2008
The Year in Music: North America
By Leslie Kandell
The Computer Age throws down a gauntlet. Met Opera screenings boffo. Radio on the rise. The Russian Ring coolly received. Mozart's complete works free online. Tanglewood fetes American septuagenarians. Young and younger blood set for NYC and LA podiums. Toscanini remembered 50 years after his death. The passing of many greats.
The oldest among us grew up listening to radio. Boomers came later and had television. Today's young adults will not know life without computers, which transform cultural and personal styles. An online ad beginning "Keyboards and mice are OK, but they're looking a little long in the tooth these days" separates age groups into sheep and goats, and so does "Add us to your RSS feed."
Composers, performers, and recording companies have Web sites (one called "podarama"); type a name into a "search engine"--everyone now knows what that is--and up pop colorful references and performance schedules beckoning the finger to "Click Here." Customized orchestra sites (the Boston and San Francisco symphonies are often in the forefront) offer podcasts, interviews, and archival material--as well as suggestions for concerts the computer determines you'd like to hear, plus ways to donate.
Indoor wall outlets no longer rule the cyberspace experience. Free wi-fi is part of Lincoln Center's extensive redevelopment in its outdoor spaces. In 2007, Petrushka was transmitted live on the Web by the New World Symphony, preceded by a behind-the-scenes blog of insights from its director, Michael Tilson Thomas. Philadelphia's electro-music conference and festival were streamed live, and the online link to them was public. The computer age has yielded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra's live and acoustic hybrid performances, whose descriptions are daunting to even read: "Hemispherical speakers radiate sound outwards from each localized instrument crafting expressive controller mappings...."
Broadstreetreview.com pinpoints the trend: "Americans are changing the way they interact with the arts, sometimes choosing active participation over attendance, diversity over mainstream arts. They are becoming curators of their own cultural experience, using the latest technology to participate remotely in events taking place anywhere in the world."
YouTube has burst into the music world with a resounding click. Click: Rachmaninoff's C-sharp minor Prelude (click here) is performed by two guys with a piano and planks. Offended? Click: Sid Caesar synchs a marital dispute to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Shocked? How about auditioning online to sing with the Boston Pops: Post a video to be viewed and voted on by random millions. Pops artistic staff and musicians winnow the choices, and voters click on smaller pools till a winner emerges. Sites like this can jumpstart careers the way Luciano Pavarotti said he benefited from "Live from the Met."
Markings and comments of the world's great composers--138 manuscripts from the Juilliard School's collection--are online with accompanying sound clips and a "Zoomify" feature that adjusts size and resolution.
NEW MEANING OF "SCREENING"
The last of the Metropolitan Opera's six simulcasts to movie theaters across the United States and Canada drew 48,000 viewers, more than double the first screening's audience. Half the Met’s $5 million investment was recouped, and, as surprised moviegoers latch on to this $18-a-ticket bonanza in their home towns, General Manager Peter Gelb is right to expect bigger returns and to schedule eight broadcasts extended to Europe; opening night's new Lucia in September was screened in Times Square and outdoors on Lincoln Center Plaza--free, obviously. San Francisco Opera simulcasts within its community, Washington National Opera does so to colleges and high schools. Using robotic cameras, the Philadelphia Orchestra transmitted a live Verizon Hall concert to parts of the United States and Europe, and the New York Philharmonic's all-Dvorák opening-night concert with Lorin Maazel and Yo-Yo Ma was shown on Lincoln Center Plaza. The Guardian reports that in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's 3-D space, users in the virtual concert hall watch a live video and audio stream of the event, after which they go to the bar for a live Q&A session, at which the conductor is represented by his avatar (animated character, a word that makes the thesaurus look dated).
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RADIO
Classical radio's expansion and health are getting an assist from the Internet. Time was when people turned on the radio to hear, say, a concert, but when they turned the radio off, that concert was finished for them forever. Now stations--prominently including Chicago's WFMT Radio Network--form power partnerships for putting music on the Web; live concerts are taped, shaped into two-hour segments and distributed to radio stations not only for their own scheduled broadcasts but also to stream 24/7 on their Web sites. Online listeners can tune in when they want--and as often as they want. Which is how WFMT's May-through-December Lyric Opera series could rack up an audience of a million, and how KDFC is bringing San Francisco Opera back to Bay Area radio after a 25-year hiatus.
On the East Coast, Robert Spano was the host of an American Music Festival series on WNYC (or WNYC.org, where it can be heard this minute). Composers mentioned as attracting today's youth or pointing to the future were Steve Mackey, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Zorn, Osvaldo Golijov, and Jennifer Higdon. American Music Center's Counterstream* Radio (*makes current dictionaries seem dated) is a 24-hour Internet showcase for influential music by United States composers where listeners can "Inspect the unexpected." It's syndicated on Myspace and other Web sites.
NEW MUSIC
Meet the Composer matched 17 composers to orchestras, giving them a mission, should they choose to accept it. Five of these matches are listed below: Composer: Major Commissioner
Jennifer Higdon Wheeling Symphony Orchestra
Melinda Wagner The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Christian Wolff Callithumpian Consort
Charles Wuorinen Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Yehudi Wyner The Cantata Singers
The string repertory expanded this year: Nicholas Maw's rich Glass-flavored sextet from his opera Sophie's Choice, was introduced at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in a concert dedicated to the memory of Mstislav Rostropovich.
André Previn conducted his high-spirited double concerto for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and double-bassist Roman Patkoló at the Boston Symphony, where John Harbison's Concerto for Double Bass was also first heard, with the intrepid Edwin Barker as soloist.
Tod Machover's VinylCello, led by Kent Nagano with Matt Haimovitz and the Berkeley Symphony, involves a "hyperbow," which allows manipulation of sound, plus a DJ, who improvises by mixing the mix. (The final version calls for electronically captured--and very likely mixed--audience interaction.)
FESTIVALS
Marginally Mozart was more the ticket at the Mostly Mozart festival, which featured sizeable works by Osvaldo Golijov, Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Frank Martin's Overture in Homage to Mozart.
"To Hell and Back" was a clever Times headline for Glimmerglass Opera's new productions of the Orpheus legend, including Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, the Gluck/Berlioz Orphée et Eurydice, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, and Philip Glass's Orphée.
With James Levine dynamically in place at Tanglewood, opera is creeping back there. Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera singers perform with the Boston Symphony and also the student orchestra, while student singers prepare opera roles under Big Apple coaches.
Gian Carlo Menotti having passed away, the Spoleto Festival proved how much he contributed in choosing Charleston and starting the festival, which now takes over the town, with the avant-garde offshoot Piccolo Spoleto. This year's operas dealt with events not being as expected. Faustus by Pascal Dusapin has a Beckett/Godot reference, as they talk all night and conclude that you can't trust anyone and that no particular reward or retribution is on the horizon. Gluck's one-act opera, L'Ile de Merlin, had a hip-hop setting and translation, and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny had a world turned upside down. Book of Longing by Philip Glass is based on song lyrics by Leonard Cohen. First heard in the Toronto and Charleston festivals, it was reviewed as a "noisy A/V set of Mahlerian proportions."
The summertime Lincoln Center Festival presented two cycles of the New York premiere of the so-called Russian Ring--the Kirov Opera of the Mariinsky Theatre's production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Valery Gergiev--to decidedly mixed reviews.
Ojai presented Cricket Music by Peter Eötvös, made from sounds of nature, Kosmos for two pianos, and the American premiere of the recent Sonata per Sei for two pianos, keyboard, and three percussionists, written to complement Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.
In the department of Chinese and not-so-Chinese, Central City Opera, 75, offered the premiere of Poet Li Bai by Guo Wenjing, with a libretto by Diana Liao and Xu Ying. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra performed Chinese Opera, which is neither Chinese, nor is it an opera. Each of its parts is dedicated to a specific theatrical director or producer, including Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Jacques Tati, and Patrice Chereau.
IN FOCUS
The San Francisco Symphony's two-week "Russian Firebrand, Russian Virtuoso: The Music of Prokofiev" went through Prokofiev's piano concertos (with Russian pianists), as well as music for orchestra, piano, ballet, and opera.
John Harbison, director of Tanglewood's contemporary music festival, struck musical gold by focusing on composers born around 1938, as he was. Consider this partial list: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, David Del Tredici, Olly Wilson, Stanley Silverman, Philip Glass, William Thomas McKinley, John Corigliano, Charles Wuorinen, Joan Tower, William Bolcom, Frederic Rzewski.
As composer-in-residence at the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Tower compiled "Notable Women," three concerts showing that for the most part, listeners cannot discern a composer’s sex but that performance history of works by women is up--according to last year's figures--to 2%.
Fifty years after Arturo Toscanini's death a substantial exhibition of the New York Public Library displayed images, texts, and recordings, intended to remind individuals that they can have free access to its holdings, in the spirit of either intent research or luxurious basking.
The 122-volume New Mozart Edition is available free online, along with critical commentaries.
MUSICAL CHAIRS
Maazel is still busy as music director of the New York Philharmonic, as are Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Christoph Eschenbach at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Samuel Wong at the Honolulu Symphony. But their successors will all slide into place in the next year or two. New York has chosen 40-year old Alan Gilbert, son of two Philharmonic violinists and its first native New Yorker, snaring Riccardo Muti for several weeks a year as a kind of unofficial supporting statesman. But Gilbert is more than 50 percent older than Gustavo Dudamel, 26, the Venezuelan hotshot who succeeds Salonen. Charles Dutoit, long the Philadelphia's conductor at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, was named chief conductor for a four-year term while the orchestra continues to look for a music director; Eschenbach will return for some significant dates. Wong's successor is Andreas Delfs, who is leaving the Milwaukee Symphony. Gerard Mortier, long of the Paris National Opera, will succeed Paul Kellogg as New York City Opera general manager and artistic director in 2009. (Expect edgy future productions.) Jaap van Zweden becomes music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2008, and Giancarlo Guerrero leaves the Eugene Symphony podium for Nashville’s, beginning with the 2009-10 season. Leonard Slatkin becomes music director of the Detroit Symphony in 2008.
GLORY AND HONOR
Sound Waters by Ornette Coleman won a Pulitzer Prize, though detractors did not consider it distinguished, classical, or large-scale enough to do so. Ingrid Fliter, the Gilmore Artist Award winner, made her Mostly Mozart Festival debut with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi. Daniel Barenboim received Japan's Praemium Imperiale Award for the international impact of his music-making, and John Zorn's William Schuman Award for his idiosyncratic Jewish jazz was celebrated in a marathon concert at Columbia University. Joshua Bell won the Avery Fisher Prize; Dawn Upshaw, a MacArthur Award for her collaborative work in new music; Arvo Pärt, Denmark's Sonning Music Prize; Steve Reich, Sweden's Polar Prize; George Tsontakis, the Charles Ives Living; Joyce Didonato, the Beverly Sills Artist Award; Alexander Ghindin, the Cleveland International piano competition. Among the ASCAP award-winners for adventurous programming (presented at the conference of ASOL, which changed its name, finally, to League of American Orchestras) were the Atlanta Symphony for the strongest commitment to new American music, the Minnesota Orchestra for Educational Programming, and the Cabrillo Music Festival orchestra.
LIVES OF THE GREAT INSTRUMENTS
To reduce its debt, the New Jersey Symphony is seeking a purchaser for 30 precious string instruments it bought in 2003 from pet book publisher and philanthropist Herbert Axelrod, who was later indicted for fraud. The orchestra hopes for a buyer who will lend the instruments back to the musicians who love them.
Orchestras and individual musicians may continue to travel with their bows, after winning an exemption during negotiations at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Most fine bows are made from pernambuco wood. Negotiators settled on adding the tree to the endangered species list but applying the listing only to objects other than bows.
MILESTONES AND MARKERS
The 400-year celebration of the founding of Jamestown, VA, featured Queen Elizabeth, President George W. Bush, and four world premieres by American composers, performed by the Richmond and Virginia Symphony Orchestras: John Corigliano's stately Jamestown Hymn, Jennifer Higdon's Spirit for brass and percussion, Adolphus Hailstork's tranquil Settlements (which ended with British fanfares), and John Duffy's agreeable Indian Spirits.
In Pennsylvania, the Bethlehem Bach Festival gave its 100th consecutive performance of the B-minor Mass, with a trimmed-down choir, rising performance level, and an expanded following.
Personal milestones: For the 85th birthday of Lukas Foss, the newly named Bard Festival of the Hamptons revived his 1944 cantata The Prairie, based on Sandburg's ode to the Midwest from Cornhuskers. Herbert Blomstedt, Kurt Masur, Colin Davis, Charles Rosen, and Leon Fleisher are 80; John Williams, 75; Philip Glass and David Del Tredici (who received the Aaron Copland Award) are 70; the Ojai Music Festival is 60, as is the Fort Worth Opera, which for the occasion commissioned Thomas Pasatieri's Frau Margot, imagining entanglements between Alban Berg’s widow and Leonard Bernstein, who hopes to complete Berg’s Lulu.
OBITUARIES
In the year 2007 and late 2006 the opera world noted particular losses: composer Gian Carlo Menotti; conductors Silvio Varviso and Siegfried Landau; company directors Colin Graham, Richard Bradshaw; sopranos Beverly Sills, Régine Crespin, Teresa Stich-Randall, Rose Bampton; tenors Luciano Pavarotti, Jerry Hadley, Ernst Haefliger. The wider music world recorded the loss of composers Carter Harman, Daniel Pinkham, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Tikhon Khrennikov; conductors Walter Hendl and Gordon Wright; pianist Leonid Hambro; cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich; flutist and Marlboro Festival founder Louis Moyse; oboist Ralph Gomberg; clarinetist David Weber; organist Alec Wyton; harpsichordist Albert Fuller; acoustician Russell Johnson; publicists Audrey Michaels and Margaret Carson; musical parodist Anna Russell.
Leslie Kandell contributes to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Record Guide, BBC Music Magazine, Berkshire Eagle, and other newspapers and magazines.
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