The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

Russian soprano Anna Netrebko got the 2014 Winter Olympics off to a harmonious start in Sochi, singing the Olympic Hymn at the opening ceremony, but slippery slopes awaited many personalities in the world of music. Pop fiddler Vanessa Mae revealed another string to her bow as a skiing pro, but after she tried her glissandi on the slopes a storm blew up over the circumstances of her qualifying for the Olympics. Soprano Montserrat Caballé was investigated for alleged tax fraud; deaf composer Mamoru Samuragochi, known as “Japan’s Beethoven,” was exposed as a fake who had been contracting out his composition work. U.K. Culture Secretary Maria Miller was forced to quit following an expenses scandal. She had been in the job just 18 months, hardly time for her to distinguish between Rimbaud and Rambo.

Canadian baritone Gerald Finley kept to the moral high ground, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro for a musicians’ charity. Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber was forced to end his playing his own imprint, Universal coining the Peral Music label spe- career because of a neck injury. Mr. and Mrs. Rattle announced the safe arrival of a third child.

As Scotland prepared to vote for or against independence from the U.K., most Scottish musicians were curiously coy about their voting intentions, fearing a backlash. “Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?” wondered the Daily Telegraph. Apparently not.

John Tavener was remembered at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.

RECORDING AND BROADCASTING

In-house labels remained a major growth area in recording, the Berlin Philharmonic joining the party with concert recordings of Simon Rattle conducting the Schumann symphonies as the first release. The new label’s launch issue was made available through the orchestra’s website in a number of formats, including download, streaming, CDs, Blu-ray disc, and the promise of vinyl.

One artist not taking the DIY route was rewarded with his own imprint, Universal coining the Peral Music label specifically for Daniel Barenboim and launching with Bruckner’s Symphonies 1 through 3 with the Staatskapelle Berlin—his third cycle-to-be, following those with the Chicago Symphony on DG and the Berlin Philharmonic on Teldec. 

The unexpected growth of vinyl was a detour along the main road to digital. A British Phonographic Industry seminar was told that there was more to digital than just providing downloads. With a generation that had never purchased physical product, it was important that digital marketing was given as much thought as digital platforms, embracing all options—iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube channels, websites, and blogs—to drive sales.

Warner Music Group enjoyed another round of musical chairs, naming Alain Lanceron as president, Warner Classics and Erato. Lanceron was president of Virgin Classics and director of EMI Classics France at the time that WMG acquired EMI Classics, Erato, and Virgin Classics from Universal for $762 million in 2013.

Nicola Benedetti became the first solo British violinist since the 1990s to enter the Top 20 of the Official U.K. Albums Chart with a recording of Scottish-themed music. U.K. music broadcasting saw the shock departure of Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3 and the Proms, to run Aldeburgh Music. Rumor was rife that he had seen writing on the BBC walls, and his announcement was followed by substantial job cuts at the classical station.

ORCHESTRAS

Concerts conducted by Valery Gergiev, often a helter-skelter ride, offered extra excitement with the likelihood of protests from hecklers in the audience, following his support of his friend President Putin’s Ukraine policies and anti-gay stance. The artistic community was more circumspect in its disapproval, but soprano Karita Mattila openly refused to sing under Gergiev’s baton, prompting an extraordinary torrent of abuse from Jon Hellevig, a lawyer and Finnish candidate for the European Parliament, on his Facebook page.

Management of the London Symphony Orchestra remained tight-lipped about all the names in the frame as Gergiev’s replacement as principal conductor, but was more forthcoming about the appointment of its youngest member, 18-year-old Peter Moore, a former BBC Young Musician of the Year winner (at age 12), taken on as co-principal trombone.

The octogenarian Bernard Haitink released a broadside at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for hurting his feelings by leaving him out of the orchestra’s 125th anniversary celebrations the previous year. Having been chief conductor for 27 years from 1961 and honorary conductor from 1991, he felt he was owed an invitation to the party. “They totally ignored me, and I’m afraid I’m not big enough to ignore the slight,” he told a Dutch paper. The orchestra management hit back, suspecting hubris, and saying it was Haitink’s own fault for not being more flexible with his availability. The 60th anniversary in 2016 of his debut with the orchestra is not expected to see a grand reconciliation.

A spirited round of musical chairs saw announcements of a new principal guest conductor for the London Philharmonic in Houston Symphony’s newly named music director, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and for the Hallé in Ryan Wigglesworth; a new chief conductor for the Barcelona Symphony in Kazushi Ono; a new concertmaster for the Berlin Philharmonic in the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Noah Bendix-Balgley; a new managing director for the Camerata Academica of the Mozarteum Salzburg in Shane Woodborne.

Another managing director, Simon Funnell of the London Mozart Players, fell on his sword when the ensemble made a last-ditch attempt at survival by becoming self-managing. There was also a new music director for the Ulster Orchestra in Rafael Payare, succeeding JoAnn Falletta, appointed in the hope that he would stay longer than the chief executive, Rosa Solinas, who quit after 13 months, the third to go in recent years.

Continuing a time-honored tradition, the La Scala Philharmonic performed the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony to an empty auditorium in honor of the house’s music director from 1968 to 1986, Claudio Abbado, who died in January. Daniel Barenboim conducted. Up to 8,000 people crowded into the square outside the theater to listen.

Gustavo Dudamel was among others paying tribute to Abbado, with a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. The Berlin Philharmonic made 17 Abbado concerts available free on its Digital Concert Hall online site.

OPERA

English National Opera was dealt a bitter blow with the withdrawal of a third of its public funding. Faced with a fragile business model—the company has required successive bail-outs over the years—Arts Council England came up with a solution: fewer performances. ENO said no, and while the two put their heads together to come up with a compromise solution, the funding was slashed.

The news came as a dampener just two months after ENO had announced a modest surplus and an ambitious 2014-15 season with 11 new productions and 170 performances, including two world premieres. Earlier in the year ENO had announced the departure of Music Director Edward Gardner at the end of the 2014-15 season to become chief conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic and to be succeeded at ENO by Mark Wigglesworth. The company also acquired a new executive director in Henriette Götz, reporting not to the board but to Artistic Director John Berry.

In Valhalla, Eva Wagner-Pasquier announced she would be stepping down as co-director of the Bayreuth Festival. Christian Thielemann, who was said to have prompted Fabio Luisi’s abrupt departure from Dresden Semperoper in 2010, claimed another scalp with the annulment of Serge  Dorny’s contract as general director before he had even started the job. Dorny was said to be consulting his lawyers.

There was another fall-out in Milan, where incoming La Scala Director General Alexander Pereira planned to sell the house six productions from his old job as director of the Salzburg Festival and found his six-year contract slashed to just one as a result.

Opera lost one of its great entrepreneurs with the death of George Christie, who had run Glyndebourne Festival Opera from when he took over from his father, company founder John Christie in 1958, to when his son Gus could be lured away from making wildlife films to take over in 2002.

The opening night of the Glyndebourne 2014 festival season prompted one of the biggest operatic rumpuses of the year when a group of critics was united in uncommon agreement over the doubtful wisdom of casting a short, stout singer as Octavian in a visually powerful production of Der Rosenkavalier. The critics were widely condemned for being male, middle-aged, balding, sexist, and ungallant, and righteous indignation spun the story beyond the realms of informed debate.

PLACES

In Salzburg, President Helga Rabl-Stadler claimed the Festival needed “millions” more in state aid to survive. Its kid sister, the Salzburg Easter Festival, announced that it was losing Managing Director and Intendant Peter Alward in June 2015 after six festivals.

London’s Southbank Center lost a battle with local skateboarders when an application to develop the site was turned down in favor of keeping the skaters’ park intact. There was cheerier news for the center with the full reinstatement of the Royal Festival Hall organ after a six-year restoration costing some $3.8 million, with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund topped up by members of the public and a sponsored bike ride in which the center’s Chairman Rick Haythornthwaite led a team on a 300-mile pedal to the Southbank Center from the Harrison & Harrison organ works in Durham, north-east England.

The Bolshoi gradually returned to what passes as normality following the acid attack on the ballet’s Artistic Director Sergei Filin and the abrupt departure of Anatoly Iksanov after 13 years as general director. His replacement by Vladimir Urin prompted the exit of Music Director Vassily Sinaisky, “the result of four months of watching and working with Mr. Urin,” he said. Tugan Sokhiev took over as music director.

Other institutions filling sits vac were Edinburgh International Festival, choosing Irishman Fergus Linehan as its new director; London’s Barbican Center, naming Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Huw Humphreys its new director of music; and St. Paul’s Cathedral, appointing 24-year-old Rachel Mahon the first woman organist in its centuries-long history.

WINNERS

Korean soprano Sumi Hwang took top honors at the 2014 Queen Elisabeth Competition; French conductor Maxime Pascal, 28, won the 2014 Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award; British harpist Juliana Myslov won the Dutch Harp Competition in Utrecht; Polish mezzo Ewa Gubanska won the Handel Singing Competition in London; Ukrainian pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi won the Prix du Piano of Interlaken Classics in Bern; Catherine Arlidge of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra became the first violinist ever to be awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society/Association of British Orchestras’ Salomon Prize. 

Gerard Mortier, who died in March, was given a posthumous lifetime achievement honor at the International Opera Awards.

Sir Thomas Allen was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music 2013 and John Tomlinson the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal.

The Vienna Philharmonic won the Herbert von Karajan Music Prize, awarded annually by Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.

NEW MUSIC

The 2014 BBC Proms season—unexpectedly, director Roger Wright’s last—programmed 11 world premieres with a further 23 European, U.K., or London premieres including two BBC commissions completed by John Tavener before his death in 2013. The world premiere of Benedict Mason’s Meld was described as “an enigma and a spectacle” designed to make the most of the Royal Albert Hall’s idiosyncratic space.

Other Proms first outings included a modern-day premiere of The New War Hymn, written by Proms founder Sir Henry Wood in response to the outbreak of the First World War. A less likely war-related premiere was A Man from the Future, a new piece for electronics, orchestra, choir, and narrator by pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, celebrating code breaker Alan Turing, who was prosecuted in 1952 for his homosexuality and received a posthumous pardon in 2013.

John Adams, whose Saxophone Concerto got its U.K. premiere at the 2014 Proms, had the world stage premiere of a larger-scale work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, scheduled at English National Opera in November 2014 with Peter Sellars directing.

One of the big hits of the year was James MacMillan’s new Viola Concerto, which received the ultimate recommendation from the Times reviewer: “I immediately wanted to hear the piece again.” •

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