Gustavo Dudamel, «Mozart in The Jungle» and the TV that anticipates reality – Corriere.it

The 42-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustav Dudamelone of the few pop figures in the swampy world of classical music, will become in 2025 the director of the prestigious New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The news was greeted by

New York Times

as “an earthquake for the city’s cultural scene”. But it certainly doesn’t come unexpected, or at least not for those who have followed the four seasons of Mozart in The Junglethe TV series in which Gael Garcia Bernal brought to the small screen a young South American conductor inspired by… Guess who? To Gustavo Dudamel.

Mozart in The Jungle

Review of previous episodes. In 2014 it was released in the United States (and then the following year also in Italy) an Amazon Prime Video series in which Garcia Bernal plays Rodrigo DeSouzaenfant prodige of the classical who is appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with a very clear task: to lead the prestigious institution that has had as directors Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein in the future, rejuvenate it and open it to young people.

Mozart in The Jungle era based on the memoir of the same name released by oboist Blair Tindall, but the showrunners had drawn elsewhere for the conductor character. Rodrigo De Souza was a former South American child prodigy, nonconformist in work and in private life, with a helmet of brown curls framing his face. You understand, right? Rodrigo was television transposition by Gustavo Dudamel.

When TV predicts the future

The list of series that have somehow anticipated reality is long and rather varied. Homeland recounted the conversion to Islam of Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, kidnapped in Iraq, long before the explosion in Italythe case of Silvia Romano
; the Russian spy duo operating in Sweden, arrested in November, seems copied and pasted from The Americans;
Y: The Last Man
imagine instead a world without males, a scenario that scientists recently explained to be very concrete.

The case of Mozart in The Jungle, however, goes further. The series placed Rodrigo De Souza on the podium of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra more than ten years in advance than when Gustavo Dudamel will actually end up there. As if to say that fantasy arrives a decade before reality, or rather, that understands a decade in advance what will happen (or should happen). Do you want to understand what the world will be like in 2033? Watch today’s tv series and you’ll be fine.