The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

BEDFELLOWS, BIGTIME
The very word “operatic” calls to mind Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. Both were born in 1813, and 200 years later, the opera world still looks hopefully for the next Wagner tenor, the next Verdi soprano. The Italian spoke well of his German peer’s work, though they never met, but the exasperating Wagner never bothered to mention Verdi. Despite Verdi’s tragic themes, exotic locales, and extended processions—with elephants—his beloved melodies have the golden tinge of a sunny climate, while Wagner’s grim forest caves, mythic curses, and sheer conceptual grandeur are a big transcendental controversial deal.

The Metropolitan Opera celebrated Wagner’s bicentennial with three cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Fabio Luisi, staged by the quixotic Robert Lepage, and starring Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt, plus a new Parsifal conducted by Daniele Gatti and Asher Fisch, directed  by François Girard, with Jonas Kaufmann and Katarina Dalayman. To honor Verdi, the Met presented Il Trovatore, Otello, Un Ballo in maschera, Aida, a new Rigoletto set in Las Vegas, Don Carlo, La Traviata, and a new Falstaff. Lyric Opera of Chicago produced Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal, and Verdi’s Traviata, Simon Boccanegra, Rigoletto, and Otello.

After having withdrawn from conducting for two years for a variety of health problems and back surgery, Music Director James Levine, 70, returned to the podium on a motorized wheelchair, leading the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on May 19. On September 24 he returned to the opera house to lead a highly praised Così fan tutte as only he can do it. He was scheduled to conduct several more performances of the Mozart opera, plus runs of Verdi’s Falstaff and Berg’s Wozzeck.

Seattle Opera’s three Ring cycles and famed related activities always take over the city. This year’s fête took in an estimated $39 million; performances were led by Principal Guest Conductor Asher Fisch and directed by Stephen Wadsworth, with British soprano Alwyn Mellor as Brünnhilde and German tenor Stefan Vinke as Siegfried. (The company’s new general director, succeeding Speight Jenkins, is Aiden Lang.) At Tanglewood, under Lothar Koenigs of the Welsh National Opera, the Boston Symphony was on stage for Act III of Die Walküre in concert, with a compelling Terfel, Dalayman, and the Met Valkyries. (Don’t think about the cost of this single performance, out of state.)

Nicola Luisotti, music director of both the San Francisco Opera and Italy’s Teatro di San Carlo of Naples, led a combined concert in Verdi’s Requiem at the War Memorial Opera House, with a chorus and orchestra of 320. Gustavo Dudamel led it at the Hollywood Bowl, and Andris Nelsons, incoming music director of the Boston Symphony, was to lead it at Tanglewood, but was prevented by injury and replaced by the exciting Carlo Montanaro.

The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose friendship with fellow Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is to be the subject of an opera, spoke about justice and law, preceding a performance of Verdi’s Falstaff at the Chautauqua Opera and Britten’s Billy Budd at Glimmerglass.

RITE OF SPRING CENTENNIAL
The tumultuous premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet score for Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) triggered myriad centennial events, led by the University of North Carolina’s yearlong exploration of the piece with performance, art, lectures, and a scarvesand-smoke version by the idiosyncratic puppeteer Basil Twist on YouTube. The Rite, a touchstone of 20th-century repertory whose power dwarfed its choreography, was performed by American orchestras great and small, some of which presented related events. A hundred years into it, we are captivated by its haunting folk tunes, thrilling rhythms, and rich, spiky harmonies. Charles Dutoit brings out its beauty with ease. Mark Morris presented his version of the ballet at the Ojai Festival, where he was the first dancer to serve as director. “Stravinsky and His World” was the subject of two lively weekends at Bard SummerScape, which featured concert versions of three post-Rite vocal works—the brief opera Mavra, the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, and the melodrama Perséphone.

Bay Area animator Stephen Malinowski collaborated with synthesist Jay Bacal on a brilliant, revelatory visual score that may be watched on YouTube. In the New York Philharmonic’s well-intended effort to blend Petrushka and The Fairy’s Kiss, a passionate ballerina (danced by Sara Mearns) got caught up in a hi-tech blizzard, dodging jugglers and sparring with puppets. A project of Music Director Alan Gilbert, it extended his Stravinsky tribute and furthered his reputation as a creative quester.

Decca released a 20-CD set of 38 recordings of The Rite, and Sony released a 10-CD set that included the composer’s 1940 and 1960 recordings. A new book by Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories (Naxos), asserts that Stravinsky had homosexual liaisons in his youth, and has been taken with a barrel of salt.

BRITTEN’S 100th
To observe the year, musical organizations took a look at Benjamin Britten’s varied chamber music, and some mounted operas. Chautauqua Opera did its first production of Peter Grimes. The St. Louis Symphony under David Robertson also performed the opera at home and at Carnegie Hall. Curlew River, a one-act religious opera based on a medieval Japanese Noh play acted by men, was staged at the Juilliard School and at Tanglewood by Mark Morris. Tenor Nicholas Phan, a rising Britten recitalist, said of the composer: “He never underestimates the intelligence of his audience. He’s willing to trust his sophisticated style in terms of imparting something deeply emotional and moving.”

OTHER OPERAS
The San Francisco Opera commissioned Dolores Claiborne from Tobias Picker and librettist J.D. McClatchy. Based on the Stephen King novel made into a movie, soprano Patricia Racette sang the title role.

Before moving from England to the Met, Nico Muhly’s new Two Boys, called “haunting” and “chilling,” was introduced to New York piecemeal, in scenes at Le Poisson Rouge and at the Guggenheim Museum’s “Works in Process.”

Two Met favorites were redesigned with different settings (greeted with reactions from griping to head-scratching). Handel’s Giulio Cesare, directed by David McVicar, was moved to the Napoleonic era, and Michael Mayer set Rigoletto in Las Vegas—rat pack and all.

Anna Nicole, by Mark-Anthony Turnage, first seen at Covent Garden in 2011, opened New York City Opera’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Steven Sloane conducting a cast of Broadway actors. It turned out to be the bankrupt NYCO’s final production in its 70-year history.

ORCHESTRA NOTES
Rather than tolerate empty seats at Severance Hall, musicians of the venerable Cleveland Orchestra sought out audiences in unlikely venues; they wound up successfully trying out Schubert in bars and playing soccer with neighborhood residents. Students who bought tickets to Cleveland Orchestra classical concerts at Severance Hall made up 13 percent of the audience.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Gustavo Dudamel, introduced John Adams’s engrossing semi-opera, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, whose libretto by Peter Sellars moves the biblical story forward and back in time, adding improbable characters including Cesar Chavez. The work was also performed in New York and at Ravinia—which also presented the little match girl by Carnegie Hall Composer Chair holder and Musical America Composer of the Year David Lang.

Expanding the theme of the New York String Orchestra, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Institute created the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America. 120 teenage musicians from 42 states trained for two weeks in June at Purchase College, tuition-free, and then embarked on a five-concert international tour with conductor Valery Gergiev and violinist Joshua Bell.

Disaster in Minnesota: Orchestra management and locked-out musicians had not talked, face to face, for a year. The board, to balance a $6 million deficit, had proposed salary reductions the players found unacceptable. Music Director Osmo Vänskä’s pet project of a complete Sibelius symphony cycle at Carnegie Hall was cancelled, and he resigned after ten years of raising the MSO to major league status. BIS Records cancelled sessions for the third disc in the orchestra’s presumably aborted Sibelius cycle.

Concerts of live orchestral music under film and video are catching on with orchestras. The New World Symphony commissioned a video from filmmaker Tal Rosner, made for Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, and the Boston Symphony played Bernstein’s complete score of West Side Story under the film. The music for a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was played by Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic.

DIY
In the annual Sing for Hope—managed by soprano Monica Yunus, whose father was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for setting up microfinancing—88 pianos are donated to hospitals and schools. To publicize the project, pianos are decorated by local artists and placed around the city outdoors, for passersby of any age to play. In opening and closing ceremonies, 88 pianists of all capabilities played Bach’s  Prelude in C all at once.

WINNINGS
The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Caroline Shaw, its youngest recipient, for her lovely, peculiar partita for eight singers, which slides among speech, close folk harmony, whispers, and yowls. The Grawemeyer Award went to Michel van der Aa for his work with cello, featured in his multimedia concerto.

Composer Kaija Saariaho received the Polar Music Prize, avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, 84, the Kyoto Prize, Jeremy Denk a MacArthur Fellowship, and Plácido Domingo the Praemium Imperiale. Yo-Yo Ma received the Vilcek Prize, recognizing contributions to the arts of immigrants to the United States. Tenor Bryan Hymel received the Beverly Sills Artist Award and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard the Richard Tucker Award. An ASCAP award for commitment to new American music went to the Albany Symphony.

The Cleveland Foundation announced a record $26.6 million in grants that includes $10 million to the Cleveland Orchestra. Sanford and Joan Weill gave Carnegie Hall a challenge grant in that amount, to complete the renovation of its studio towers.

Lyric Opera of Chicago is again in the black, 25 out of 26 years—a record among major not-for-profit music and performing-arts companies and surpassing its $22.9 million fundraising goal. Renée Fleming, its creative consultant, was awarded a National Medal of the Arts at the White House.

HAIL AND FAREWELL
The Boston Symphony settled on Latvian-born Andris Nelsons, 34, as its music director. His victory lap at Tanglewood was cancelled, however, when he was injured at Bayreuth where he was conducting Wagner. The Houston Symphony chose Andrés Orozco-Estrada, a Colombian, to succeed Hans Graf as music director. James Judd is now music director of the Little Orchestra Society in New York, and Louis Langrée completed his first season as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony with Maya Angelou narrating Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, which the Cincinnati had introduced in 1942. Andrew Litton was appointed the Colorado Symphony’s music director. Reynold Levy, president of Lincoln Center, was succeeded after 12 years by theater producer and educator Jed Bernstein. Dr. James Gandre, former dean at Manhattan School of Music, has been appointed its president, and the American Composers Orchestra appointed Derek Bermel artistic director. After 34 years, cellist David Finckel of the Emerson Quartet has a successor, Paul Watkins, whose style fits the group exactly. The introductory tour began at Caramoor. After 34 years, Glenn Dicterow stepped down as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.

LIVES OF THE GREAT INSTRUMENTS
Mozart’s violin and viola, brought from Salzburg to the United States for the first time, were played at the Boston Early Music Festival and in New York.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed the instrument collection of Sau-Wing Lam (1923-1988), in the U.S. for the first time. Daniel Hope played some of the nine Guarneri and Stradivarius violins and one viola. The latest study of Stradivarius’s varnish reveals no secrets, but one theory is that his instruments’ exceptional sound might come from reverent players performing particularly well.

Steinway is under its fifth owner. Its legendary piano showroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan is closed, to the consternation of pianists who regard it as integral to the company’s history.

Descendants of the conductor Arturo Toscanini auctioned his Steinway; letters from Verdi, Wagner, and Strauss; rare sketches of Falstaff ; a handwritten score of a Mendelssohn overture; and a self-caricature by Enrico Caruso.

Tower Music, an hour-long composition by Joseph Bertolozzi, was made by striking various surfaces of the Eiffel Tower with mallets, and collecting the sounds electronically.

When Wu Man’s $50,000 pipa was damaged by a flight attendant, she had to get off the plane and find another pipa to play her concert. (It is assumed that the airline heard from her lawyer.)

FESTIVALS
The name Mostly Mozart has apparently given up the ghost, with International Contemporary Ensemble’s presentation of the whisper opera by David Lang. Gianandrea Noseda led Beethoven and Rossini (including the rarely performed Stabat mater) and David Afkham led all-Brahms, featuring Vadim Repin and Truls Mørk. Matthias Pintcher was also represented. Auf wiedersehn, Amadeus.

Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music showcased startling expansions of sound by Marco Stroppa (electronics) and Helmut Lachenmann (vocal and instrumental expression), familiar in Europe but not here. A concert version of George Benjamin’s opera, Written on Skin, earned accolades at its U.S. premiere.

The Festival of New Trumpet Music included pieces by Henry Brant, Christian Wolff, and John Zorn, whose 60th birthday is being prolifically celebrated.

Everything you wanted to know about the field was available for display and purchase at the Boston Early Music Festival. Among all the instruments, workshops, and recitals, the centerpiece was Handel’s early opera Almira. In the brilliant, exacting title role, soprano Amanda Forsythe showed that early music has found its Renée Fleming. •

OBITUARIES
In 2013 and late 2012, the music world lost composers Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, Henri Dutilleux, Harold Shapero, Jonathan Harvey, Robert Ward, Richard Rodney Bennett, Dean Drummond, John LaMontaine; conductors Colin Davis, Wolfgang Sawallisch, James DePreist, Stephen Simon, Jean-François Paillard; pianists Van Cliburn, Charles Rosen, Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland; sopranos Lisa Della Casa, Galina Vishnevskaya, Gloria Davy; mezzo-sopranos Risë Stevens, Regina Resnik, Claramae Turner; tenor David Lloyd; cellists Janos Starker, Paul Olefsky; trumpeter Adolph Herseth; hornist Joseph Eger; organist Marie-Claire Alain; sitar player Ravi Shankar; opera directors Patrice Chéreau and Lotfi Mansouri; piano therapist Dorothy Taubman; Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz; Gordon Hardy, music administrator; Jim Nayder, founder of “The Annoying Music Show” on public radio.

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