Conductors Music

A Florida conductor was recovering at home Monday after falling 14 feet into the empty space below a movable orchestra pit on the opening night of an opera he had written. David Ott fell Friday after the premiere of "The Widow's Lantern," an original work written for the Pensacola Opera. Ott said he fractured nine vertebrae, dislocated his shoulder and may have broken an ankle. It happened when the lights were off and he went to retrieve his music, not realizing the Pensacola Orchestra pit had been raised to stage level.

At any given moment, Gustavo Dudamel might be catching a red-eye flight to Sweden, rehearsing young musicians in Venezuela, blazing a path through Mahler's First in Los Angeles or brainstorming with the head of his record label in Germany.Then there are the endless hours spent memorizing brain-racking orchestral scores. And the countless weeks devoted to the type of social and educational programs that once helped catapult Dudamel from a working-class provincial Venezuelan boyhood to the top of the world's classical conducting ranks.

On his first official day of rehearsal with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, amid an enthusiastic welcome from musicians and unprecedented media fanfare, Gustavo Dudamel wanted to make one thing perfectly clear: He's ready to get down to business. At 28, Dudamel is carrying the weight of his new title -- the L.A. Phil's music director -- as well as great expectations from the classical music world on his shoulders. But speaking Wednesday at a news conference at his new home, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dudamel rejected frequent media speculation that the formidable demands of the prestigious post could prove too much for him. The Venezuelan conductor calls his English "terrible," but he had no problem putting his thoughts on this matter into words: "No -- really, no ," he said in answer to the question following the day's rehearsals.