The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

After much wailing, swearing, and gnashing of teeth, the music world buckled down to deal with reduced cash flow to the arts, a fallout from the plummeting economy. Organizations reluctantly took varied approaches to achieve what Opera Company of New York gracefully called a “season carefully calibrated to balance artistic integrity with fiscal recovery.”

Ending a quarter-century of Carnegie Hall concerts, this group began presenting recitals in smaller Manhattan locales. Other orchestras postponed European tours, assigned unpaid furloughs, won agreements on musicians’ pay cuts, delayed filling vacant chairs, reduced executive staff compensation or arranged outright contributions, asked members to contribute more to health insurance premiums or—several of the above. Among them were symphony orchestras in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Minnesota, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and opera companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Planning future programs, the Boston Symphony said it “will have to negotiate more vigorously.” To free up cash, the Metropolitan Opera mortgaged the two giant Chagall murals in its lobby—an unsettling step in a 50th-year celebration of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. (Losing Chagalls is an incentive for the Met not to default.)

To the rescue: At “Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative” Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser and his staff provide counsel to the nation’s non-profit performing-arts organizations. Click on the above title and choose from categories of assistance. The conference of the newly renamed League of American Orchestras focused on “core issues of the new economic reality,” starting with lower hotel and registration fees. Its Web site also features a new section on economic solutions. Meet the Composer divided $300,000 in grants—double last year’s amount—among composers and presenters of new music, in what it calls a “new-music stimulus package.” Seattle Opera projected a new high of $9.5 million in advantages for the Pacific Northwest Region from its Ring cycles.

NEW LEADERS
Lorin Maazel concluded his tenure at the New York Philharmonic (and now directs his own festival, the Castleton), to be succeeded as music director by Alan Gilbert. Esa-Pekka Salonen left the Los Angeles Philharmonic (to have time to compose) and is succeeded by the fiery Gustavo Dudamel. Things got rocky at New York City Opera when the muchheralded Gerard Mortier decided not to assume the directorship, but George Steel, late of Columbia University and—ever so briefly—Dallas Opera, stepped into the role of the tottering company’s general manager and artistic director. (Dallas and Columbia both promoted successors from inside.) Charles Wadsworth, Spoleto Festival’s longtime artistic director for chamber music, is succeeded by Geoff Nuttall, violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. This is the inaugural season of Nicola Luisotti as music director of San Francisco Opera. The Indianapolis Symphony did not renew the contract of Mario Venzago, and is seeking a music director.

NEW SPACES
For its 50th anniversary, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is being treated to a major facelift, still in process. A three-story glass version of its Alice Tully Hall hovers over Broadway (one entrance mercifully near the subway) housing an airy lobby, a pleasant café with long hours, and a warmlooking, rosy-brown hall. The modern acoustic, unsullied by noise from the subway or heating system, is its message for the future: clear and serviceable. Its organ is to be reassembled while the hall is closed for the summer. Using Tully’s design team, the Juilliard School unveiled 96,000 feet of new or renovated space, including a black-box theater, a dance rehearsal studio, and an orchestra rehearsal hall, all named after generous donors.

ORCHESTRAS HEAD EAST
The New York Philharmonic’s pioneering debut in North Korea last year served as an overture to the 2009-10 season’s Asian tours. In October, the Philharmonic’s first Asian Horizons tour with its new music director Alan Gilbert (whose mother is Japanese and a first violinist in the orchestra), performed in Tokyo, Seoul, Hanoi, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. Observing the 30th anniversary of Sino-American diplomatic relations, the National Symphony, led by Ivan Fischer, visited China in a tour that included performances, master classes and daily screening for the H1N1 virus.

To increase awareness of chamber music, top figures in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center undertook a residency in Seoul and another in Taipei, concertizing and coaching with local performers and teachers.

Carnegie Hall and Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center joined to reverse the eastward direction, bringing “Ancient Paths, Modern Voices,” which celebrated Chinese culture, to their coastal cities. Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Wu Man, and Cho-Liang Lin headed a roster of highly varied events extended to neighborhood concerts.

MEETING OF THE MEDIA
Technology and imagery are intersecting—not to say colliding—with formal concert traditions. The search engine Google was behind the madcap YouTube Symphony Orchestra, assembled through informal audition tapes made by hopefuls—some professional, some not—and uploaded onto YouTube.com for worldwide viewing and voting. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra site had two million hits and 3000 applicants from 70 countries. Winners were flown to New York for a thrilling whirlwind of meetings and rehearsals. Michael Tilson Thomas, who introduced and conducted a rousing finale at Carnegie Hall, spoke of “elements of classical music, summit conference, and speed dating.” During the program of Brahms, Villa-Lobos, and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (truly wild), the performers’ audition videos snaked across the ceiling.

Expanded audio-visual connections are not limited to the YouTube concept. “Certain repertoire invites theatrical treatment,” said Atlanta Symphony’s Robert Spano, explaining his concert’s projected images for Haydn’s The Creation, which were designed with reflective materials to “invoke natural and conceptual representations of the beginning of time.”

At the Met, the impact of Canadian director Robert Lepage’s tech-driven Damnation of Faust—Berlioz’s “dramatic legend,” which hadn’t been staged there for a century—is sure to inform and illuminate future Met productions. Resembling a cross-section of a 24-room house, its set inventively used the stage’s height, and the audience as fourth wall saw all sections—which morphed from book-lined library carrels to crowded tavern rooms and private balconies, while its partitions were used as vertical walkways for soldiers, trees for beetles to climb, and Christs on crucifixes that revolved out of sight when Mephisto appeared.

The mix was pursued in “New, Wired and Green,” a concert of the American Composers Orchestra Underground. “Machines give you the power to control the universe,” said the program notes to Margaret Brouwer’s 20-minute Breakdown. A “sample-based hybrid opera in one act,” the piece is a surreal film collage of found footage, made in collaboration with video/sound artist Kasumi and focusing on World War II, preand post. Manipulated mini-clips depicted the kind of panic in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

Christopher O’Riley’s three-concert series alternated piano music (some of which he arranged) of Shostakovich and Radiohead, Debussy and Nick Drake, Schumann and Elliott Smith in a canny blend that after a while blurred distinctions between each pair. He overreached, however, by adding pairs of found-footage film images that drifted across stage-rear screens as he played. In Massachusetts and upstate New York, the Aston Magna early-music series presented “Music in the Time of Goya,” in what amounted to a small-form slide show accompanying a timeline of Goya’s paintings.

Technology begat the do-it-yourself fixer-upper: On the Boston Symphony’s Web site, “Classical Companion,” visitors to the site mix orchestral snippets by Ives with “electronic versions of Ives’s melodies, harmonies, and drumbeats, to create their own Ives-inspired ‘sound collage.’ ” (Fair’s fair, and Ives’s shade can choose to like it or lump it.) Another fixerupper, offered by Underworld Productions Opera Ensemble, was Così fan tutte, in which several endings were presented, and the audience voted its choice by texting on cell phones at intermission.

HONORS AND WINDFALLS
Steve Reich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his Double Sextet, a Carnegie Hall commission introduced by eighth blackbird, which on its recording played against itself. “The Lost Art of Letter Writing,” a violin concerto by Australian composer Brett Dean, earned the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award. Lisa Bielawa, Composer in Residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, won the venerable Rome Prize. Alfred Brendel won the Praemium Imperiale.

Some ASCAP Adventurous Programming Awards went to the Cabrillo Festival (strongest commitment to new American Music), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (innovative programming)
and the St. Louis Symphony (programming contemporary music). Because $55 million is an eye-catching amount, it is respectfully noted that the School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin has been named for Dr. Ernest and Sarah Butler, following the largest single gift for a music school at a public university.

FESTIVALS
Festivals are no longer a time “to let the ears lie back in an easy chair,” as Ives complained. Ravinia, honoring the bicentenary of Illinois’ favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, commissioned a multi-media tribute from Ramsey Lewis. Proclamation of Hope: A Symphonic Poem, depicts events in Lincoln’s life and makes symbolic connections with President Obama. Christoph Eschenbach led the Chicago premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto 4-3 for String Trio and Orchestra (previously introduced by the Baltimore Symphony), which draws on several styles of American music.

Threaded through Ravinia and other festivals were Mendelssohn bicentennial tributes, enhanced by the introduction of recently discovered vocal and chamber works, plus drawings and letters unearthed in library basements and private collections. Stephen Somary’s foundations in New York and Stuttgart are part of “The Mendelssohn Project.” Events at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage were called “Mendelssohn: Lost Treasures and the Wagner Suppression.” The composer was also part of Bard’s two weekends of “Wagner and his World.”

Mostly Mozart apparently benched Amadeus this year, ceding the spotlight to John Adams’s new opera A Flowering Tree, inspired by The Magic Flute and based on a folk tale from India. Pierre-Laurent Aimard as pianist and conductor spiked Mozart with Ligeti and Stockhausen, and Mark Morris brought choreographed chamber works by Beethoven and Ives to Lincoln Center, fresh from their introduction at—not Jacob’s Pillow, but Tanglewood, with Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax as backup duo. (Mozart’s moment came when the International Mozarteum Foundation confirmed that a concerto movement and fragmentary prelude were definitely by the young—age 7 or 8—Mozart.)

Poems of Louis Zukofsky is a new song cycle by the centenarian Elliott Carter, who acknowledged the cheering audience at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Tanglewood also mounted a concert version of Act III of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, led by James Levine, who was back between illnesses. Boston Symphony members’ summer students accompanied Metropolitan Opera stars James Morris and Johan Botha. The Meistersinger finale was also the largest work performed at Bard College’s “Wagner’s World,” which included talks on the origins and effects of Wagner’s anti-Semitism.

EDUCATION
The U.S. Department of Education announced the dispiriting results of its 2008 Arts Report Card, detailing how much eighth-grade students are able to do in music and the visual arts: 57 percent of eighth-graders attended schools where music instruction was offered at least three or four times a week, and 8 percent attended schools with none. Thirtyfour percent of eighth-graders reported participating in one or more musical activities in school, and 5 percent reported playing in an orchestra in school. The Secretary of Education and senior officials at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Assessment Governing Board called for increased access to arts learning and significantly improved data collection on the status of arts education.

MILESTONES
André Previn, 80, Musical America’s 1999 Musician of the Year, was celebrated at Carnegie Hall and Tanglewood for his careers as a jazz and classical pianist, conductor, and composer. George Crumb is also 80. Van Cliburn and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos are 75. James Galway, 70, was honored by Derek Bermel’s new Swing Song, for a large group of child flutists (with discreet adult support). Stanley Drucker, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, retired from the orchestra after 62 years, seven months, and one week, a Guinness world record. He played Copland’s Clarinet Concerto in several area farewell concerts.

OBITUARIES
In the year 2009, the music world recorded the loss of composers George Perle, Nicholas Maw, Lukas Foss, Maurice Jarre, Leon Kirchner; conductors Thomas Dunn, Edward Downes, Richard Hickox, Erich Kunzel; soprano Hildegard Behrens; mezzo-soprano Betty Allen; bass Ezio Flagello; cellist Valentin Berlinsky; pianists Alicia de Larrocha, Joseph Bloch, Arthur Ferrante; musicologist Michael Steinberg; impresario Schuyler Chapin; record producers Wilma Cozart Fine and Israel Horowitz; choreographer Merce Cunningham; new-music patron Betty Freeman. Patelson’s, New York City’s beloved music store, closed its doors.

Leslie Kandell has contributed to MusicalAmerica.com, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Record Guide, BBC Music Magazine, Berkshire Eagle, and other publications.