CBSO * * * * *
at Symphony Hall
Review by Christopher Morley

It's been quite a week for Symphony Hall. Friday's bad weather and a Wednesday when the CBSO had been forced to abort its pre-concert rehearsal due to the ICC bomb scare.

That all-New World programme under the baton of hot-property young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel was thankfully scheduled for repeat on Saturday.

Certainly valuable hours of acquaintance with the material had been lost, and there had even been a Eurostar trip to Paris in the interim, but nothing of this showed in a knockout presentation.

The blockbuster punch came with the suite from music for the film Night of the Mayas by Silvestre Revueltas, evoking his Mexican homeland's great mysterious pre-Conquistadores civilisation.

Far more than mere emotional signposting, the score brings deeper satisfactions, clearly structured and imaginatively textured.

But nothing in the first three movements – loaded with power, gorgeous melting sweetness and vibrant Mexican rhythms – could prepare the listener for the finale's amazing onslaught.

This sound-image of a Mayan sacrificial dance brings to the fore a phalanx of 11 percussionists pounding away on exotic instruments in orgiastic cross-rhythms, whooping in intoxicated abandonment – but in reality brilliantly controlled under Dudamel's energetic direction.

After such wonders, a splendid Dvorak New World Symphony seemed almost too much to take.

There’s a song from Half a Sixpence the CBSO might be singing as it seeks its next principal conductor: "The One that Got Away".