The mane event

It turns out that Dicterow was so curious when he first heard of this potential conducting phenom ("they are few and far between") that he went to Tanglewood in Massachusetts two summers ago to see him lead the Boston Symphony, then caught him recently at Carnegie Hall with his "supercharged" Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. "He paints such a wonderful picture physically on the podium. . . . He reminds me of a young Zubin," summed up Dicterow, who came here from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his father played the violin for half a century, and where Zubin Mehta became principal conductor, in 1962, at the same age Dudamel is now.

The next day, yet another comparison was offered up.

"He reminds me of a young Abbado," said Gil Shaham.

Shaham is the guest soloist for the four-concert series, performing Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A minor to end the first half of the program, which kicks off with the percussion-driven "Sinfornia India" by Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. Shaham was speaking in his dressing room during a final rehearsal Thursday morning, this one open to the public at $16 a ticket. A crowd of 1,200 turned out, and although Dudamel had the orchestra play each piece through for them, he then went back over sections he wanted tweaked, seeking more of what musicians call "dynamic layering" in the Mexican piece, for instance, and asking Shaham to "lighten up the texture a bit" in the Dvorak. "The piece can be thick, muddy," the violinist agreed after he'd finished up with the conductor a decade younger than he is.

"I'm just getting used to being older than some of the players in the orchestra," said Shaham, who has been a soloist since his teens but now is getting up there at 36.

He had an advantage over most of the others here, having worked with Dudamel before, in Israel. "I hate to say it, when I first saw him, the buildup was so big, yeah, I was skeptical," Shaham recalled. He also wondered whether this was one of those instances when someone is built up just to be taken down. "I was kind of like 'I feel a little bit sorry for Gustavo. I think people are testing him.' "

Acid test

Though there may yet be a wave of second-guessers -- critics who say "Yes, but . . ." -- among musicians at this level, there's no faking it, Shaham noted. So he stopped worrying about Dudamel the first time they went into rehearsal in Israel and he saw "the chops -- they're all there." That's something you realize "instantly," he said. "It takes a couple of seconds."