Year in Music: North America 2006 Part I

By Leslie Kandell

Americans are becoming alert and sensitized as disasters strike and political issues polarize them. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they comforted themselves by singing their country’s songs. We were more sophisticated during last winter’s tsunami, producing benefit concerts (some with big classical standards, others with newly composed anthems) to supplement the government’s puny initial response to nature’s far-off calamity. These good-will activities served as a grim dress rehearsal for the deadly Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed most of New Orleans, Biloxi, and adjacent areas—here in America’s own backyard. The New Orleans Opera season was canceled and the Louisiana Philharmonic blown into exile as instruments were lost or soaked and theaters were engulfed.

But because music, as one critic put it, “still communicates as no other art form can,” the music world united to protect its members. Dress rehearsals morphed into benefit concerts: At Chicago Lyric Opera it was Carmen with Denyce Graves and Neil Shicoff, while at Washington National Opera Plácido Domingo conducted I Vespri Siciliani—with proceeds going to the American Red Cross. The Houston Symphony under Hans Graf presented a joint concert with the Dresden State Orchestra of Saxony (under Daniel Harding), which came to Houston to perform for Katrina’s victims and volunteers. (The Houston Symphony’s next concerts were canceled when Hurricane Rita struck.) The Nashville Symphony arranged for 60 of the Louisiana Philharmonic’s 68 members to play themselves a benefit concert (Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony) in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. And in New York, the Philharmonic joined the Louisiana in a benefit program of American music, hosted by Beverly Sills. Katrina victims were offered free tickets to “Comfort for the Soul,” at the Fort Worth Symphony’s Eastern European music festival. Orchestras in Cleveland, Santa Rosa, and Atlanta also contributed. The American Symphony Orchestra League’s Gulf Coast Orchestra Relief funds were matched by the American Federation of Musicians; orchestras around the country offered music jobs, some posted on blogs, some on craigslist and other Web sites.

Boosey & Hawkes, marketing 45 classical cell phone ring tones (that would encompass Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine—added incentive to turn off the phone at concerts) donated 20 percent of its October profits to Katrina aid. With university schedules on hold, conservatories—Eastman, Juilliard, Manhattan, New England, and San Francisco among them—absorbed Louisiana students. Next year, perhaps, we will begin to hear the music composed for memorials.

THE MUSE IS WAR

Lyrics like “From the Halls of Montezuma” went out of style after World War II, but war still inspires music, albeit a different kind. Kent Nagano, music director-designate of the Montreal Symphony, conducted the Berkeley Symphony in his own composition, Manzanar: An American Story, with narrators and theater bits, about the internment of his Japanese-American parents in California during World War II. Doctor Atomic, by John Adams, first heard at the San Francisco Opera, is about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the race to build the first atomic bomb. According to librettist Peter Sellars, who used government documents and personal letters to form the libretto, “Documents that were top secret and never meant to be seen are now set to music.” Critics were reserved, the Chicago Tribune lamenting “structural flaws and excessive length” while respecting its “multilayered beauty and brilliance."

Daniel Barenboim, whose tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony ends in 2006 after 17 years, has been increasingly politically and musically outspoken. At Columbia University, he declared it hypocritical to keep Wagner off the concert stage when recordings are available. He also drew criticism for refusing to answer questions from a uniformed Israeli radio reporter; he had contended that it showed insensitivity toward Palestinians. Houston Grand Opera introduced Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess, Mark Adamo’s re-creation of the ancient Greek anti-war play by Aristophanes. Its music is safe and appealing, its staging sexually explicit for these times, and its workshop-like production hinted at something more elaborate when it arrives at New York City Opera. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, new-age chants and orchestrated hymn-like tunes by Karl Jenkins, taking off from the 1450’s L’Homme Armé, did not cause a stir in 2000, but its recording is now firmly on Billboard charts. Nicholas Maw’s 2002 opera Sophie’s Choice, based on the wrenching Styron story of a concentration-camp atrocity, had its German premiere in Berlin.

A Shostakovich centennial concert series of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center included a lecture called “Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator.” Concerts displayed the contrast between the composer’s politically correct works and those that expressed his private anguish. Two generations after the Holocaust, Joel Sachs led the ensemble Continuum in “American Composers, Jewish Music, 5765 Years in a Contemporary Perspective,” with selections by Copland, Gideon, Davidovsky, Golijov, Schoenfield, and Sierra. Aaron Jay Kernis’s eclectically mournful Holocaust memorial, Lament and Prayer, first heard some years ago under Gerard Schwarz, was led by Lorin Maazel on the New York Philharmonic subscription series. In Verdi’s Nabucco, the figure of Saddam Hussein was co-opted for Nebuchadnezzar, updating the production for an audience that likely knows little of Italian history—let alone Babylonian—and in the director’s words, “making it about the politics of today.”

WOMEN AS CONDUCTORS

Women conductors are losing oxymoron status as they enter the mainstream. Marin Alsop, who received a McArthur grant, was appointed music director of the Baltimore Symphony, overcoming dissent among its musicians to become the first woman to head a major American orchestra. The Leonard Bernstein protégée made her Boston Symphony debut at Tanglewood in August, and won the Classical Brit Awards’ Female Artist of the Year. Anu Tali, founding conductor of Estonia’s Nordic Symphony, is small in stature but not in impact. At the New Jersey Symphony’s winter festival, “Northern Lights,” she led Gade, Grieg, and Sibelius with a spacious beat that didn’t dislodge the frame or lose the orchestra. The music director of the 30-year old Ensemble intercontemporain is to be Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, and the music director of the El Paso Symphony is Australian-born Sarah Ioannides. The New York Philharmonic promoted Xian Zhang, a 32-year old native of China, to associate conductor. The first woman to hold an official conductor title at the Philharmonic, she led summer concerts in the parks and also appeared at Colorado’s Vail Valley Music Festival.

FESTIVALS

Festival themes ranged from recent and wet-ink new (works by Gunther Schuller and Lee Hyla at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music), to bedrock standard (e.g., “Beethoven: Center of Gravity” at Music@Menlo), but most were a soft-edged grab bag of new, old, and mind-opening. Lincoln Center Festival was the most extravagant and eclectic, with (in part) an all-night performance of John Tavener’s Veil of the Temple (with pillow seating and a special stage); Shadowtime, a far-out meditation on the German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin; Respighi’s puppet opera La bella dormente nel bosco (“Sleeping Beauty in the Woods”) staged by Basil Twist; and My Life as a Fairy Tale—letters, diaries, and fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. Pieces or happenings) at other 2005 festivals included the Santa Fe premiere of Lalo Schifrin's Letters from Argentina, influenced by tango, Incan sounds, and jazz, and co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, La Jolla Music Society, and Chamber Music Northwest. Mostly Mozart focused on Mozart’s travels to Paris, Prague, and London, with the varied works interpreted by ensembles native to those cities. Bard Music Festival’s “Copland and His World” presented The Tender Land, and contextually, Regina, Blitzstein’s operatic adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Golijov’s Ainadamar, portraying the assassination of Federico García Lorca, improved in Santa Fe Opera’s new production directed by Peter Sellars, with sets handpainted by the surrealist/expressionist artist Gronk. Emblematic of Caramoor Festival’s growth is its opening concert of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with Music Director Peter Oundjian leading the resident Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Collegiate Chorale. Juilliard’s Focus Festival turned to Shostakovich’s centennial with “Breaking the Chains: the Soviet Avant-Garde, 1966-1991,” which is to say, music the government disliked.