Tale

Gustavo Dudamel has begun his tale of two cities.

As Dickens prophetically reminds us, ours is hardly the first age of wisdom and of foolishness, the first epoch of belief and of incredulity. Dudamel’s great challenge is to make his 17th and final season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and his prelude season before taking over the New York Philharmonic (in September he officially became designate music and artistic director) — the best of musical times for both cities.

The opening concerts for the two orchestras were two weeks apart, the Big Apple having come first. The main works on the New York-centric program were by two great 20th century composers, Bartók and Charles Ives, who were treated as outsiders by the city’s musical establishments during their lifetimes.

The performances were impressive. An orchestra that has a reputation for being difficult was responsive. If I read the room right, there was a genuine, if somewhat guarded, sense of optimism from a welcoming crowd.

Following a tradition he started with his first season in L.A., Dudamel opened with a newly commissioned work, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “of light and stone.” He struck instant sonic gold with this mystical evocation of Hawaii, wondrous in sound, Lanzilotti, a hopeful good start.

Dudamel has a different look these days when he walks out on stage for an L.A. Phil concert after he’s been away for a while. Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he again seemed ever so slightly hesitant, as if not knowing what to expect now that his leaving has become manifest. But greeted by a full house’s demonstratively embracing thankful enthusiasm, he beamed, the hesitant posture turning into ownership.

The conductor opened his farewell season with Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” a joint commission bridging his two orchestral families.

(Timothy Norris / Los Angeles Philharmonic)

The new work this year is Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” and it is Dudamel’s first effort at bringing together what he calls his two families.

Reid, who is herself bicoastal between L.A. and New York, narrates, through astonishing orchestral properties and powers, an environmental tale of her two cities. The work is a joint commission with the New York Philharmonic; Dudamel will take it east in the spring.

Earth, air, water and fire are Reid’s subject matters, which she translates into four movements that cover a New York winter, an aerial approach to Manhattan’s noise and quiet, the Altadena and Pacific Palisades conflagrations, ending on a sort of surfboard ride over crashing blue waves. With the help of a wordless Los Angeles Master Chorale, Reid tells the story through ever-surprising instrumental evocation.

Nothing, however, sounds like you might expect in Reid’s massive orchestral soundscape capable of holding a listener in tight grip for 30 minutes. Is that percussive pounding in earth the ground moving under our feet and the cello solo snowy Central Park? I don’t know how she does it, but I immediately bought into weird sounds from the chorus indicating something words can’t express about what those New York skyscrapers are up to. The effect of what sounded like ticking clocks going astray felt like an inviting dip in the lake.

Dudamel ended the concert with Richard Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony,” 125 orchestral musicians schlepping up the mountain, finding spiritual ecstasy at the summit and getting drenched on the way down, a self-satisfied drinking in of nature with every step. It is an astonishing, so to speak, over-the-top score, which you either love or abhor for its instrumental vulgarity.

Love was in order Thursday. Dudamel first performed “Alpine Symphony” at Disney in 2008, a year before beginning as music director. He jogged up the mountain and back, full of beans, showing off but also sharing his enthusiasm and demonstrating a skill that gave confidence that this 20-something conductor had the chops.

Dudamel’s performance of Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony” demonstrated the L.A. Phil’s distinctive immediacy compared with his more formal European interpretations.

(Timothy Norris / Los Angeles Philharmonic)

Last summer, I heard Dudamel conduct the “Alpine” with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival. The playing was sumptuous but formal and distant. These were the Alps as seen from a comfortable gondola taking in the view, and what a view, indeed.

The L.A. Phil sound, on the other hand, reveled in being-there, huffing-and-puffing immediacy. A rainstorm was a rainstorm: wet. The pastures replete with cowbells weren’t so much scenic as earthy, the real thing.

The orchestra sounded rapt and ready for ecstasy Thursday. There are two new first-chair players. A member of the orchestra’s second violin section, Melody Ye Yuan, has become her section’s principal. Ryan Roberts is the new principal oboe, and he had a luminous solo in the “Alpine.”

It was only after Roberts, who grew up in Santa Monica, won the L.A. Phil blind audition for principal oboe that Dudamel discovered he had just hired away a rising star in what is about to become his New York Philharmonic. But it’s all in the big new family.

Scotland fans with even average memories take nothing for granted on the road, their mind’s eye still capable of conjuring up disturbing images of losing qualifying matches to Georgia in Tbilisi in 2007 and Kazakhstan in Astana a dozen years later.

Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary doesn’t get to join the hall of infamy, not after Scotland won a fairly joyless, but wholly professional, behind closed doors contest against Belarus. Get in and get out with three points was the mission and the mission was accomplished. Quality was optional on this occasion.

There wasn’t much of it, but for now it doesn’t matter. There was an encouraging performance from Ben Gannon-Doak, operating on the left wing with Andy Robertson as his minder. There was a solid outing from Che Adams who scored the first and was involved in the second. There was another clean sheet and the feeling of a job done adequately.

The drama on the night didn’t come in Hungary, it came in Greece where Denmark hauled themselves off the floor after dropping a home point against Scotland.

In taking the previously thrusting Greeks to the cleaners – 3-0 going on two or three more – they shook up the group. After being thoroughly outclassed by Denmark, a team that Scotland kept goalless a few days ago, Steve Clarke has a right to think that Greece are maybe not as good as they were made to look at Hampden in March.

“Long Story Short,” premiering Friday on Netflix, is the sweet, melancholy, satirical, silly, poignant, hopeful, sometimes slapstick cartoon tale of a middle-class Jewish family, told nonchronologically from the 1990s to the 2020s. For all its exaggerations — and unexaggerated portrayals of exaggerated behaviors — it is remarkably acute, and surprisingly moving, about relations between parents and children and brothers and sisters and about the passage of time and the lives time contains. The eight-episode season is bookended with funerals.

On a plane ride home, Avi Schwooper (Ben Feldman), his last name combining his parents’ Schwartz and Cooper, plays new girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) a recording of Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child,” in which a character goes from a baby to a married man in the space of a verse. “That’s time, right?” he says, setting a theme and a strategy. In the episodes that follow, we’ll see relationships begin and end; children born and grown, not necessarily in that order. Things change, things fall apart, things last.

Created by “BoJack Horseman” creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg — Avi is drawn to resemble him — and designed by Lisa Hanawalt (who inspired and designed the “BoJack” characters and created “Tuca & Bertie”), it has the look of a children’s book, bright, colorful and busy, aggressively two-dimensional, with wobbly bold lines and squiggly patterns. Deceptively sophisticated and wonderfully expressive, it is full of lifelike details, without being made to resemble life.

Avi’s parents are Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), intense and serious, and Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), laid-back and humorous. Avi, who writes about music, will go on to marry Jen (blond, gentile); Hannah (Michaela Dietz) is their smart, socially isolated daughter. Avi’s sister Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the angry middle child, will start a family with Kendra (Nicole Byer), a Black woman who is Jewish by choice. Younger brother Yoshi (Max Greenfield) is a bit of a lost soul — “sometimes I just feel like the extra one,” he’ll say — diagnosed as an adolescent with ADD, dyslexia and executive function disorder. (“I never gave him enough attention,” Naomi says, rushing to claim the guilt. “Now he has a deficit.”)

Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and designed by Lisa Hanawalt, the series has the look of a children’s book, bright, colorful and busy, aggressively two-dimensional, with wobbly bold lines and squiggly patterns.

(Netflix)

Though each episode is a piece in the mosaic, each has its own story to tell: Yoshi selling mattresses that come in a tube; Avi mixed up with self-righteous parents as he campaigns to remove wolves from Hannah’s school (the wolves, by contrast, are drawn realistically); Kendra at work at a birthday arcade called BJ Barnacles; Yoshi on a nocturnal adventure in San Francisco — the show is set around the Bay Area — with a former friend of his sister, attempting to retrieve a lost bag; Shira attempting to make her mother’s knishes; an improvised shabbat in a desert motel. There are inside family jokes (“Is not a schnook,” Cousin Moishe) that will pay off after a while; a school holiday pageant (“Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa too / We tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas,” runs a song in the background). Yoshi has a bar mitzvah; Naomi is honored for her charitable work. Occasional weird inventions are folded in: a “hambulance” delivering ham; food trucks selling potato ice cream and soup on a stick; something called Pacifier Shirt Syndrome, caused by rubbing a dropped pacifier on a short.

Although I suspect this subject is interesting only to (us) Jews, it took a long time for any sort of Jewish specificity to make it to the screen, especially given who built the movie business. (Assimilation was the name of the game for a people blamed for a scapegoated race.) Even now, it doesn’t happen all that much. You could sense it on “Seinfeld,” see it on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” a lot. There are the current Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” with Kristen Bell in a relationship with Adam Brody’s rabbi, and the recent Adam Sandler-produced “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.” And there is the odd Holocaust drama.

But in this moment, with its confounding mix of classical antisemitism, fake anti-antisemitism brandished as a weapon against universities and what gets called antisemitism simply because it’s critical of Israel, it’s not a bad thing to get a relatively straightforward look at a contemporary American Jewish family. Together, the characters represent the spectrum of religious attitudes — from atheist to convert, selectively to very observant — but all are steeped in the culture.

Hannah, whose gentile mother makes her “not Jewish,” wonders if her wanting a bat mitzvah might be “cultural appropriation.”

“Look, if Adolf Hitler saw you, I don’t think he’d be doing the math on technically how halachically Jewish you are,” says her father. “He’d throw you in the oven with the rest of us. … If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler, you’re Jewish enough for me.”

That the show can be a little obscure from time to time — I had to look up “Moshiach” to get one joke — just deepens its world. But anyone who’s ever shared a family joke, or wanted to ask a question of someone no longer around to answer it, or compared notes with a sibling on a parent never fully understood will recognize themself here.