Gustavo Dudamel becoming the New York Philharmonic’s next conductor is a seismic event for the city’s cultural scene.

Gifted and energetic, Dudamel, 42, is the rare classical artist to break into the mainstream. He has made albums with the world’s top orchestras — and voiced an animated character in “Trolls World Tour.” He is the music director of the venerable Paris Opera — and inspired the wild-haired maestro protagonist of the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.” He can shuttle between a Mahler symphony and a “Star Wars” soundtrack, between a John Adams premiere and a Super Bowl halftime show.

So New York hiring Dudamel is a huge coup, promising full houses and the devotion of donors. But his being poached from the Los Angeles Philharmonic — for a five-year contract beginning with the 2026-27 season — was also entirely predictable.

Over the past six years, New York’s Philharmonic has been remodeling itself after Los Angeles’s, the most ambitious and progressive major orchestra of the 21st century. In 2017, New York stole away Los Angeles’s chief executive, Deborah Borda, who brought Dudamel to California when he was a 20-something wunderkind.

Borda gave New York’s programming an L.A.-style, contemporary-minded face-lift. She helped complete a long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall that made the space more intimate and congenial — and conspicuously similar to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Top executive, check. Programming, check. Hall, check. It was only a matter of time before Dudamel came on board — famous conductor, check — for what has swiftly become the Los Angeles Philharmonic East.

But if he is the final step in the Californiafication of Geffen Hall, he is also the fulfillment (or the attempt at one) of the New York Philharmonic’s slower burning, less openly acknowledged longing: to recapture the populist glamour it enjoyed under Leonard Bernstein, its music director from 1958 to 1969.

Since then, through the ups and downs of six successors, there has been a palpable sense that the Philharmonic essentially wants a repeat of the Bernstein of the 1960s, when he was not just one of America’s best known musicians, but also one of its best known figures, period.

Bernstein was a best-selling author who used his network-TV platform to render newly accessible the intricacies of Beethoven’s Fifth, sonata form and jazz, and who had composed, with “West Side Story,” a Broadway and Hollywood sensation. Friendly with the Kennedys, Lauren Bacall and Alice B. Toklas, he was as familiar from the society pages as from the arts section.

The mists of memory have erased some smudges. Critics sniped at his over-the-top emotiveness on the podium and at his long breaks between appearances with the orchestra. Not every piece he touched turned to gold.

But whatever actually happened, the Philharmonic quickly came to perceive his as the true glory days of the nation’s oldest orchestra, which was founded in 1842 and has included luminaries like Mahler and Toscanini among its directors. With Bernstein conducting, its opening concert at its new Lincoln Center home in 1962, broadcast on CBS, was the top-rated show in its time slot that night. So enthusiastic were audiences that even when Bernstein took a sabbatical in the 1964-65 season, sold-out performances persisted.

The decades since have hardly been unmitigated failures. Pierre Boulez — like Bernstein, a composer, though in a more recondite modernist mode — innovated with repertory mixtures and concert formats. Zubin Mehta had easy charisma; Kurt Masur, old-world gravitas; Lorin Maazel, analytic brilliance; Alan Gilbert, D.I.Y.-style modesty; Jaap van Zweden, driven precision.

But the post-Bernstein years — even Mehta’s 13-year run, the orchestra’s longest-ever directorship — come across in many tellings as a bit of an anticlimax. Not since Lenny, the story goes, has the fit been exactly right, either in terms of the music-making or the whole romanticized feeling of being in the middle of it all, hitched to an actual star.

Until now?

For all the warmth he inspires in musicians, Dudamel isn’t Bernstein. Talented and charming, he isn’t a public communicator like Bernstein was. His fame, befitting our era, is about his vigor and visual silhouette — that popcorn halo of curls — more than his ability to articulate the meaning of Mahler in words for a mass audience.

And we now live a very different time than the ’60s, for culture in general and classical music in particular. The recording industry is a shadow of the giant that created and promoted over 200 of Bernstein’s incendiary, soulful collaborations with the Philharmonic. The orchestra now barely makes PBS, let alone CBS. The globe-trotting tours during which Bernstein was greeted like a liberating hero have been sharply curtailed.

And Dudamel’s conducting can be uneven. His cycle of Schumann symphonies with the Philharmonic last season was spirited and unpretentious, naturally unfolding and fresh, more than deep or intense. Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, in 2020, was full of underlinings and italicizations, the work of a young man intent on making his presence known in a standard.

But even if he doesn’t lecture on Mahler in prime time, his Mahler can be excellent, as in his strong, sincere Ninth Symphony recording with Los Angeles, from 2012. (In May, the Ninth will fill his first performances with the New York Philharmonic since his hiring.) While Dudamel is not a composer like Bernstein, his commitment to education and his advocacy for new music — both pillars for Borda and her team in California — have been as unfaltering as his great predecessor’s. Both men managed to connect with audiences long schooled to think that only Europeans could have authority in the classics.

Dudamel is altogether as close a figure to Bernstein as any conductor in the world today, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to go with the capacity crowds at the Hollywood Bowl. Like Bernstein, he has achieved genuine civic stature — and like Bernstein, enough of one to occasionally enmesh him in controversy. Dudamel was sharply criticized for continuing to work in his native Venezuela as humanitarian crises mounted under its president, Nicolás Maduro; under pressure, he spoke out against the Venezuelan government in 2017.

There were other options New York could have pursued — acclaimed podium leaders even further from being household names. Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a few years younger than Dudamel, has had considerable success with the Philharmonic, as have more established hands like Manfred Honeck and Susanna Mälkki.

But there has long been, in this orchestra’s music director choices, a sense of a pendulum swinging, each maestro the greatest possible contrast to the one before — a key sign of an organization always looking for a singular savior, an answer to the problem of the moment, rather than making leadership decisions that emanate from sustained core values.

So it makes perfect sense that Dudamel, a superstar, would be the choice after van Zweden, a minor character even within the music industry. Van Zweden, in turn, was a martinet specialist in the standards who seemed appealing as an about-face from Gilbert, less electric in the core repertory. Gilbert’s familial closeness to the Philharmonic — both his parents were players — was seen as the antidote to Maazel’s remoteness. And so on, back to Bernstein. It’s a recipe for short-term satisfaction, and short tenures.

It’s also important to remember that Bernstein wasn’t merely a star; he was a visionary. When he came back to the Philharmonic from that mid-60s sabbatical, for example, he announced that his programs over the next two years would be dominated by 20th-century works — not short pieces, but substantial symphonies and concertos. That venture came from him, not from administrators whose marching orders he was executing.

So we’ll see whether Dudamel just offers the easy sheen of celebrity, or whether he’ll be connected organically to the orchestra, its growth and its city. He will certainly face challenges vastly more daunting than in Los Angeles, where that Philharmonic is the looming titan on the music scene. In New York, to the chagrin of conductor after conductor, you’re competing with the world’s greatest ensembles, constantly touring through Carnegie Hall with their best, most polished programs.

“A lot of us think,” Zubin Mehta once said, “why not send our worst enemy to the New York Philharmonic and finish him off, once and for all.”

Dudamel will immediately disrupt the city’s cultural center of gravity — including at Lincoln Center, where attention has long been weighted toward the mighty, publicity-grabbing Metropolitan Opera. For the Philharmonic, basking in robust attendance at its newly reopened hall as orchestras around the country are struggling, he offers the hope of further fending off a downturn. The question is whether he can fully break the New York music director curse for the first time since you-know-who.

When Bernstein announced he wouldn’t extend his contract past 1969, he said, “I shall always regard the Philharmonic as ‘my’ orchestra.” And in a way, it has been his ever since — still in thrall to what he represented and the feelings he inspired, still seeking to recapture all that.

The Philharmonic is finally getting what it’s wanted. Now we’ll see what the orchestra does with it.