Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, posing throughout a photograph session at Paris’ Opera Bastille in Sept. 2022.
Joel Saget/AFP through Getty Images
cover caption
toggle caption
Joel Saget/AFP through Getty Images
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, posing throughout a photograph session at Paris’ Opera Bastille in Sept. 2022.
Joel Saget/AFP through Getty Images
A hotly anticipated recreation of musical chairs is underway: the charismatic conductor Gustavo Dudamel is leaving Los Angeles to develop into the new music and inventive director of the New York Philharmonic.
The 42-year-old Dudamel will formally step into the function of main the Philharmonic at the starting of the 2026-27 season. As of the 2025-26 season, he’ll function the New York orchestra’s music director designate, and his full contract as music and inventive director will final for 5 years.
Dudamel has served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and, extra broadly, as one in every of that metropolis’s most hailed high-culture heroes — since 2009. He concurrently serves as music director of the Paris Opera, a submit he has held since 2021, and as music director of the Simón BolÃvar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, which he has led since 1999.
In a press launch despatched to NPR Tuesday afternoon by the New York Philharmonic, the Venezuelan-born Dudamel stated: “Today, above all, I am grateful. I am grateful to the musicians and leadership of the New York Philharmonic as we embark upon this new and beautiful journey together; to my beloved family at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and YOLA [the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles] for helping me to learn and grow through countless challenges and triumphs; and to my Maestro Abreu [the conductor José Antonio Abreu, his early mentor in Caracas] and the musicians of Venezuela who have been there with me since the beginning. As the great poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca said: ‘Every step we take on earth brings us to a new world.'”
Although there was excessive hypothesis that Dudamel may earn this podium in New York, his appointment is already being hailed as one thing of an East Coast coup. His predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, the Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden, abruptly introduced in Sept. 2021 that he could be departing, citing a pandemic-era revisiting of his personal priorities.
The New York Philharmonic’s outgoing chief govt officer, Deborah Borda, has labored intently with Dudamel in the previous; earlier than her arrival in New York, she served in the identical function at the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years — and introduced in Dudamel there. Borda additionally led the latest massive renovation of David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home venue, which simply reopened this previous October.
Dudamel’s rent in New York implies that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is now formally on the hunt for a new music director of its personal.
The information of Dudamel’s signing was first reported by the New York Times Tuesday afternoon.