The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

NIGHTMARE AT THE OPERA

How the Metropolitan Opera is doing depends on who’s telling it. Music Director James Levine, his upper body robust, made it back to his post with a swivel wheelchair and a hydraulic podium to raise him to stage level. Falstaff, Così fan tutte, and Wozzeck made it worth waiting for his recovery. Other notable Met productions during the 2013-14 season included a beautiful Die Frau ohne Schatten with Christine Goerke as the Dyer’s wife and a much-talked-about Werther, starring a slightly detached Jonas Kaufmann.

But the Met’s biggest drama played out at contract time and featured General Manager Peter Gelb and the unions. Maintaining that the very future of opera was at stake, Gelb proposed pay cuts of up to 18 percent, as well as benefit reductions and changes in work rules for musicians, stagehands, and other union workers. For their part, union reps accused Gelb of incompetent financial management and inflating his personal salary, and blamed unappealing Met productions for opera’s dwindling audiences.

As the contract deadline approached, Gelb threatened a lockout, and union press-release attacks reached fever pitch. Genuine negotiations began only in August; both sides tried to stare each other down, but eventually agreed to federal mediation and an independent financial analysis. The Met extended contract talks past the July 31 deadline—some went far into the night—and on August 20 it was announced that the 2014-15 season would begin on schedule, as indeed it did, with Levine leading Le Nozze di Figaro.

The clear winner was the audience. As to the rest, the Met stressed that contracts called for savings from all the unions, while the unions got the Met to agree that the company’s spending would be monitored by an outside auditor. But Gelb’s troubles were not over. In October, the new production of American composer John Adams’s controversial The Death of Klinghoffer—based on the real-life hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestine Liberation Front terrorists and their murder of an American Jewish passenger—opened following a summer of deadly Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The debate about whether or not Klinghoffer is anti-Semitic, which occurs with each production of the opera, had already begun. Gelb maintained that the opera is not anti-Semitic, but in deference to complaints about rising international anti-Semitism, he agreed to suspend the HD broadcast. That drew opposition both from those who believe that no opera inspires terrorist acts and from those who didn’t want it produced at all.

Elsewhere, in non-incendiary opera news, The Passenger, Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s neglected 1968 opera in Russian, conducted by Patrick Summers and sung in English, finally made its way to Houston Grand Opera, and also to the Lincoln Center Festival, where it was performed in New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory. Stephen Wadsworth’s prison-gray production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, set in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, received “mixed reviews” at the Santa Fe Opera.

San Diego Opera was almost left for dead, but managed to raise money for a 50th season in 2015. It plans to produce La Bohème, Don Giovanni, and the San Diego premiere of John Adams’s Nixon in China.

Sarasota Opera’s creditable revival of Verdi’s rarely heard Jerusalem was part of a winter festival (winter there being a time when intermission can be spent strolling on sun-drenched plazas overlooking the sparkling gulf ) that included Il Trovatore and The Flying Dutchman. In addition to expected strong points, the productions were radiantly—softly, flexibly—lighted by Ken Yunker, whose employment calendar deserves to be filled forever. The company received a $50,000 grant from the Gulf Coast Community Foundation for improved film projection. 

Among events honoring Ned Rorem’s 90th birthday were stagings of his opera Our Town at Drake University in Des Moines, Central City Opera in Colorado, and the Monadnock Music Festival in Peterborough, New Hampshire. 

LUCK OF THE ORCHESTRAS

According to Garrison Keillor, de facto national bard, “Ecclesiastes tells you all you need to know about Minnesota: ‘Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.’ You can say that again.” The Minnesota Orchestra community has seen plenty of sorrow, but less like Hamlet and more like Judge Judy. During a 16-month lockout, its beloved Finnish music director, Osmo Vänskä, resigned in protest last October after years of working to build what he hoped would be “the best orchestra in this country.” Now, by public and players’ demand, with the departure of several board members and Executive Director Michael Henson, he has returned.

After months of strife, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is surmounting its problems and is in better shape than the rest of the city. Music Director Leonard Slatkin boasts of his orchestra’s comeback, citing concerts with attendance up to 93 percent of capacity. Outreach includes an ambitious free streaming program, performances in community venues and one-year student passes for $25. The Seattle Symphony’s spirited music director, Ludovic Morlot, is proving just the ticket in his fourth season at the orchestra, which is doing some vibrant  music-making: in nightclubs (performers in jeans casually explaining program notes), rocking with Pearl Jam, and introducing and recording Become Ocean, for which the Alaskan composer John Luther Adams won the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote: “As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” The piece was a highlight of the final Spring for Music festival at Carnegie Hall—as was Christopher Rouse’s new Requiem, an apt title for the end of the series.

Alan Gilbert's eventual legacy as the New York Philharmonic’s music director will be his imaginative programming. This year’s notable chapter was a Biennial featuring the premiere of Rouse’s Symphony No. 4 and new works selected and rehearsed in days. One was the somewhat eponymous DoReMi by Peter Eötvös—a violin concerto for Midori, who played it. Other parts of the Biennial involved visual enhancement. After a record 34 years, Concertmaster Glenn Dicterow stepped down and moved back to his native Los Angeles to become the first Robert Mann Chair of Strings and Chamber Music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School.

Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are performing an unusual Schubert cycle of all six symphonies (a coincidental complement to Schubert and his World at Bard SummerScape), as well as concerts in tribute to the orchestra’s conductor emeritus, Pierre Boulez, who turns 90 in March. Also at the CSO, a music series—Beyond the Score—includes live theater, visual projections, and orchestral excerpts played by the orchestra; each installment dramatizes the story behind the symphonic piece.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra finally eased in a music director. Andris Nelsons spent two uneven weeks at the BSO’s Tanglewood summer festival and assumed full duties in the fall. That schedule  included premieres of two commissioned pieces for the occasion—from fellow Latvian Eriks Ešenvalds and Michael Gandolfi, co-chair of Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music.

The Louisville Orchestra has an incoming music director, 27-year-old Teddy Abrams, and an energetic executive director, Andrew Kipe. Box office and donations are reportedly up, to the (pleasing) tune of $20,000. Better to be in the black than in the red. Let the good times roll.

NEW MUSIC, BECOMING LESS SCARY

Some of the year’s biggest events in new music showed the graying (or in some cases demise) of the new-music establishment composers, who have become influences on their juniors.

The Bang on a Can Marathon was presented in two different versions: nine hours in New York City’s World Financial Center Winter Garden and six hours at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe were at both. So was last year’s Pulitzer Prize laureate, Caroline Shaw, whose winning (in two ways) Partita for 8 Voices was heard in New York and her charming new String Quartet at MASSMoCA. Shaw is emerging as a composer whose individual language has found a young and old new-music audience. Through his music and teaching, Steve Reich, though not a founding member of BoaC, was clearly an influence.

The Juilliard School’s annual Focus! Festival honored Alfred Schnittke, who would have been 80, and whose work and world have become a staple in the new-music community. That world includes Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt, and Giya Kancheli, whose postmodernist music is cheerfully accepted and no longer perceived as frightening.

Tanglewood’s contemporary-music directors, John Harbison and Michael Gandolfi, emphasized American composers who had Tanglewood connections. Two impressive premieres looked back gently: Steve Mackey’s Violin Concerto remembered his mother, and Bernard Rands’s Folk Songs was a childhood memory of well-loved British tunes. Nico Muhly’s opera Two Boys was produced at the Met, freeing him to move on to Pleasure Ground, depicting the life of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, which was introduced by the Cincinnati Symphony.

Kronos Quartet threw itself a 40th-birthday party at Carnegie Hall, with Terry Riley, minimalism’s éminence grise, waving from the celebrity box. The hall was full of composers Kronos has championed, and all were in a celebratory mood. 

Nonesuch Records celebrated its 50th anniversary at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in September: 23 evenings of music including a reunion after 40 years of Philip Glass and Steve Reich for three concerts, and such label stalwarts as Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, Kronos Quartet, Fred Sherry, Brad Mehldau, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N’Dour, and a horde of others, with personal appearances by composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, and longtime label head Robert Hurwitz.

FESTIVALS

The pianist and scholar Jeremy Denk served as music director for the Ojai Festival and went on to Saratoga Performing Arts Center to perform Beethoven with the Philadelphia Orchestra. At nearby Tanglewood, he paired the Ives Concord Sonata and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, calmly and from memory. No wonder he was awarded a MacArthur grant, the Avery Fisher Prize, and our own Instrumentalist of the Year.

Mark Morris’s dance setting of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was performed at Mostly Mozart, where it was led by Nicholas McGegan. The festival name has become a distant image by now, as Mostly moves into Beethoven’s Ninth and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. 

Carnegie Hall’s much-appreciated Spring for Music ran out of money despite hard work and good music-making. At least, the Seattle Symphony got to perform John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean. The composer’s Sila: The Breath of the World, commissioned by Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors and Mostly Mozart, had its premiere in July—percussionists and brass standing by the plaza’s reflecting pool and The Crossing choir sloshing around in it.

A highlight of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival at Park Avenue Armory was the Peter Sellars staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, conducted by Simon Rattle.

Spoleto presented John Adams’s oratorio El Niño and Michael Nyman’s opera Facing Goya. Savannah Music Festival introduced its commissioned string quartet, The Sun Was Chasing Venus, by Charlotte Bray, whose orchestral work At the Speed of Stillness was performed at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music.

Grant Park Festival in Chicago, in tribute to its 80 years, gave the premiere of William Bolcom’s commissioned Concerto for Orchestra, which makes reference to the Festival’s rich history. (For Leonard Slatkin’s 70th birthday, Bolcom also composed the raucous Circus Overture, which Slatkin led at Tanglewood.) Northern Lights, by Christopher Theofanidis, also had its premiere at Grant Park.

Philip Glass’s four-year-old Days and Nights Festival at Big Sur and Carmel, which mixes music with art and the spoken word, featured physicist Brian Greene’s difficult film Icarus at the End of Time, with a live score by Glass.

TECH ADVANCES

Tanglewood’s Lawncasts inaugurated a new form of listening. Outdoor viewers fashioned their own views of the performing musicians on their own electronic devices, choosing camera angles from a menu on their screens. The next two Lawncasts (of three) improved on the glitches of the first.

The New York Philharmonic is digitizing its early history. Every document created between 1842 and 1970, as well as every concert program, press release, and annual report through 2014, will eventually be online, free. At this stage in the Archives’ evolution, everything from the inaugural season, 1842-43, is now available.

The Mozart Project, intended to be read on a personal electronic device, is a Mozart research tool which calls up music, scholars’ comments and writings, and panel discussions. Some call it an app.

HONOR, HONOR

The $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize was given to the Vienna Philharmonic, which quietly revoked honors it had given to Nazis convicted of war crimes and invested it in a digital archive. Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz received the $300,000 Gilmore Award, given every four years. Arvo Pärt was awarded the Praemium Imperiale.

Danish composer Per Nørgård won the New York Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music. The Grawemeyer Award went to Serbian composer Djuro Zivkovic for On the Guarding of the Heart. Tenor Michael Fabiano took home both the Richard Tucker and the Beverly Sills awards.

LIVES OF THE GREAT INSTRUMENTS

The defunct New York City Opera is holding an online auction of its (probably) cherished possessions, including a harpsichord, a celesta, and a good number of percussion instruments. Plácido Domingo and Lauren Flanigan were in the cast of a farewell-slash-70th-anniversary concert put together by dramaturg Cori Ellison.

Cameron Carpenter, the flamboyant organ virtuoso, had a movable digital touring organ made to his specifications by Marshall and Ogletree.

Pleyel, the world’s oldest piano company, founded in 1807 and maker of Chopin’s piano, is going out of business because of losses and low sales.

Hunter College professor Richard N. Burke determined that George Gershwin’s mother donated his family piano to Hunter in 1947. Found in a sub-basement filled with paint cans, the Steinway was restored and its ivory keys were preserved. •

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

OBITUARIES

In 2014 and late 2013, the music world recorded the loss of composers John Tavener, Peter Sculthorpe, Lee Hyla, Seymour Barab, Robert Ashley, Elodie Lauten, and Mary Rodgers Guettel; conductors Lorin Maazel, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Julius Rudel, Lotfi Mansouri, Lawrence Leighton Smith, Martin Josman, Richard Heyman, Claudio Abbado, Gerd Albrecht, and Christopher Hogwood; conductor and recorder player Frans Brüggen; sopranos Licia Albanese and Rita Shane; tenor Carlo Bergonzi; bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk; pianist and critic Harris Goldsmith; violinists David Nadien and K. Lamar Alsop; his wife, cellist Ruth Alsop; opera visionary Gerard Mortier; artist manager Harold record producer John McClure; music store owner Paul Ash, and the New York City Opera, founded in 1943.