Gustavo Dudamel conducts Desenne, Ginastera and Estévez

For his second weeks of concerts, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel focuses on composers from his home continent. Now resident in the U.S., Caracas-born Paul Desenne is an alumnus of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolivar, the orchestra of Venezuela’s remarkable music education program El Sistema, with which Dudamel is intimately connected. Desenne’s 2014 orchestral work Hipnosis Mariposa, originally commissioned by Gustavo Dudamel, is a tribute to the immensely popular Venezuelan songwriter Simón Díaz (1928-2014), whose famous song “La vaca Mariposa” is the basis for Desenne’s upbeat, colorful score. Gustavo Dudamel has been a stalwart champion of the Venezuelan Antonio Estévez’s important Cantata Criolla for chorus and orchestra. Composed in 1954, the cantata sets a text by the Venezuelan poet Alberto Arvelo Torrealba. The great Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s sparkling Piano Concerto No. 1, from 1961, was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.