The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

Rejoice, ye worker-bee orchestra members and high-level administrators! Several major United States orchestras signed music directors into the next decade, opening the door to a few years of peace! Trouble seemed afoot in September 2014, when Franz Welser-Möst suddenly resigned from the Vienna State Opera—while the Berlin Philharmonic was seeking a music director to succeed Simon Rattle in 2018. But Welser-Möst extended his Cleveland Orchestra contract to 2022, which emerged as a magic date: magic because Gustavo Dudamel’s contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was renewed until the same year, as was Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Andris Nelsons, reportedly on Berlin’s short list, dried his eyes and signed with the Boston Symphony until—2022. Riccardo Muti extended with the Chicago Symphony until 2020.

There’s still room at the top. In 2017 Alan Gilbert is to relinquish directorship of the New York Philharmonic (which has chosen Frank Huang as its new concertmaster). James Levine is scheduled to return to Philadelphia and Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and Andrew Litton became music director at the New York City Ballet, stepping down after three years as music director of the Colorado Symphony.

OPERA

David Gockley, general director of San Francisco Opera, announced that he would step down in 2016 after ten years—but he certainly hasn’t slowed down. The company’s summer season opened with Berlioz’s opulent Les Troyens, with Susan Graham and Bryan Hymel as the ill-fated royal lovers Dido and Aeneas. Donald Runnicles returned to conduct David McVicar’s production. It was followed by the premiere of Two Women by Marco Tutino, a sad World War II drama based on a novel made into a movie with Sophia Loren. Nicola Luisotti conducted, Francesca Zambello (new artistic and general director of Glimmerglass Festival) directed, and Anna Caterina Antonacci was the ill-fated widow who fled Rome with her daughter, to the inhospitable mountains. Gockley’s successor is Matthew Shilvock, who has a five-year contract.

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s novel about what a Confederate soldier did for love, was turned into a movie, and is now an opera by Jennifer Higdon, introduced at Santa Fe Opera. Jay Hunter Morris, Isabel Leonard, and Nathan Gunn starred in the production, one of whose reviews suggested that what has previously been called Higdon’s lush, meaty lyricism was now “post-Copland, post-Britten.” That could be a good mix.

Houston Grand Opera presented O Columbia, a chamber opera by Gregory Spears that examines the past, present, and future of America’s spirit of exploration. Royce Vavrek’s libretto was inspired by interviews with astronauts, engineers, and shuttle mission trainers.

Although there will be no new operas at the Met, new productions are scheduled. James Levine conducts Die Fledermaus, Simon Boccanegra (with Plácido Domingo), and Abduction from the Seraglio. Mary Jo Heath was named successor to the late Margaret Juntwait as host of the Met broadcasts.

The opera world was stunned mid-year by the news that the great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky would enter treatment for brain cancer. Early in the Met season, he sang the role of Count di Luna in Il Trovatore with no diminution of his superb vocalism and artistry.

In Havana, Cubanacán: A Revolution of Forms by Roberto Valera, 76, had its premiere at the Havana Biennial and featured tenor Roger Quintana as Fidel Castro, playing golf with baritone Che Guevara and singing about Eisenhower, Kennedy, and their swings. Los Angeles Opera bravely sprang for the oddball Dog Days by David T. Little, who is working on a commission from the Met, so he’s arrived, and has earned it.

A star-studded concert in tribute to the late Julius Rudel had an ulterior motive—seeking a way to resurrect the defunct New York City Opera, where Plácido Domingo (among the performers) had made his debut 50 years ago under Rudel’s baton.

Ward Holmquist, longtime artistic director of Lyric Opera of Kansas City, left when the board eliminated his position.

In the past 25 years, only five percent of Opera America grants supported operas by women, but that’s about to change—as is probably the number of mad scenes and beheadings. Women of any age can now apply for Discovery Grants of up to $15,000, and the organization hopes to select 10 winners.

FESTIVALS

In addition to Tanglewood’s anniversary celebration for its Music Center, it had two weeks with the BSO’s newly appointed music director, Andris Nelsons, in works by Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich, and Strauss that he and the orchestra took on their European tour two weeks later. He also led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra—young professionals, members of the BSO, and alumni of the TMC—the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and assorted other choruses and soloists, including sopranos Christine Goerke and Erin Wall, mezzo Jane Henschel, and baritone Matthias Goerne in an eloquently played and sung Mahler Eighth Symphony. One assumes that he will be spending more time at the festival in coming seasons once his prior engagements overseas have been met.

After 46 years as founder and sole director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver is not retiring as much as stepping aside and upward to become choral advisor to BSO conductors and to his successor.

Thomas Morris extended his contract with Ojai until 2018, the festival’s 75th anniversary.

George Benjamin was Mostly Mozart’s composer-in-residence, festival artistic director Jane Moss’s move to vary the festival’s predictable repertoire. Benjamin’s creepy opera Written on Skin featured the Mahler Chamber Orchestra with Alan Gilbert on the podium. (Considering that the festival finale was Haydn’s Creation, maybe Minimal Mozart would be better.) Skin was also a highlight of Toronto’s New Creations Festival. Cincinnati’s Music Now was highlighted by composer, chorister, and Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw performing her new Violin Concerto, Lo.

HELLO AGAIN

Leon Botstein, who has cornered the market for bringing back music that deserves to be brought back—if only once— crafted his Bard SummerScape Festival around Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) and his world. Themes were Mexico, Latin  America, and Modernism; music was by Chávez, his predecessors, and his later (once-is-enough) contemporaries. Botstein took a chance with another revival—this one staged—of The Wreckers by Ethel Smyth, which was satisfacto- rily received, as his New York City concert version had been.

Charles Ives’s Connecticut study has been painstakingly re-created at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His piano is there—holding personal items he hid inside it—and the windows display large photos of what he saw when he looked out the window. It is to re-open to the public at regular hours in March.

A study from Western Washington University suggests that earworms can be gotten rid of by doing something that requires full attention, like reading a page-turner or watching an addictive TV program.

ORCHESTRAS

A weird staged version of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the San Francisco Symphony was led by Michael Tilson Thomas. One wouldn’t want to miss it, but its success could not equal its ambitious concept, which recalled the look of Bernstein's Mass.

Robert Spano of the Atlanta Symphony, long a champion of new music, conducted the premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’s Creation Oratorio, and also toured with the Curtis Chamber Orchestra to venues in Florida, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and California. The program was Higdon’s new viola concerto, and the conductor’s own Hölderlin Lieder.

Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony explore new repertoire eagerly but in a casual manner. They tour with John Luther Adams’s The Light That Fills the World, which shows that way back in 2002 he was creating the heavy rolling texture that won his Become Ocean last year’s Pulitzer Prize.

LIVES OF THE GREAT INSTRUMENTS

A Conlon Nancarrow-era player piano bought on eBay was the centerpiece of a Nancarrow festival. Works by the expatriate and his contemporaries were performed and dissected in New York at the Whitney Museum’s dramatic new downtown location.

The “Ames” Stradivarius violin, stolen in 1980 from the late virtuoso Roman Totenberg, surfaced when it was brought in for an appraisal in Pittsburgh; it was returned to his family.

Results of an M.I.T. study of Cremona-made violins, using X-rays and CT scans, revealed that the length of the instrument’s  F-holes was the proportion most crucial to producing a strong, sweet sound.

NEW MUSIC

To honor its 75th anniversary, the Tanglewood Music Center commissioned a whopping 34 new pieces, heard throughout the summer but mostly during its annual Festival of Contemporary Music. Some of the participating composers included John Williams, André Previn, Michael Gandolfi, Steve Mackey, and David Lang.

John Adams’s big, symphony-like Scheherazade.2, introduced at the New York Philharmonic by violinist Leila Josefowicz, for whom it was composed, is inspired by oppression of women throughout history.

DON’T GET UP. IT’S ONLINE

On Medici TV, more than 100 events are covered in prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Concertgebouw, Teatro alla Scala,  Berliner Philharmonie, Salle Pleyel, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Verbier Festival, and Salzburger Festspiele. You can access this extraordinary online collection of classical-music videos, where 1,500 original programs are available free on demand.

Boston Symphony concerts, provided by WGBH’s live concert broadcasts, are available at bso.org/media center the week after the program’s premiere at Symphony Hall or in the Shed at Tanglewood.

A plan to use digital sampling instead of an orchestra at the Hartford Connecticut Wagner Festival’s Ring cycle was shot down—postponed, that is—by singers, purists, and union officials together. But is that so different from dancers often performing to recorded music? 

The Detroit Symphony launched Replay, an on-demand classical performance archive in HD featuring 100 full-length classical works originally heard on the Live from Orchestra Hall webcast series. The archive will be refreshed each week during the classical season. Members can browse by composer, date, or through a rotating series of curated playlists such as “Living Composers,” “Made in America,” and “Virtuoso Violin.”

NEW LEADERS, NEW SPACES

Reynold Levy completed his tenure as Lincoln Center president and was succeeded by the veteran Broadway producer Jed Bernstein. Levy’s tell-all book, They Told Me Not To Take That Job, criticized heads of several Lincoln Center organizations.

$100 million may cover about 20 percent of the complete renovation of Lincoln Center’s newly renamed David Geffen (formerly Avery Fisher) Hall. Its name was changed to reflect that sum’s donor. (Fisher’s heirs were compensated for their cooperation.)

Sanford I. Weill retired from the chairmanship of Carnegie Hall and was briefly succeeded by fellow billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, who quit after accusing the Hall’s respected executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson of improprieties. The board supported Gillinson, and a member of the board told the Times that Perelman “likely would not have had the support to be re-elected chairman...if he had run again.”

Under its new president, Katy Clark, Brooklyn Academy of Music plans to raise a $25 million building to link its three spaces: the original theater, the Harvey Theater, and the Fisher Theater. The linking structure will be called BAM Strong, for the Strong siblings who provided key support.

The annual “Make Music New York” festival commissioned the moderately successful “Concerto for Buildings”: Whoever showed up was invited to sing and play in the cacophony.

PRIZES

Julia Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for the coal-themed oratorio, Anthracite Fields. The Grawemeyer went to Wolfgang Rihm for IN-SCHRIFT 2, scored for lower instruments, and the William Schuman award to John Luther Adams, whose ship has come in. Philip Glass, whose autobiography was well reviewed, received the Glenn Gould Award, and Seiji Ozawa, 80, was selected for a Kennedy Center Award. 

The Tchaikovsky competition was won by pianist Dmitry Masleev, who played it safe. The Richard Tucker award went to mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton (who replaced Elina Garanca in Anna Bolena at the Met), and the Beverly Sills to baritone Quinn Kelsey. Operalia was a tie between Romanian tenor Ioan Hotea and Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen.

Kevin Ahfat won the first Seattle Symphony Piano Competition, which recognizes pianists who embrace contemporary music and creative programming. •

OBITUARIES

In 2015 and late 2014, the music world recorded the loss of composers Gunther Schuller (who received a posthumous MacDowell award), Ezra Laderman, Stephen Paulus, William Thomas McKinley, Marvin David Levy; conductors George Cleve, Jerzy Semkow, Ward Swingle, David Willcocks; sopranos Magda Olivero, Janis Martin; mezzo-sopranos Irene Dalis, Elena Obraztsova; tenor Jon Vickers; pianists Claude Frank, Aldo Ciccolini, Jose Feghali; cellist Laszlo Varga; trumpeter Rolf Smedvig; harpsichordist Rafael Puyana; organist John Scott; percussionist Everett (“Vic”) Firth; harpmaker Victor Salvi; diction coach Nico Castel; stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen; impresario Tibor Rudas; manager Ronald Wilford; Vera Stern, arts administrator; Henry Segerstrom, lead donor of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts; critics Andrew Porter and Robert Commanday; radio host Margaret Juntwait. 

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