Strauss with muscle by Gustavo Dudamel, the sizzling South American. #hf12

The young conductor of Venezuelan descent brought his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra to the Concertgebouw for the final concert of the Holland Festival last night for the first time. While Hollanders braved the tropical weather in the corridors, Venezuelan beauties walked to the stage vivaciously on their stilettos. After Máxima and Willem-Alexander had also taken their seats on the balcony, Gustavo Dudamel came dancing down the stairs.

Dudamel barely waited for the silence and gave the horns the floor with the opening theme of Ehécatl, the first part of the pre-Columbian triptych Rituales Amerindos. Argentine composer Esteban Benzecry set to music the Aztec god of wind, the water god of the Mayans and the thunder god of the Incas. Almost cinematically, the violence of nature rippled through the lusty orchestra led by an apparently very controlled Dudamel.

The 'Bolívar' rolled its muscle with complex, pulsating rhythms that seemed to take over from Stravinsky's Sacre. Benzecry also referred to La Mer By Debussy and Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra. The composer was building on a tradition that came to an end around 1914 with the advent of modernism.

Remarkable programming, as after the break, it sounded Eine Alpensymphonie by Richard Strauss from 1915, a 'narrative' of a day's journey through the Alps from sunrise to sunset. At the top, Auf dem Gipfel, something exceptionally un-Straussian happens: a true Mahler moment. And that's even though Strauss and Mahler couldn't stand each other.

While the brass boldly blew out the Straus theme, the strings gave away a melancholic theme that seems to have run off from Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Music journalist Alex Ross wrote poetically about it:

The intermingling of Mahler and Strauss suggests the image of the two composers standing side by side at the peak of their art. Perhaps they are in the hills above Graz, gazing down at the splendour of nature while the world waits for them below.

But the world did not wait, the world raced on with the twentieth century. Europe lost its innocence and could no longer compose unburdened in the romantic tradition. But a hundred years later, in the New World, Benzecry seems to pick up the pen where Mahler, Debussy and Strauss left it.

Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra zinged through the scores of both Benzecry and Strauss with a sensuous spectacle. It was a delight to watch the first two violas at the balustrade building a party side by side or the double basses synchronously performing a languid dance.

It was delicious, it was lusty, it was joyful. Indeed, the panties and bras almost flew towards the stage. Especially with the encores, which the audience had been eagerly awaiting: Danzón no 2 by Arturo Márquez and, of course, the Mambo by Leonard Bernstein. It has to be said: this is how every orchestra in staid Europe should be allowed to play.

But.

The musicians emerging from El Sistema must be careful that their music does not become a 'colonial trick'. They have become world-famous for applying the American Dream to the classical tradition. But don't fall into the trap of the 'noble savage'? Of: 'look how these nicely bronzed Latin Americans are also nice trying to make a little classical music.' But maybe that cute idea is exactly why us sweaty pale-nosed Dutchmen are clamouring for more.