“What this country needs is a really good $5 concert,” writes Mark Swed in Monday’s (11/1) Los Angeles Times. “And that is what Oakland got Sunday at the sold-out, 2,800-seat Paramount Theatre as Gustavo Dudamel conducted YOLA, the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, created by the Los Angeles Philharmonic when Dudamel became music director in 2006. The concert, for which all seats were $5, was the climax of YOLA’s first tour, with stops in Northridge, Visalia and Fresno…. There was the undeniable thrill Sunday of seeing accomplished young musicians who began with cardboard violins and the like a decade ago having become a genuine orchestra with its own distinctive look, style and sound…. The kids come across as cool, even a little teenage cocky, but also wide-eyed…. Dudamel—who conducted the Oakland show after YOLA’s music director, Juan Felipe Molano, led the other tour stops—demands from YOLA what he does from any orchestra.” Swed praises YOLA’s enthusiastic rendering of music by Márquez, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and John Williams.
Posted November 3, 2016
