Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramirez was born on 26 January 1981 and is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist.
33 Facts About Gustavo Dudamel
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Gustavo Dudamel is currently music director of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Paris Opera.
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Gustavo Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, the son of a trombonist and a voice teacher.
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Gustavo Dudamel studied music from an early age, becoming involved with El Sistema, the famous Venezuelan musical education program, and took up the violin at age ten.
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Gustavo Dudamel attended the Jacinto Lara Conservatory, where Jose Luis Jimenez was among his violin teachers.
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Gustavo Dudamel then went on to work with Jose Francisco del Castillo at the Latin-American Violin Academy.
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Gustavo Dudamel began to study conducting in 1995, first with Rodolfo Saglimbeni, then later with Jose Antonio Abreu.
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Gustavo Dudamel attended Charles Dutoit's master class in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2002, and worked as assistant conductor to Simon Rattle in Berlin, Germany and Salzburg, Austria in 2003.
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Gustavo Dudamel won a number of competitions, including the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Germany in 2004.
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Gustavo Dudamel's reputation began to spread, attracting the attention of conductors such as Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, who accepted invitations to conduct the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Veneite.
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Gustavo Dudamel made his debut at La Scala, Milan, with Don Giovanni in November 2006.
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In 2011, he featured in the documentary Gustavo Dudamel, Let the Children Play directed by the Venezuelan filmmaker Alberto Arvelo.
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In 2013, Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra during the funeral of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
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Gustavo Dudamel continues to retain his position with the Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra.
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In 2015, Gustavo Dudamel conducted both the opening and end titles, at the behest of famed film composer John Williams, for the official motion picture soundtrack and film of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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On 1 January 2017, Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in their traditional New Year's Day Concert; at the age of only 35, he is the youngest guest conductor in history to lead this event.
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Gustavo Dudamel first guest-conducted at the Opera national de Paris in 2017.
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Gustavo Dudamel made his US conducting debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl on 13 September 2005 in a program consisting of "La Noche de los Mayas" by Silvestre Revueltas and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 5.
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Gustavo Dudamel was invited back to conduct the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall in January 2007 in performances of "Dances of Galanta" by Zoltan Kodaly, the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman as soloist, and Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.
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Gustavo Dudamel will be the first Latin American music director of the New York Philharmonic.
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Gustavo Dudamel is featured in the documentary film Tocar y Luchar, which covers El Sistema.
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On 23 July 2009, Gustavo Dudamel was selected by the Eighth Glenn Gould Prize laureate Jose Antonio Abreu as winner of the prestigious The City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protege Prize.
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Gustavo Dudamel was named one of Times Magazine's most influential 100 people in 2010.
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Gustavo Dudamel is featured in the 2011 documentary Let the Children Play, a film which focuses on his work advocating for music as a way to enrich children's lives.
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In February 2012, Gustavo Dudamel won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, for his recording of Brahms Symphony No 4 for the label Deutsche Grammophon.
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In 2013, Gustavo Dudamel was named Musical America's Musician of the Year and was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.
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Gustavo Dudamel received the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society from the Longy School in 2014 and the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award in 2016.
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In June 2018, Gustavo Dudamel received Chile's Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit.
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Gustavo Dudamel is featured as the name of an achievement in the game A Rite from the Stars, released on 19 July 2018.
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On 18 October 2018, Gustavo Dudamel was announced as the 25th recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
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Gustavo Dudamel received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 22 January 2019.
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At the 64th Annual Grammy Awards the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance was given to the Gustavo Dudamel-conducted 2019 recording of Symphony No 8.
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In February 2017, Gustavo Dudamel secretly married Spanish actress Maria Valverde, whom he had first met in 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada.