All eyes are on Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old wunderkind conductor slated to replace Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the fall of 2009. The only word to describe his ascendancy is the shopworn cliché meteoric, but it does hold—having won the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in 2004, Dudamel has become a player on the world’s musical stage in practically no time at all.

Following Dudamel’s first two Deutsche Grammophon releases—solid but unadventurous recordings of symphonies by Mahler and Beethoven—comes Fiesta, a record of Latin showpieces played by his own Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, an ensemble as good as any professional group, maybe even better than most. More than simply a themed release, Fiesta is an impressive array of widely varied work, carefully selected and lovingly performed.

Surveying a small portion of the Latin-music landscape, Dudamel mixes obvious choices like Ginastera and Revueltas with less familiar figures, such as Evencio Castellanos and Arturo Márquez. His riotous reading of the “Mambo” from Bernstein’s West Side Story has all the rough-hewn tumble one might expect from young Latin players. But it is in quieter moments, like Aldemaro Romero’s Fuga con Pajarillo, that this conductor and group are at their most vivid, nuanced and deeply musical. What might be a novelty in other hands here feels like an offering by a major artist at the onset of a long career.