanis, the thrashing highs and creeping lows of this work, which once incited riots after its debut in Paris in 1913, was an apt fit for this lively ensemble, as well as for Dudamel, whose stage antics had the audience laughing throughout the evening.“I’m having such a good time!” he proclaimed once between numbers. Another time he bent over to peek at the First Violinist’s stand asking, “What’s the next one again?”After the Rite and the second main piece of the evening, Maurice Ravel’s stirring wartime waltz, La Walse, Dudamel launched into a speedy mashup of 2/4-timed tunes from a well-tread canon: Aaron Copland, Hungarian dance music, and a mambo, during which the performers stood up, spun around, and shouted Mambo! It might have been corny with another symphony, but here the spirit was purely infectious.
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