Beethoven
Symphony No 7, Op.92
Gabriela Ortiz
Revolución diamantina, UK premiere
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
Los Angeles Master Chorale
Gustavo Dudamel
Reviewed by: Ates Orga
Reviewed: 12 August, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
For the second of his sold-out Prom visits this season, Gustavo Dudamel featured the concert version of Gabriela Ortiz’s ballet Revolución diamantina (Diamond Revolution, 2023). Around 42 minutes in duration, this is a theatre spectacular short on neither paced contrasts nor motivic elaborations, machined engines organically powering the whole. Ortiz writes challengingly for large forces, with a percussion battery of all sizes, shades and colours, along with eight sopranos and altos placed within the ranks. A brilliant virtuoso orchestrator, she displays a delicately fine ear for timbre and balance, decibel-laden explosions, animated crescendos and structured ‘thunder-sheets’ of sound counterpointing cameos of fragile embroidery and laced harmonics, like so many stars shimmering in the desert night. ‘Raw’ old masters nod by – Stravinsky, Bartók, Orff, Messiaen, Ligeti, Reich – even, unexpectedly, Britten and Peter Grimes. Ancestral echoes steeped in Mexican heritage surface, take over and disappear. Minimalist mantras, guttural tribal cries and hoofed beats, drum talk, distilled Hollywood fragments invade the spirit. A vibrant, ‘hot’ landscape in a groove defiantly its own, Revolución diamantina compels. Tone poem music with the capacity to endure.
Developing a storyline by the Pulitzer-winning author Cristina Rivera Garza, the work’s six acts, Ortiz says, ‘traverse various scenarios related to feminism: harassment and a lack of security in public spaces, the confusion between the language of romantic love and practices of manipulation and control that all too often, can lead to lethal forms of violence against women; solitude and a lack of sense of belonging; the voices of the disappeared; a blind march that makes its appearance on the horizon of a nonsensical place; the intimate terrorism that goes on between couples, as well as its stages and consequences; street protests and their cries for justice; and finally, the aspiration that only by walking together will we be able to find a way out, because even though we may have only indirectly experienced much of what has been described here, their cause is also our own: that of all of us, women and men and people’. ‘The 21st century,’ she quotes the veteran Mexican multidisciplinary artist Alejandro Escuer, ‘will be remembered as a time when the women of the world sought out and conquered the standing they truly deserve. Revolución diamantina is a sonorous premonition, a ritual in motion that provides a glimpse of this urgent social transformation, one that will doubtless be characterized as the most gradual, imposing, important, and inevitable revolution of the current era.’
In the hands of Dudamel, a seasoned Ortiz campaigner, this was a pole-axing UK premiere, delivered with relentless authority and adrenalin, from first downbeat to marking time in the long silence of the close. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, guest led by Nurit Bar-Josef, rose to stratospheric heights of finesse, energy, solo spots and super-ensemble. Every attack was razor sharp, every pause coordinated and breathed as one, every goal and dream elevated. The eight ladies of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, physically animated, were in the business of vocal beauty and vocal acrobatics – a Greco-Mexican ‘chorus’ serving to instigate and rebuke (Leila Cobo). The solar plexus moments were many, climactically, terrifyingly so, in the mounting inevitability of the fourth and fifth acts (‘Speaking the unspeakable’, ‘Pink glitter’). The only slip was the break in tension at the end of the fifth, applause and unacceptably brightening house lights dispersing the silence and auditorium glow otherwise wanted before the expanse of the ‘Todas (All)’ finale. Never mind, the occasion was electrifying, not to be forgotten, the composer given an ecstatic ovation. Get Dudamel’s 2024 Grammy release with the same forces (Platoon LAPHIL02). A gripping sonic bonanza.
Beethoven Seven comprised the first half ‘overture’ – fiery rhythms, pounding pulses and earthy primal attacks from two hundred years ago, Wagner’s ‘apotheosis of the dance’. Antiphonal violins, double basses left of stage, bumper third horn. Stylishly dramatized timpani (soft mallets in the introduction, hard sticks for the rest). Outstanding woodwind, subtle brass detailing in the finale. No first movement repeat (pity); touches of rubato in the trios of the scherzo; driven tempos. A tight, disciplined performance, perfectly balanced in the hall, sending shivers in the finale, Dudamel at his maturing best. Good to see Antony Hopkins remembered in the programme book, he of BBC Sunday music appreciation in the 50s and 60s. A symphony, he voiced, that ‘gives us a feeling of true spontaneity; the notes [seemingly flying] off the page as we are borne along on a floodtide of inspired invention’.
Critics, can be notorious naysayers and somehow feel they know better than anyone else.
Bravo to Ates Orga for the superlative, intelligent and highly knowledgeable review he wrote about this concert.
I was also there and agree with his every word as would I’m sure, most of the hall.