The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

With recession deepening, music organizations worried that their audiences could be entering a new stay-at-home era. But as ticket-office staff remained busy, it turned out to be the performers who were staying at home. Money (lack of) played its part, but it was the knock-on effect of visa restrictions in security-conscious nations that produced the red signal.

The U.K. took things to extremes, with demands for finger-printing, eye scanning, and a stipulation that touring performers should state which color socks they would be wearing for each concert. Among those balking at all this were pianist Grigory Sokolov, who gave up a Royal Festival Hall date, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who pulled out of English National Opera’s new Così fan tutte three weeks before curtain up, and the Swansea-based Ballet Russe, whose Russian dancers took a short break in their homeland but were not allowed back. Canadian musician Allison Crowe was held at London Gatwick Airport for 11 hours before being deported.

Those who did manage to make it past the white cliffs of Dover must have taken home a quaint impression of a land where a stable owner was obliged to buy a license for playing music to her 11 horses, where an ice cream manufacturer flew in an Italian tenor to serenade his herd of cows, and where the eccentric mayor of London arranged for 31 upright pianos to be dumped on the capital’s streets in case anyone fancied having a go.

RECORDING AND BROADCASTING
The celebrated veteran record producer Christopher Raeburn died in February. Decca bade him farewell, rather inadequately for someone who had

been with the company for half a century, and in the same month the company seemed to write itself out of the plot as well. Choosing its 80th-anniversary year as a suitable moment, it told staff (though without making a public announcement) that its A&R and production activities would be transferred to Deutsche Grammophon’s base in Hamburg, leaving Decca as little more than a label name and a fond memory. Two months later it performed a neat U-turn, and Decca lived to fight another day.

Opinion remained divided over whether the Internet would save the recording industry or sound its death knell. Virgin and Universal got in on the act by launching a subscription-based service giving cable customers access to the entire Universal catalog. Meanwhile, pirates were having as successful a time in the recording business as in the seas around Somalia. There was a setback for the cyber-swashbucklers when the men behind file-sharing hub Pirate Bay lost a court case and headed for a year in jail, but their legal compatriots in Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament.

The French enlisted the help of ISPs to ward off piracy, but a report suggested that merry file sharers were also music’s best customers, buying more product than the average customer.

While CD sales plummeted another 30 percent, an 83-year old working from a farmhouse in rural France bucked the trend, Bernard Coutaz enjoying nine percent sales growth for his Harmonia Mundi label.

ORCHESTRAS
The Association of British Orchestras published evidence that symphonic ensembles were increasingly plying their trade beyond the concert hall. The Royal Philharmonic was booked to play the William Tell Overture to the horses as they thundered down the final straight at Aintree race course; the BBC Symphony Orchestra included a world premiere in a program in Europe’s largest urban shopping mall.

At the association’s conference in February, orchestra managers were told by an economics journalist that in the downturn it would be quite reasonable for them to start feeling very afraid. Another session looked at the question of whether musicians were all closet alcoholics, but the managers mostly missed it, since they needed a drink after the economics lesson.

In a vigorous round of musical chairs, Simon Rattle announced that he would be holding on to his cushion at the Berlin Philharmonic, Chinese-born American conductor Xian Zhang broke Italy’s classical-music glass ceiling when she was named music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, the English Chamber Orchestra got a new music director in cellist/conductor Paul Watkins, Emmanuel Villaume was appointed chief conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic, composer/conductor James MacMillan was booked as the new “permanent guest conductor” of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, and composer/conductor Oliver Knussen became the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s new artist in association.

The Berlin Philharmonic continued its “Digital Concert Hall” project into a second season, with almost all of the orchestra’s concerts in the 2009-10 season being made available live on the Internet. After being broadcast, the concerts go into the Digital Concert Hall video archive, where there are also around 30 recordings from the previous season.

Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra cancelled performances in the Middle East because of fighting between Israel and Hamas, playing Berlin instead.

Berlin was also the venue for a concert by Ars Choralis, a group of singers and instrumentalists based in Woodstock, New York, honoring the women’s orchestra of the Auschwitz extermination camp Birkenau.

At La Scala, Milan, Daniel Barenboim was booed for fistfuls of mistakes during a performance of the Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto that he conducted from the keyboard.

Colin Davis, celebrating 50 years with the London Symphony (12 as principal conductor), went the extra mile by pledging a significant sum towards the orchestra’s endowment fund, challenging audiences to increase the fund by $1.59 million.

In February the Spanish press reported that Riccardo Chailly would succeed Lorin Maazel as music director of the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana. Two months later Maazel signed a new contract.

Camerata Salzburg lost its artistic director when Leonidas Kavakos walked, blaming the “continuous instability in the orchestra’s management.”

OPERA
The music world was shaken by the death of 85-year-old veteran conductor Edward Downes and his terminally ill wife, who took their lives together. As a scholar he did much work to prepare new editions of lesser-known Verdi operas. He was principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic for 11 years and during a long relationship with the Royal Opera House he conducted 950 performances of 49 different operas. He was also music director of the Australian Opera.

There was high drama offstage at the Opera di Roma where the mayor set out to oust the general manager, with Franco Zeffirelli firing broadsides from the wings. The company’s orchestra, chorus, and staff organized a glamorous protest under the mayor’s windows, singing the national anthem and a chorus from La Traviata, followed by the corps-de-ballet performing Nutcracker excerpts, wearing jeans and T-shirts under their stage outfits.

As the power struggle developed, Riccardo Muti was said to have been offered the music directorship of the troubled house. Muti was non committal. Finally Mayor Gianni Alemanno put the company into receivership and fired both General Manager Francesco Ernani and his newly appointed artistic director, Nicola Sani. The unions threatened to strike, but the mayor restored order by promising to appoint a new board of directors and find the funds to cover a projected deficit.

The first Bayreuth Festival to be directed by the half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Pasquier-Wagner was threatened with strike action by 60 stagehands and lighting engineers and 100 freelance workers who blew the whistle on working practices, claiming that they were paid no more than $5.58 an hour. A union activist said: “If that entails the two directors shoving the scenery in themselves, then so be it.” The threat was lifted after some negotiations of Wagnerian intensity.

The Royal Opera set the cat among the pigeons by suggesting a $163.3 million refurbishment of Manchester’s Palace Theater for a $24.5 million month-long season each year. With the city’s appetite for opera and ballet satisfied by Opera North and Birmingham Royal Ballet’s visits to the nearby Lowry arts center the plan was “so daft as to be criminal” in the words of The Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen, and Lowry did not mince its words either.

Covent Garden was back in the news when American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato slipped during a scene change of the Royal Opera’s Barber of Seville, breaking an ankle on the first night. The show went on, with the help of a stick and a crutch, and her Rosina graced further performances in a plaster cast.

As London sweltered in a record-breaking heat wave in June, more than 10,000 turned up in Trafalgar Square on one of the hottest days of the year to watch Renée Fleming in the Royal Opera’s La Traviata on the big screen, with a further 10,000 watching the free open-air screenings in 15 sites across the U.K.

Four months earlier, a snowstorm had closed most of London’s opera houses and theaters, cancelling the first night of English National Opera’s new production of La Bohème and Covent Garden’s Die tote Stadt.

A power blackout in Covent Garden failed to prevent the first performance of George Benjamin’s first opera, Into the Little Hill, in the Linbury Theater, the cast, ensemble, and audience relocating to the bar for the performance.

A production of Samson et Dalila at the Cologne opera was threatened when its Dalila, high priest, and 28 of the chorus boycotted rehearsals, declaring it too brutal. Director Tilman Knabe had set it in the modern Middle-East, complete with a machine-gun battle and a gang rape.

An $803 million refurbishment of Sydney Opera House remained but a dream when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd poohpoohed the idea.

PLACES
As the world’s financial hubs went into meltdown, the Barbican Center was able to declare “Good news from the City!”—unveiling a season with the promise of growth through partnerships. It was not just a nice idea but a signed and sealed deal with five international associates: the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

There was more jazz and razzmatazz at the Southbank Center, which appointed Ornette Coleman to curate its annual Meltdown Festival.

At the Bolshoi Theater, Music Director Alexander Vedernikov quit, blaming “administrative and bureaucratic logic.” Vedernikov had spent eight years trying to revive the fortunes of a house that is struggling to complete a $1 billion redevelopment.

WINNERS
While the British-originated hit Billy Elliott danced its way through virtually every awards ceremony, the Classical Brits unleashed the usual flashy show, honoring José Carreras with a lifetime achievement award and singling out comely trumpeter Alison Balsom as female artist of the year. Another female artist, the 32-year-old Russian Ekaterina Shcherbachenko was named BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.

Thomas Quasthoff, Valery Gergiev, and violinist Janine Jansen were among winners at the grown-up awards of the Royal Philharmonic Society, while one of the winners from last year, El Sistema founder José Antonio Abreu, shared the Polar Music Prize. Another big international award, the $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize, went to Plácido Domingo, but it was not long before people were asking whether he really needed the cash.

Grateful for a more modest amount was 20-year-old Australian violinist Ray Chen, winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, who took home $28,200 and the use of a vintage Stradivarius.

NEW MUSIC
Rufus Wainwright’s opera Prima Donna picked up the column inches when it premiered at Manchester as “the opera the Met won’t see.” When Peter Gelb questioned Wainwright’s insistence on a French libretto and would not commit to a performance before 2014, Wainwright walked. Manchester International Festival stepped in and won a high-profile event for its second festival. The work confounded expectations and played to highly appreciative houses.

There was another new opera from James MacMillan, Parthenogenesis, which presented some beautiful writing but displayed the same weakness as his The Sacrifice in refusing to set up the story sufficiently to help the audience in.

New music at the BBC Proms included premieres from composers Anna Meredith and Michael Nyman, along with Maxwell Davies’s Violin Concerto No. 2 and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 7.

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