ANAHEIM, Calif. — When Gustavo Dudamel lowers his baton at the end of the night at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, Aug. 23, an era ends for the conductor and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

A Concert for Venezuela marks the conclusion of his 17 years as music director of the L.A. Phil, the finale of four nights of Celebrating Gustavo at the Hollywood Bowl that incorporate Dudamel’s passions as the orchestra’s artistic director, too.

On Thursday, Dudamel conducts Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 after premiering a newly commissioned piece by longtime Pixar film composer Michael Giacchino, which will feature YOLA, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, a children’s choir and the L.A. Phil.

Friday night is Gustavo’s Fiesta, a celebration of Latin music with artists such as Los Tigres Del Norte and Lila Downs performing with the orchestra. On Saturday, Dudamel and the L.A. Phil back the rock band Foo Fighters.

A Concert for Venezuela closes out the weekend with a fundraiser for earthquake relief efforts in Venezuela, with a portion of the proceeds going to help children, families and staff of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education program of which Dudamel is a graduate. The program inspired him to create YOLA as a similar program to reach children who might not other have access to play in youth orchestras.

This kind of variety is the embodiment of everything Dudamel loves.

This fall, Dudamel, 45, heads east to take over as music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, though he’ll hold onto some of the bonds he’s built in Los Angeles since he came here a 28-year-old conducting prodigy in 2009.

In May, the L.A. Phil appointed him artistic and cultural laureate and founding director and conductor laureate of YOLA, which will, along with his decision to keep a home here, ensure he’ll return here for years to come.

Still, this chapter of Dudamel’s time in the City of Angels is ending, and so we looked back over his 17 years leading the orchestra, a few bonus years before that, to remember his impact not just on an orchestra but a city and its many and varied communities too.

September 2005: Dudamel makes his U.S. conducting debut at the Hollywood Bowl. The program includes Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and Revueltas’ La Noche de los Mayas.” Curious orchestra administrators from around the country were there to check out the 24-year-old newcomer, according to the Los Angeles Times’ review.

“I hope the Philharmonic kept the visiting orchestra officials out of his dressing room long enough to get first dibs on his next American engagement,” the Times’ critic writes. “And the one after that. And after that.”

January 2007: Another first, this time Dudamel’s debut as guest conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. “The floppy-haired maestro is fun to watch,” writes the Orange County Register critic Tim Mangan. “He uses his hair to advantage, bobbing his head to make it fly about and seemingly to generate electricity.

“Certainly Dudamel had nothing to teach this orchestra about [Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra],” the review continued. “Nevertheless, he forged a reading with his own personality all over it. Never satisfied to leave well enough alone, he probed into the guts of the score, unearthing harp parts, dictating rhythmic units, taking the violas to new heights. There wasn’t a dead or dull moment. Perhaps more impressively, there weren’t any mannered ones either.”

April 2007: The L.A. Phil announces it has hired Dudamel as music director. He replaces Esa-Pekka Salonen, who had led the orchestra for 17 years — the same amount of time Dudamel has served in that role. Now 26, Dudamel jokes at an introductory press conference that he feels old. He started conducting his dolls at 6, and youth orchestras in Venezuela’s El Sistema when he was 12.

“What’s important are his gifts,” Philharmonic violinist Mitch Newman said at the time. “And really what you heard in this press conference, that he can go from humor to warmth to depth, it’s all right there at his fingertips. And that’s what he communicates in the music to us, he has such a deep understanding.”

Fall 2007: The Philharmonic launches YOLA in South Los Angeles, providing instruments, training and academic support free of charge to students who might otherwise never have the chance to play an instrument.

It’s inspired by El Sistema, which took a Venezuelan boy named Gustavo, gave him a violin and taught him to play, starting his journey to the top of the world of classical music. From 80 students in 2007, YOLA currently serves about 1,300 across the city.

November 2007: A year before Dudamel officially went to work for the Philharmonic, he’d already achieved one hallmark of L.A. celebrity — a signature item on the menu at Pink’s historic hot dog stand in Hollywood. The Dudamel Dog, or Dude Dog, took a 10-inch hot dog — about 4 or 5 inches shorter than the average conductor’s baton — and buried it under guacamole, American and Swiss cheese, grilled fajita onions and bell peppers, jalapeño peppers, with tortilla chips propped on top.

“I will love to go to Pink’s, always!” he told the Orange County Register. “And it’s so funny, because it’s like Mexican. With guacamole, with these kinds of things. It’s funny; it’s delicious you know? It’s delicious and it is spicy. It’s hot!”

The Dudamel Dog doesn’t appear on Pink’s online menu today. And he seems to have moved on. A New York Times reporter had lunch with Dudamel in September 2025, with Dudamel taking him to Gray’s Papaya on Broadway for hot dogs that were practically naked — just ketchup and mustard.

October 2009: Finally, he’s on the clock. Dudamel conducted his first show as the L.A. Phil’s music director at the Hollywood Bowl on Oct. 3, 2009. The orchestra headlined with Beethoven’s Ninth, which returned on Thursday for the first of Dudamel’s farewell shows at the Bowl.

YOLA performed, too, as did the Silverlake Conservatory Ensemble, which included Chili Pepper bassist Flea, and the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts jazz band accompanied by keyboardist Herbie Hancock, the L.A. Phil’s jazz chair.

In some ways, the day had the feel of a rock show, with merch stands selling bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with “Bienvenido, Gustavo!” and fans at the edge of the stage reaching up to slap hands with Dudamel at the end of the night.

October 2009: Five days later, Dudamel made his official debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Oct. 8, 2009. The program opened with “City Noir,” a new piece by composer John Adams. It was a signal that, like his predecessor Salonen, Dudamel was committed to modern classical music, too.

But the second piece, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, really shined, according to Register critic Tim Mangan.

“The young conductor never lets up with his urging and coaxing of the musicians, and he is in constant eye contact with them, from concertmaster to timpanist to tuba,” he wrote. “He rides the wave of the musical impulses and expression, but he doesn’t wallow in it, doesn’t swoon. Every signal has a reason. He growls, he sings, he jabs fists, stabs fingers.

“Mahler wrote his symphony when he was Dudamel’s age. The passions and triumphs in it are a young man’s. Dudamel avoided exaggeration in his reading, but there could be no mistaking his understanding and empathy in every episode of the work.”

April 2010: “America and Americans,” Dudamel’s first festival at the L.A. Phil, opens. It featured only works by composers from North, South and Central America, with a different perspective from what many had done before.

“We tend to think of music of the Americas by looking south,” explained Deborah Borda, then the Philharmonic president, in an interview with the Times. “But Gustavo starts in South America and looks north.”

January 2012: Dudamel, music director for both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Venezuela’s Simón Bolivar Orchestra, came up with an ambitious plan to lead both orchestras as the same time. Over three weeks, he would lead the two orchestras in performances of all nine of Mahler’s symphonies plus the adagio to his unfinished 10th — first in Los Angeles, then again in Caracas.

Mahler had long been a favorite of Dudamel, who talked in interviews about how the accidental gift of a Mahler CD when he was a boy inspired a passion for the German composer’s music. The feat cemented Dudamel’s reputation as a top interpreter of Mahler’s music and led to his first record album with the Philharmonic when a 2012 performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was released on CD in March 2013.

December 2015: Amazon’s “Mozart in the Jungle” was based on a 2005 memoir by oboist Blair Tindall but the TV series adaptation looked to Dudamel for inspiration of the South American conductor Rodrigo, played by Gael Garcia Bernal. Both Rodrigo and Gustavo were young, passionate South American conductors known commonly by their first names.

The character Rodrigo was said to have conducted at La Scala in Italy at 23 — Dudamel did so at 25 — and had led a Scandinavian orchestra — Dudamel had been at Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony.

If you needed any further proof, look no further than the first episode of the second season when Rodrigo guest conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Dudamel has a role as its stage manager.

February 2016: The British rock band Coldplay headlined the halftime show for Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, but the supporting acts included Beyoncé, who stole the show, Bruno Mars, Mark Ronson … and Dudamel, conducting an ensemble of young musicians from YOLO.

August 2017: Dudamel tried for years to stay out of the increasingly authoritarian politics of Venezuela. When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in 2013, Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Orchestra played at the funeral of Chavez, who had been a strong backer of El Sistema.

But in 2017, after an El Sistema violinist was killed in widespread protests against the rule of President Nicolás Maduro, Dudamel took a stand for the Venezuelan people that was critical of the government. Maduro’s government canceled a planned tour of the United States by Dudamel and the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.

Dudamel, who had traveled frequently between Los Angeles and Venezuela, did not return to his homeland until 2022. He did not conduct the Simón Bolívar Orchestra until 2023 when they reunited in Edinburgh, Scotland.

January 2019: Dudamel receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, joining other sidewalk-famous conductors there such as Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini, Eugene Ormandy, Arthur Fiedler and Zubin Mehta, like Dudamel, a past conductor of the L.A. Phil.

April 2020: In addition to his role in “Mozart in the Jungle,” Dudamel also voiced the character of Wolfgang Amadeus Trollzart, the ruler and conductor of the butterfly-winged Classical Trolls, in “Trolls World Tour.”

April 2022: The documentary “¡Viva Maestro!” offered a fascinating look at Dudamel’s life and career and an unexpected point of view due to the uprisings and protests of the Venezuelan people against their government in 2017. Suddenly, planned tours with Dudamel conducting Venezuelan musicians were scuttled, director Ted Braun said.

The cameras captured “Gustavo’s commitment to music’s transformative power,” Braun said of the rapidly changing events Dudamel was swept up in. “And his commitment to the musicians that he grew up with. And to the mentor, who really made him who he is.

“We obviously were going to watch and follow how he responded to those tests,” Braun said. “To pay attention to Gustavo, his values and his commitment to music’s transformative power. And that’s what we ended up doing.”

February 2023: The classical music world is rocked by the announcement that Dudamel would leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the end of its 2025-2026 season to head for the Big Apple and the New York Philharmonic.

“Today I am honored to be named the next musical and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, adding to a legacy that includes great masters Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein,” he said of his decision.

“Most of all, I’m thankful,” he continued. “I am grateful to my beloved family of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and YOLA for helping me learn and grow through countless challenges and triumphs; to my Maestro Abreu and the children, youth and teachers of Venezuela who have been with me since the beginning; and to the musicians and the leadership of the New York Philharmonic as we embark on this beautiful new path together.”

April 2025: While composer Hans Zimmer was the first to conduct an orchestral set at Coachella, Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic became the first actual orchestra to play the music festival when they thrilled the cool kids in the desert with a mix of instrumentals and performances with guest singers, such as Laufey, Cynthia Erivo, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, and L.L. Cool J.

March 2026: Dudamel delivers the commencement speech for the University of Southern California‘s graduation ceremonies at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He told graduates that while the modern world is full of “noise,” the clamor of people speaking without listening, they should strive for something different.

“The magic of an orchestra lies in turning noise into harmony. And turning differences into art. We call this balance,” he said. “Listening is creation. It is what transforms noise into beauty. … And this makes me think of something many people repeat often today, that difference and diversity are a problem.

“I disagree with that concept. Diversity is not the problem. The problem is not listening to one another,”

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