The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

As Mozart madness gripped the globe, the inevitable backlash provoked pianist András Schiff to get a little testy with those who felt they had had enough of the party. In a year when an imposter was caught pretending to be the pope's official organist, a grand piano was found up a mountain, and European legislation looked like outlawing the humble pipe organ, a little madness went a long way.

RECORDING AND BROADCASTING
The troubled recording industry was struck another blow with the effective axing of Warner Classics in June. The parent company insisted it was business as usual but as the label had been swallowed up by the reissue division, Rhino, few were holding their breath for a list of new recording projects.

In a fevered round of musical chairs, Warner Classics’ Matthew Cosgrove moved to DG; EMI Classics president Richard Lyttelton was encouraged into "retirement" to be replaced by Costa Pilavachi, who had recently been eased out of the same chair at Decca; and in retailing, HMV chief Alan Giles quit after poor sales figures, saying he could not remember a worse three months during his career in retail.

The on-off EMI-Warner Music merger was briefly back in the news, but looked less likely when a European Court rained on the Sony-BMG parade by overturning the European Commission’s approval of the merger, forcing the companies to request clearance for the deal again.

EMI released a CD by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic of Holst’s Planets, complete with Colin Matthews's Pluto movement, neatly coinciding with the International Astronomical Union's declaration that Pluto was not a planet after all.

The French government upset the Apple cart by declaring the iPod makers would have to disclose their proprietary software, a move described by Apple as "state-sponsored piracy." In broadcasting, BBC Radio 3 celebrated its 60th anniversary and followed up wall-to-wall Beethoven and Bach projects by broadcasting all 15 hours of Wagner’s Ring on Easter Monday.

ORCHESTRAS
The orchestral story generating the most column inches followed a suggestion by a German critic that the honeymoon was definitely over for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The magic was gone, the white heat of the relationship had fizzled out: "While Rattle romps expressively on the podium, the Philharmonic musicians sometimes tend to play as inconsequentially as if they were a wife reaching to the fridge to get out a beer for her husband," suggested the anonymous piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

The criticism came as a surprise to the orchestra's capacity audiences and Rattle's colleagues, and among those stepping forward to support Rattle was Alfred Brendel. Rattle himself kept out of the fight, save to tell Der Spiegel: "It is the job of critics to criticize--my job is to direct this orchestra and to make great music."

The question was, who was the critic? He eventually emerged as one Axel Brüggemann, editor of a German Sunday broadsheet newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, in which he ran an anti-Rattle campaign under his own name. He 'fessed up that the allegations in the article concerning Rattle's imminent removal from his Berlin post were baseless, and finally fell on his sword, quitting the paper.

MusicalAmerica.com's Berlin correspondent Paul Moor commented acidly that the row had "shed far more heat than light, serving no practical purpose whatsoever--except for attracting unprecedented attention to its perpetrator."

Another orchestra getting attention was the lesser-known Beethoven Academie of Belgium, which put itself up for sale on eBay. "This excellent orchestra is doomed to die," read the description of goods. Orchestra’s manager Bart Michiels staged the stunt as a protest against the Flemish cultural minister's removal of the band from the list of core funded arts clients. If the sale treated the musicians as objects, he said, that was how they had been treated by the minister and the artistic commission.

In Britain the Association of British Orchestras and the Musicians Benevolent Fund joined forces to launch the Healthy Orchestra Charter, encouraging players and managements to square up to the challenges of a high-stress job where substance abuse was common.

A thwarted terrorist attack temporarily banned carry-on items from planes, causing an outcry among musicians who were invited to condemn priceless instruments to the tender mercies of the baggage handlers. Sir Colin Davis headed a list of high-profile protesters in the letters pages of the Times, and Last Night of the Proms conductor Mark Elder raised the issue in his speech, televised worldwide. The restrictions were finally lifted.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra announced that it would cut single and subscription ticket prices for its 2006-07 season to bring classical music to a wider audience.

Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo, who succeeded Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, said he would step down as music director after ten years and become its principal guest conductor.

Norway's musicians went on strike for ten days in June.

Everywhere programs were crammed with Mozart 250th anniversary offerings. When pundits showed signs of tiring, András Schiff hit out in the Guardian newspaper at what he termed "musical journalism at its most disagreeable."

OPERA
If English National Opera had finished 2005 in dramatic style, firing chief executive and artistic director Sean Doran and swiftly appointing two company insiders to run the show, the rollercoaster showed no signs of flattening out in 2006. Controversial chairman Martin Smith had been "hounded out" of his post, according to his successor Vernon Ellis, who
spoke darkly of the company's "poisonous enemies."

The two new bosses--Loretta Tomasi as chief executive and John Berry as artistic director--faced the press for the first time in March, stretching credulity by declaring that 2006-07 had gone largely unplanned before they arrived, U.S. Cavalry-style, to save the day. The company's 458 staff members were unimpressed, and wrote to the Arts Council expressing distress with the way the appointments were made.

It was not all bad news. The company picked up an Olivier Award for its Madam Butterfly, averted strike action, and appointed 32-year old Edward Gardner as music director from May 2007.

The Royal Opera claimed a world first in announcing the installation of a state-of-the-art high-definition production system at Covent Garden. The company launched its own CD label, and opened the door again to soprano Deborah Voigt, who was now 135 pounds more likely to fit into the little black dress that had caused her to lose Strauss's Ariadne in 2004.

Scottish Opera was back in business after a money-saving year of piano-accompanied Macbeth. But the company had lost nearly half its workforce, including the entire chorus, and was threatened by a strike of backstage staff. Its newsworthiness at least guaranteed interest at a press conference where attendance was so high that the company had to switch venues at the last minute.

Welsh National Opera named Metropolitan Opera director of music administration John Fisher as its new general director; Wexford Opera, which began construction of its new house, appointed Michael Hunt as new chief executive, succeeding Jerome Hynes, who died suddenly in the fall of 2005 at the age of 45 while making an announcement from the stage.

In Berlin the Deutsche Staatsoper was finally pledged funds for repairs. The Deutsche Oper started the year in robust style with Katharina Wagner's new production of Puccini's Il Trittico booed at its opening night curtain. It was the house debut for Richard Wagner's 27-year old great-granddaughter, who is likely to succeed her 86-year old father Wolfgang Wagner when he steps down as artistic director at Bayreuth. In April striking workers forced German opera houses and theaters to cancel performances or stage works without costumes and sets.

There was more booing at the Paris Opéra where audiences showed their dismay at the house's new Don Giovanni in January and again at a new production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride in June.

In Italy, the 95-year old Gian Carlo Menotti's Spoleto Festival brought a blush to the cheeks with a production of Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte by John Pascoe that featured bare-breasted women and a manly tenor prancing about in a cape that left little to the imagination.

At Bayreuth, Tankred Dorst's new staging of the Ring cycle was variously described as a dreary, ugly, impotent, dreadful disaster. "Bayreuth slips further toward mediocrity," concluded MusicalAmerica.com's reviewer Larry L. Lash.

British conductor Mark Wigglesworth was appointed the new music director of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Belgium's Royal Opera, from 2008. The Brussels-based Opera Europa elected La Monnaie general director Bernard Foccroulle as new president, succeeding Anthony Freud, now general director of the Houston Grand Opera. Belgium Opéra appointed a new general manager in Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera, superintendent of Bologna's Teatro Comunale. It may have seemed a good time to make the move from Italy, where opera was reported to be in crisis, the three major houses admitting they were on the verge of bankruptcy and blaming then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's radical cuts in arts spending.

La Scala named Daniel Barenboim principal guest conductor and the Maggio Musicale got a new superintendent in cardiologist and music critic Francesco Giambrone.

The Finnish Broadcasting Company reported that the Finnish National Opera was to lay off its entire staff, though the eventual outcome was less dramatic, the directors calling for the loss of 40 staffers out of 600 over three years and for an entire staff layoff for two months of 2007.

In Vienna a 52-year old actor, Robert Meyer, was named director of the troubled Volksoper.

An interview with Dame Kiri te Kanawa in the London Times revealed that she retired from the opera stage two years ago, but nobody had noticed.

PLACES
London South Bank Center artistic director Jude Kelly defined her vision for taking the city into the 2012 Olympic year with a culturally rich program, appointing as head of music and head of contemporary culture Marshall Marcus and Gillian Moore, former chief executive of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, respectively. The center's Royal Festival Hall is due to reopen after extensive refurbishment in June 2007.

The Wales Millennium Center became the only house in the United Kingdom to mount one of the Mariinsky Theatre's six internationally touring Ring cycles.

Vienna's historic Theater an der Wien was rededicated as an opera house after 40 years of musicals.

Ben Nevis was one of the less likely places to feature in a music story when volunteers performing a routine litter pick-up on top of Britain's highest mountain were reported to have discovered a grand piano, tucked among the boulders, candy wrappers, and beer cans.

In Germany 34-year old Massimiliano Muzzi was shown a red card for allegedly claiming to be the pope's official organist. In Bologna, researchers gained permission to disinter the remains of famed castrato Farinelli, expecting to find "anything from an empty hole to the full skeleton of Farinelli attired in the majestic white cloak of the knightly Spanish order of Calatrava."

Organists everywhere sighed with relief when the European Union relented on an unintended threat to pipe organs posed by a directive limiting the amount of "hazardous substances," such as lead, that could be used in conjunction with electricity.

WINNERS
Conductor Marin Alsop, who had been named Female Artist of the Year at the 2005 Classical Brits, won the BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award at the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. Fellow American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato won in the Singer category for her performance as Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House.

Other individual awards went to Mark Elder, for his work at Manchester's rejuvenated Hallé Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Opera House, and to violinist Anthony Marwood, who was recognized for performances of contemporary repertory, including the premiere of Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto at the 2005 Proms, and a tour of Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale in which he both acted and played. The Young Artists Award went to English National Opera's new music director Edward Gardner.

Plácido Domingo won the Lifetime Achievement award at the Classical Brits.

NEW MUSIC
While British composer Thomas Adès's list of commissions remained as healthy as ever, IMG Artists signed him up to look after his parallel careers as pianist and conductor.

The BBC Proms commissioned new works from Cleveland Orchestra composing fellow Julian Anderson, James Dillon, Dai Fujikura, Ian Wilson, and Colin Matthews, and presented the world premiere of a major new choral work by Orlando Gough, We Turned on the Light. Among more than 100 works never before heard at the Proms were three by John Adams, the composer conducting the BBC Symphony.

Proms director Nicholas Kenyon, normally adroit at sidestepping criticism of his programming, was wrong-footed when it was noted that there was no work, ancient or modern, by female composers in the entire season. He managed to find one small piece by Thea Musgrave tucked away in a corner, but this did little to placate the chorus of disapproval.

Another Proms commission was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's A Little Birthday Music, written in honor of Queen Elizabeth's 80th birthday and performed in her presence. It was, wrote Richard Fairman in the Financial Times, "Twenty minutes in search of a tune. (It didn't find one.)"

Keith Clarke is editor of Classical Music magazine and a regular contributor to MusicalAmerica.com.