Musical America Awards Get Zingy

 

The 2013 Composer of the Year, David Lang, was the first honoree to be recognized, largely because love fails, his reinterpretation of the Tristan and Isolde story, was opening momentarily at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lang—cofounder of Bang on a Can, occupant next year of Carnegie Hall’s Composer’s Chair—noted that he was also directing the piece, for the first time, and had learned that “when you’re the director, you have to show up.”

 

In accepting the award, he recalled a time when, as a young composer, he would thumb through the Musical America Directory (“the Bible,” as he dubbed it), searching for outlets for his “weird” music. It was an honor, he said, to actually be in that same publication.

 

 

 Directory Features Editor Sedgwick Clark introduced the 2013 Educator of the Year as a “visionary, not only in his native Venezuela but throughout the world, as architect of the extraordinary music-education program El Sistema.” José Antonio Abreu himself prefers to think of the music program as more of a “social action project,” through which low-income children can develop a sense of pride and confidence and become not just musicians but, as Clark said, “pillars of society” in all walks of life. Speaking through an interpreter, Abreu expressed his gratitude and called the award an “immense honor.” He went on to say that El Sistema was now also working with children of “great mental deficiency” and in prisons. 

 

“The best measure of her achievement,” said Clark in describing 2013 Instrumentalist of the Year Wu Man, “is that her instrument, the pipa, is no longer an exotic curiosity.” Indeed, contemporary composers have written works with her in mind, and she regularly performs with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the Kronos Quartet, and as a soloist in Bang on a Can marathons. Wu Man recalled arriving Stateside from Beijing 22 years ago, with not a clue of what to expect. “But I did not give up on my dream. This country offers endless opportunities for musical creation,” she said, noting how much living and working in the U.S. had motivated her to grow as an artist. “I have found new territory for the pipa and for Chinese music.” She said her dream was to bring the instrument out of its traditional role and make it part of the wider musical world. Certainly she is well on her way to achieve that.

 

 Like Lang, Joyce DiDonato, 2013 Vocalist of the Year, recalled a time (1993) when, as an aspiring performer, she was thumbing through the Musical America Directory. “I found my school there,” she said, the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. The native Kansan, “America’s own Yankee Diva,” as Clark called her, is a vocal force to be reckoned with, bringing down the house in her Carnegie Hall recital titled “Drama Queens” (a collection of Baroque arias sung by royal characters), and preparing next door at the Met Opera for the title role of Maria Stuarda, which opens on New Year’s Eve.

“I am struck by how powerful we are in this room to change the world,” said the mezzo-soprano. “This is our golden age. Events like this give us the foundation to connect with one another, to go forth and make a difference.” She thanked Musical America and ended by saying, “Let’s get busy!”

 

 

Clark introduced the 2013 Musician of the Year, a relatively new father and a very proud one at that, by saying, “In eight short years, [he] has become more in demand than any conductor in the world. He is a household name in Los Angeles….He is mobbed in Berlin, Vienna, Milan, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, where he is one of his country’s best known and well-loved celebrities.” (He was mobbed at this event as well when he first arrived, with numerous cell phone cameras held aloft, some taking pictures of photographers taking pictures.) Clark noted, too, that the 31-year-old Gustavo Dudamel is often compared to Leonard Bernstein, with whom he shares “great charisma, tireless advocacy for music education, and expressive music-making.” At 18, Dudamel became music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. At 23 he won the Bamberg Symphony’s Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition (where, Dudamel remembered, he met and spent considerable time with MusicalAmerica.com’s late Berlin correspondent, Paul Moor). At 27 he became music director of the Gothenburg Symphony, and, at 29, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

 

“They were crazy to hire me,” quipped the conductor, to which Philharmonic Chief Executive Deborah Borda responded from the audience, “No we weren’t!” Dudamel remembered coming to the U.S. for the first time at age 13, as one of the older members of the SBYO. “And now we are still together,” he said, nodding to members of the trumpet ensemble. He praised the orchestra (which has since dropped the word “youth” from its title), noting that without one, “a conductor is nothing.”

 

He credited El Sistema with “giving me the opportunity to experience the power of music,” and, as such, identified himself as a mere “representative of all these children coming to life through El Sistema.”