Classical music’s greatest political butt-kissers: Dudamel, Gergiev and Rattle

On 8 March 2013, Gustavo Dudamel stood by the coffin of the Marxist autocrat Hugo Chavez and conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in the Venezuelan national anthem. He assumed, like everyone else, that the coffin contained a fresh corpse: the president of Venezuela was reported to have died from cancer on 5 March at the age of 58. Not so, it is now claimed. According to his former head of security, Chavez died on 30 December 2012. The news was kept secret while his lieutenants panicked. The funeral — covered with ludicrous sycophancy by the BBC — was, at least in part, a masquerade.

Whatever the truth, Dudamel — who’d recently taken up residence in America as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — had to be there. Foreign correspondents noted admiringly that this was because classical music played such a huge part in the life of Venezuela, thanks to the miracle of El Sistema, the programme of musical education that supposedly turns kids from the slums into world-class musicians. In fact, there’s also an element of masquerade about the Simon Bolivar orchestra: its dazzling players are generally not from the dirt-poor backgrounds described in El Sistema press releases. The dashing Dudamel must know this, but says nothing. The Southbank Centre — which has just announced yet another visit by Dudamel and the Venezuelans — must know this too.

Dudamel would have faced ostracism or worse in his native country if he’d missed the funeral. El Sistema exported pro-Chavez propaganda as well as Mahler symphonies to gullible global audiences. The young maestro was (and remains) a cultural ambassador for corrupt Venezuela, just as Sviatoslav Richter and David Oistrakh were sent abroad to detoxify Soviet Russia.