The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

Ring the changes, grind the gears, and let the record show that this was a year of turnover in high places. Up in the music world's penthouse, Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera's theatrically inclined successor as general manager to Joseph Volpe, opened his first season with a new look for Madama Butterfly, directed by Anthony Minghella, a British filmmaker who had never worked in opera before mounting this affecting, brilliantly designed production for the English National Opera last year. Minghella's version features Bunraku-style puppets--Cio-Cio San's son among them--and Asian costume-makers. Opening night was James Levine's first Met Butterfly, and it had a live telecast in Times Square and on Lincoln Center's plaza, free.

Elsewhere, Daniel Barenboim added to his Berlin commitments a prominent role at La Scala--not necessarily to the pleasure of Berliners. The Israeli conductor's former haunt, the Chicago Symphony, engineered the coup of the year, signing up Bernard Haitink as principal conductor and Pierre Boulez as conductor emeritus while the orchestra decides on a new music director. Gianna Rolandi succeeded the late Richard Pearlman as director of Chicago's Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, and the new general director of Houston Grand Opera is Anthony Freud. James Conlon made his debut as Los Angeles Opera music director, while his predecessor, Kent Nagano, now of the Montreal Symphony, is also at the Bavarian State Opera stressing Slavic repertory. Andrew Litton resigned from the Dallas Symphony, Alexander Mickelthwate succeeds Andrey Boreyko at the Winnipeg Symphony, whose new artistic director is Ernest Fleischmann, and Mario Venzago is Indianapolis Symphony's music director. Roberto Diaz succeeded Gary Graffman as president of the Curtis Institute.

OUCH!
Conductors are notably long-lived compared to other musicians, but those over 60 are no way exempt from the ills the flesh is heir to: Kurt Masur's kidney transplant in 2001 began a cycle that continued with James Levine's rotator cuff surgery after an onstage fall in Boston that sidelined him all spring. He recovered in time for Tanglewood, leading Elliott Carter's short opera What's Next? and such shoulder-busters as Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Strauss's Elektra to wild applause if low attendance. He was on hand to open the Met's unusual season (though Beverly Sills, who fractured her knee in a fall last year, resigned as Met chairman). Seiji Ozawa's shingles affected his eyesight, and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos's ear problem stalled his air travel; Sir Andrew Davis's leg surgery ruled out touring with Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Leonard Slatkin filled in for Davis, as he had already for the ailing Richard Hickox with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Slatkin became music adviser to the Nashville Symphony after the death of Kenneth Schermerhorn and conducted its inaugural concert in the new Symphony Center. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 77, trying to conduct seven Salzburg Festival performances of a new Marriage of Figaro, six of La Clemenza di Tito, and two Vienna Philharmonic concerts of Mozart's last three symphonies, dropped out of half the Titos, pleading exhaustion. At least his survival instinct is working.

ROOMS AT THE TOP
If you build it, will they come? Or maybe if the architect is Cesar Pelli? Several cities hope that this season's attendance at their new halls will reveal the answer. The 2000-seat Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall and 500-seat Samueli Theater (expanding California's Orange County Performing Arts Center) were designed by Pelli as a limestone, steel, and lgass home for the Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific, as well as other groups. The concert hall opened with commissioned premieres: García Lorca song settings by William Bolcom (sung by Plácido Domingo) and The Passion of Ramakrishna by Philip Glass. It also hosted a residency of the Kirov Opera, Orchestra, and Ballet, with Domingo as the Siegmund in their Ring cycle.

Toronto's long-awaited new opera house, the Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Toronto architect Jack Diamond, opened ambitiously with Canada's first complete Ring cycle, which had four different directors, one of whom--Michael Levine--designed the Met's new Butterfly. Glass, cherry wood, and metal enclose a 2000-seat horseshoe-shaped hall with bright acoustics--modern yet elegant and comfortable.

The Schermerhorn Symphony Center, an ersatz Greek Revival hall designed by David M. Schwarz and named for the late conductor of the Nashville Symphony, fits into the city's eclectic look (or not, as reviewed in The New York Times), as does canny programming of classical and pops to balance Nashville's famed country music. The emblematic opening-night premiere was a commissioned triple concerto for banjo, bass, and tabla by Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Zakir Hussain.

Miami now has the $461 million two-house Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. ($4.2 million of that went into art, some of which is on curtains and veils, some as mosaics.) Architecturally conceived by Pelli as a cruise ship (delighting the Carnival Corporation, which contributed), it has acoustics by Russell Johnson--tested by the Cleveland Orchestra, which plans an annual three-week residency for the next ten years. The Center's founding residents are Florida Grand Opera, Miami City Ballet, Concert Association of Florida, and the New World Symphony from Miami Beach across the bay--which for the opening co-commissioned Turn the Key, a festival fanfare by Stephen Mackey.

Thomas Hampson sang a recital to inaugurate Gilder Lehrman Hall at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, a steeply raked 250-seat underground auditorium in a glass pavilion designed by Renzo Piano. Some of the German lieder manuscripts are in the Morgan's collection of "Works on Paper."

CENTENNIALS AND MORE
In this 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, Mozartiana was widely displayed, performed, revealed, and deduced. The Mostly Mozart Festival began its 40th year with Mozart's First Symphony, composed when he was 8, and also performed his final symphony, his "Coronation" Mass, and an opera rarity, Zaide. Emanuel Ax, Garrick Ohlsson, and Christian Zacharias were among the soloists, and Gidon Kremer's Kremerata Baltica played chamber works, as well as the complete violin concertos. Mozart's music was seen while being heard: Mark Morris again proved a wondrous apologist with Mozart Dances.

To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School arranged a free singalong of Mozart's Requiem in Carnegie Hall, co-sponsored by the New York Mets. Those in the full house who sang were astonishingly attentive, and in the orchestra one could spot Carnegie Hall's Executive and Artistic Director Clive Gillinson among the cellists and Juilliard's President Joseph Polisi in the bassoon section.

Though Mozart composed nearly twice as many symphonies as concertos, more concertos were performed compared to the repeated half-dozen symphonies. As part of Great Performers' "Voices and Visionaries" Festival at Lincoln Center, András Schiff and his Capella Andrea Barca Chamber Orchestra performed three piano concerto-symphony programs.

During Mozart's birthday events, January 23-27, radio and satellite stations broadcast talks on Mozart and live reports from Salzburg, where Robert Wilson had created an installation in Mozart’s birthplace.

This year was also Shostakovich's centennial, and it looks as if the wider audience is finally ready for his militaristic symphonic works, daring operas, neglected film scores, and the small musical forms of his private anguish. With his noted champions Mravinsky and Kondrashin now gone, and Rostropovich, 79, and Rozhdestvensky, 75, performing less often, Gergiev appears a worthy successor. He led all 15 symphonies (often two on a program) in London, St. Petersburg, and New York, with similar concerts by the Philharmonics of Vienna and Rotterdam. The Shostakovich Centennial Festival at the University of Michigan spans two seasons, with the tireless Gergiev and Kirov Orchestra in 11 of the symphonies. In honor of both Mozart and Shostakovich, Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon, presented a duo-piano recital of both composers' music. The cycle of 15 string quartets was traversed by the Emerson and Alexander Quartets in New York. His songs were performed by young singers from the Mariinsky Theater in a Carnegie Hall festival.

Rutgers University hosted a three-day weekend of concerts and talks, featuring the composer's noted biographer Laurel E. Fay; no fewer than nine Shostakovich snippets can be obtained as a cell phone ring tone, courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes.

Part of the Juilliard School's centennial celebration was a "Live From Lincoln Center" PBS special, with Juilliard alumni Emanuel Ax, Renée Fleming, Itzhak Perlman, and the resident Juilliard String Quartet. Bruce Kovner, Juilliard's billionaire board chairman, surprised other hopeful institutions by donating a trove of 139 manuscripts, first editions, and other
blue-ribbon works to Juilliard, which is scurrying to provide proper space and staff. Among Juilliard's centennial commissions and premieres was Lowell Liebermann's opera Miss Lonelyhearts, based on the novella by Nathaniel West, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy. More memorable was Christopher Rouse's Friandises, choreographed and performed at Juilliard (and called Watershed) as well as in a different choreography at New York City Ballet. Juilliard's annual Focus! Festival, designed by the dauntless Joel Sachs, introduced centennial commissions by Davidovsky, Paul Schoenfield, and Roberto Sierra, among others. Anne Manson, whose credits now include being the first woman to conduct at the Salzburg Festival, led Schoenfield's Gospel Oratorio No. 2, inspired by a radio sermon. Joan Tower's new Copperwave, for brass quintet (heard at Juilliard and the Aspen Music Festival), evokes the heft and idiom of brass instruments. Ara Guzelimian, for eight years artistic adviser to Carnegie Hall, will move to the position of dean of the Juilliard School.

MUSIC FROM THIS PAST YEAR
Charles Wuorinen is finding his larger audience, and his sparkling, percussive short piece Flying to Kahani, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke's with Peter Serkin, a straight-laced brainy champion of new and old. John Harbison's song settings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, a New York Philharmonic commission that barely escaped submersion in its own appropriateness, was introduced with Dawn Upshaw. The Philadelphia Orchestra introduced Jennifer Higdon's "colorful, propulsive and unabashedly accessible" percussion concerto with Colin Currie, whose performance was called "extraordinary." Azul, Osvaldo Golijov's half-appealing, half-lamenting cello concerto (whose title means "blue"), was played at Tanglewood by Yo-Yo Ma with the Boston Symphony; the fastest, most furious piece at Tanglewood's annual new music festival was Andrew Norman's Gran Turismo for "eight virtuoso violins," inspired by a video game with automobiles.

CYCLES, DISCOVERIES, CLOSER LOOKS
Garrick Ohlsson's traversal of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas posed a challenge in program contrast as well as technical nuance and stamina. Listeners who made it through all eight concerts stumbled out dazzled and drained.

A rediscovered Beethoven string-version manuscript of Grosse Fuge, complete with furious paper-puncturing erasures, was auctioned by Sotheby's for $1.95 million. "Franz Liszt and his World" was the subject of Bard's Summerscape; in addition to the expected Liszt works, there was Bard-commissioned choreography of Années de Pèlerinage and a rare performance of Schumann's Genoveva, an opera (beautiful but dumb) that Liszt admired.

At 46, Golijov was apparently ready for a month-long survey, which took place at Lincoln Center's Great Performers with the New York premiere of an improved version of his short opera Ainadamar, his previously electrifying La Pasión Según San Marcos (which had inexplicably lost its powergiving supertitles), Jewish-centered works, and late-night concerts with klezmer versions of tangos.

Just before the death of György Ligeti, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented a three-concert tribute with lighting. Ligeti's accuracy was compared to that of baseball's Ted Williams. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who performed Ligeti's études (also on a stunning recording) called him "extremely curious, open-minded, and in contact with the world as it is."

LIVES OF THE GREAT INSTRUMENTS
The four-manual 125-rank Fred J. Cooper Memorial organ in Philadelphia's Kimmel Center had an innovative coming-out party: Le tout Philadelphia was invited for a free five-hour, six-organist marathon, where listeners could change seats at will to check the view--or perhaps the acoustics. The University of Rochester has a new Italian Baroque organ, very ornate, the only one of its kind in the United States. A concert series at New York's Central Synagogue has a mandate to feature the two-console Gabe M. Wiener memorial organ by Casavant Frères. One recital about Christianized Jewish composers featured Deborah Voigt. This year brought another note change in John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP (as slow as possible), as two organ pipes were shifted. (Sandbags will hold down the keys till the next change in 2008; the piece, progressing in Germany, should be ending around 2640.)

Wu Man, who made her breakthrough appearance with Yo-Yo Ma's peripatetic Silk Road Project, has helped establish the pipa as an East-West, East-Near-East plus old-new crossover instrument.

The Stradivarius violin known as the "Lady Tennant," built when Bach was 14, was auctioned at Christie's last year for a record $2.03 million. This year, Christie's auctioned the "Hammer" Strad (in five minutes) for $3,544,000. One hopes the price is not an inflation rate indicator.

The wrenching legal throes of the Audubon String Quartet wind down: Two members about to lose their instruments to bankruptcy, after losing a lawsuit to a fired violinist member, have been bailed out by a wealthy musician who bought them and is lending them back to their former owners.

GLORY AND HONOR
Yehudi Wyner won the Pulitzer Prize for his piano concerto entitled Chiavi in Mano. The Gilmore winner was Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter; the Grawemeyer, György Kurtág for ...concertante.... The $1 million Dan David Prize went to Yo-Yo Ma for his Silk Road Project; Carlisle Floyd received the National Medal of the Arts; Zubin Mehta received a Kennedy Center Honor; Augustin Hadelich, 22, won the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Baritone Nathan Gunn, who sang the lead role in Tobias Picker's new American Tragedy at the Met, received the first Beverly Sills Award; tenor Lawrence Brownlee earned both the Richard Tucker and Marian Anderson awards; Japan's Premium Imperiale, which went to Martha Argerich last year, was won by Steve Reich.

THAT SPECIAL BIRTHDAY
Milton Babbitt is 90; at Juilliard, where he received an honorary degree, an all-Babbitt concert introduced his cello piece More Melismata. At Tanglewood James Levine invited Babbitt to play the devil in Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (where the soldier was Elliott Carter, 98, and John Harbison narrated). Hans Werner Henze is 80; his Sebastian im Traum, a 2004 co-commission with European orchestras that refers to lines by the Salzburger Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, was given its U.S. premiere by the New York Philharmonic. Befitting the year's Mozart observances, the piece suggests "nocturnal images of the countryside around Salzburg, visions of childhood and of the morgue, with decay, autumnal reveries, angels and shadows." Alfred Brendel, 75, also turned to Mozart's music, which has rarely, said a reviewer, "landed in a lap of such luxury." For David Zinman's 70th, the Aspen Music Festival commissioned Kevin Puts's Vision, a cello concerto whose premiere featured the busy Yo-Yo Ma. Also 70 are Mirella Freni (whose 40th anniversary at the Met was celebrated there) and Steve Reich, whose new You Are, plus the benchmark Clapping Music to the politically enduring The Cave, were part of a six-concert joint tribute by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Eliot Feld's staircase dance, Sir Isaac's Apples, is set to Reich's Drumming, also heard on Columbia University's series, "Composer Portraits."

Leslie Kandell contributes to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Record Guide, BBC Music Magazine, The Berkshire Eagle, and other newspapers and magazines.

OBITUARIES
In 2006, the music world recorded the loss of composers Malcolm Arnold, György Ligeti, Donald Martino; conductors Sarah Caldwell, Skitch Henderson, Armin Jordan, Richard Kapp, Alfredo Silipigni, Milton Katims; sopranos Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Anna Moffo, Astrid Varnay, Marianna Christos; mezzo-sopranos Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Muriel Costa-Greenspon; tenors James King, Leopold Simoneau; bass-baritone Thomas Stewart; pianists Gyorgy Sandor, Edward Aldwell, Constance Keene, Milton Kaye, Clive Lythgoe; timpanist Roland L. Kohloff; music writers Hans Fantel, Leighton Kerner; collector Ira F. Brilliant, who owned a lock of Beethoven’s hair.