The announcement that Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel will conduct members of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles in the Super Bowl halftime show is big news for the world of classical music. Nothing like that has happened in the 50 years of the event.
Yet, could anything be more natural than Dudamel and YOLA at the Super Bowl? The inspiring youth orchestra, which Dudamel initiated in 2009 when he assumed his post with the L.A. Phil, is composed of mainly African-American, Asian and Latino inner-city kids. And after seven years of instruction and rigorous practice, they now represent the best of who we are as a society and of our future. They play rousing Beethoven and romantic Tchaikovsky with an irresistible, heart-warming commitment and flair.
Meanwhile, in the half-century since Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic, Dudamel has become the first conductor to rise as a true public figure, organically bridging the classical and pop divide. In the past few weeks alone, the television comedy series “Mozart in the Jungle,” based on a Dudamel-like conductor, won two Golden Globe awards, and millions of moviegoers have heard Dudamel conduct the opening and closing music of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
An estimated 120 million viewers of the Super Bowl are, for Dudamel, practically business as usual. Nearly all of his 30 million fellow native Venezuelans have seen Dudamel conduct on national television. He is one of his country’s best-known figures, and he performs regularly for Venezuela’s major occasions and celebrations. Much of Latin America knows him, as does an increasing portion of the rest of the world. All told, Dudamel has surely reached, one way or another, 120 million people by now.