On the second weekend of May, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel gave the New York Philharmonic a salsa shock. He gleefully brought the startled players together with the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, an uptown salsa and jazz band, for concerts at the city’s Lincoln Centre and United Palace.

New York’s classical music fans treated it as a cultural breakthrough; Dudamel is expected to transform the orchestra as a cultural institution when he returns in autumn as its music and artistic director.

A day later, he was back in Los Angeles to begin rehearsals at a Walt Disney Concert Hall that had been fantastically transformed by Frank Gehry for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s staging of Die Walküre.

Transformation, be it cultural, orchestral or personal, has marked Dudamel’s 17 years as music – and more recently, artistic – director of the LA Phil, a tenure that is now coming to an end with his three weeks of concerts at the Disney Hall to close the season on June 7, followed by a celebratory weekend at the Hollywood Bowl in late August.

But in his dressing room after a recent Walküre rehearsal, Dudamel says – as he has said before – that he does not think of this as a culmination, but merely the beginning of a new adventure. He is apartment shopping in New York. But he is keeping his house in Los Angeles.

“We are talking about projects,” he says. “Look, I’m coming back for two weeks in December,” when he will lead Beethoven programmes. He returns in the spring. The Bowl will always be a second home.

“I’m living here and I’m not living here,” he says. “The connection will always be here.”