By DANIEL WAKIN


LOS ANGELES - The Los Angeles Philharmonic shop offers mugs and T-shirts splashed with the armsoutstretched image of its new maestro, Gustavo Dudamel. In fact, his face has been all over town on buses, billboards and banners. Children mob him for autographs. (He signs them all.) Fireworks spelled out his name at a concert to introduce him to the city.

In a case of Hollywood-meets- Haydn, the star factory is busy at work on a rare subject: a 28-yearold Venezuelan conductor whose life revolves around scores, not scripts. With only a handful of concerts here behind him, Mr. Dudamel is more or less making this town swoon.

“He’s a genuine star,” said Martin Kaplan, a former movie executive and a professor at the University of Southern California. “He’s young. He has amazing hair. He has a great back story. He has a fantastic name. He’s the dude!”

Mr. Dudamel has just finished his first month as the orchestra’s music director after a five-year rise that brought him unusual attention in the classical music world. As his Hollywood introduction made clear, he has penetrated the consciousness of popular culture in the way Leonard Bernstein did a half century ago.

That introduction resulted partly from a carefully planned campaign, led by the orchestra’s president and chief executive officer, Deborah Borda, but as much from the media and a public fascinated with the man.

What’s most striking about this Hollywood tale is the contrast between the hype and Mr. Dudamel’s unmistakable gifts, those who know him say: his conducting talent and near-innocent but deeply compelling enthusiasm for making music.

Ms. Borda had been tracking Mr. Dudamel since he won a conducting competition in Bamberg, Germany, in 2004. Then he was a little-known product of El Sistema in Venezuela, a network of youth orchestras created in poor neighborhoods. Mr. Dudamel had risen to lead the system’s crown jewel, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, in Caracas.

As he took on more and more important guest-conducting jobs around the world, the Los Angeles Philharmonic decided in mid-2006 that he could be Esa-Pekka Salonen’s natural successor. The transition was announced all at once, in April 2007, eliminating the usual drawn-out music-director search.

Along the way the orchestra established a breathless minisite devoted to Mr. Dudamel on its Web site, laphil.com. It features a Bravo Gustavo computer game akin to Guitar Hero and an application that allows the movement of an iPhone to shape music coming out of it. A famous hot-dog stand, Pink’s, put up a banner welcoming him and created a Dudamel Dog (guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapeno peppers, tortilla chips).

Amid the overwhelmingly positive press and reviews were a few negative flecks, including one from a Philadelphia Inquirer critic who compared part of a Mahler First Symphony performance by Mr. Dudamel with “drunken clog dancing.”

“You have this kind of success, and there’s a certain amount of backlash you have to sustain,” Ms. Borda said.

In a recent interview, Mr. Dudamel called the attention amazing and wonderful but important mostly because of the recognition it brings the orchestra and classical music. But he laughed off the risk of an inflated ego.

“This is about values, and I think my values are really, really on earth,” he said. “My family was giving me values, and the system of Venezuela was giving me values, to know what I am.”


PHOTOGRAPHS BY IRIS SCHNEIDER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become Hollywood’s new star.