The Year in Music

By The Year in Music

This year's million-dollar question: Who will be chosen to lead which major orchestra? The Cleveland Orchestra was first to appoint a new music director-Franz Welser-Möst, succeeding Christoph von Dohnányi; also, Jahja Ling will take over from Leonard Slatkin at the Orchestra's Blossom Music Festival. Overseas, by secret ballot, Simon Rattle was elected director of the Berlin Philharmonic, to follow Claudio Abbado. At deadline, three of America's "Big Five" await an answer. Seiji Ozawa, finally pried from his quarter-century tenure at the Boston Symphony, will leave in 2002 for the Vienna State Opera, which is at present without a director. Also that year, Kurt Masur departs the New York Philharmonic to become principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, and Wolfgang Sawallisch retires from the Philadelphia. Other soon-to-be-vacated American orchestras and their decamping maestros include the American Composers Orchestra (Dennis Russell Davies), Atlanta Symphony (Yoel Levi), Cincinnati Symphony (Jesus Lopez-Cobos), Houston Symphony (Christoph Eschenbach), Indianapolis Symphony (Raymond Leppard), Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (Hugh Wolff), and Minnesota Orchestra (Eiji Oue). Add to that, who will succeed Gérard Mortier at Salzburg and Lotfi Mansouri at San Francisco Opera?

Thomas Adès began his tenure as head of the Aldeburgh Festival, the Berlin Symphony's director will be Eliahu Inbal, and Sarah Caldwell will oversee the opera program at the University of Arkansas. Cellist Jennifer Culp succeeded Joan Jeanrenaud, who resigned from the Kronos Quartet after 20 years. Alan Gilbert, who conducts clear, buoyant performances, moves from assistantships to conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. David Robertson is music director of L'Orchestre National de Lyon, as are Samuel Wong of the Mannes Orchestra and Vladimir Spivakov of the Russian National Orchestra. Dennis Russell Davies, whose European posts include Vienna Radio Symphony and Stuttgart Chamber, has been named music director of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and Linz Opera. The Vienna Choir Boys fired their director, Agnes Grossman, after a year; their new director is Norbert Balatsch, a former member of the Choir.

Centennials

It was a very good year for centennials in American music. Duke Ellington tunes and arrangements were everywhere, and Billy Strayhorn's artistry reached many new listeners. Wynton Marsalis toured with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, collaborating with non-touring symphony orchestras that included the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur and the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. The symphonic ensemble would play selections from Grieg's Peer Gynt, and then the jazz group, with Marsalis leading from the trumpet, would play Ellington's version.

By cheating a little, George Gershwin's centennial was prolonged a year and Aaron Copland's was advanced a bit. Copland's centennial party started in November 1999 with the New York Philharmonic's three weeks of programs relating to an archival exhibition, as well as discussions of his works for film. Copland's home near Peekskill, New York, is now a center for the study of American music, with a resident chamber ensemble, educational programs, archives, and a sponsored residency for an American composer.

The Philadelphia Orchestra, in its own 100-year celebration, programmed its entire 1999-2000 season from music composed since its first concert. It also made an extended tour that included Vietnam, and it looks forward to moving into a newly built hall.

Opera

Opera scores based on popular plays, films, or books is the latest trend. After the San Francisco Opera introduced André Previn's take on Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, other works in that genre were performed or commissioned. The question arises in each instance: How, if at all, does music enhance the original text? The list grows rapidly: John Harbison's setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby by the Metropolitan Opera; Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge by William Bolcom for the Chicago Lyric Opera; Jack Beeson's setting of the Barbara Stanwyck suspense film Sorry, Wrong Number at the Center for Contemporary Opera; Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray by Lowell Liebermann (first heard in Monte Carlo in 1996) at Milwaukee's Florentine Opera ; Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl at the Los Angeles Opera, set by Tobias Picker; and Stephen Paulus's setting of Edith Wharton's Summer by the Berkshire Opera. A trilogy of one-acts called Central Park was performed at Glimmerglass and New York City Opera. Its composers are Michael Torke, Robert Beaser, and Deborah Drattell, with playwrights Wendy Was- serstein, A. R. Gurney, and Terrence McNally. McNally will also fashion the screenplay of the film Dead Man Walking into a libretto whose score by Jake Heggie is for the San Francisco Opera.

Opera America, the trade service organization, is bullish on opera's rising attendance and interest. One poll, "tough tickets," showed Luciano Pavarotti to have the most ticket price clout; he beat out the Rolling Stones and Andrea Bocelli.

Orchestras

Program-note annotator Michael Steinberg focused on listener prejudice in an address at the American Symphony Orchestra League conference. He jokingly proposed concert-rating logos: a smiley face for audience favorites; earmuffs or a red cross for dissonant fare. He advocated pre-concert talks, musically and visually illustrated. But they need to be good, he cautioned, and they too rarely are. Above all, performance levels for new music should not be any less than for the standard repertory.

There was a scurry to perform treasures of our newly discovered 20th century. The Chicago Symphony presented three weeks of Shostakovich concerts and recitals, with Mstislav Rostropovich, a passionate if untidy protagonist, conducting and also playing chamber music. Michael Tilson Thomas commissioned and introduced works with the two orchestras he directs, the San Francisco and the New World. The latter performed a new guitar concerto by Steve Mackey, as well as film music by Herrmann, Korngold, and Gershwin, among others.

Managers continued to discuss shortcut marketing strategies such as flexible concert schedules, length of programs, no dress code, supertitles, breezy neo-tonal short openers, music with a religious spin-anything to avoid conceding that educating a school-age music public is the way to increase future audiences. Jonathan Sheffer and his EOS Orchestra may have hit on a programming key: Consider his concert of Ives, Ligeti, del Tredici, and Spike Jones.

New Music

The Walt Disney Company commissioned Aaron Jay Kernis's Garden of Light and Michael Torke's Four Seasons, two symphonies for the millennium introduced by the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. Neither is called an oratorio, yet both include chorus, soloists, and boys' choir. The Juilliard School's intrepid Joel Sachs devoted his summer series at the Museum of Modern Art to pieces by 50 women, including Chen Yi, Judith Weir, Joan Tower, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The latter's music also turned up at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music.

The festival was directed this year by Tan Dun, whose fascinating and original Concerto for Water Percussion, using lighted objects and liquid, had just had its premiere at the New York Philharmonic under Masur, with Christopher Lamb as the soggy, virtuoso soloist. While at Tanglewood, Tan concentrated on the musical meeting of East and West. Among the most stunning samples were Wing-fai Law's concerto A Thousand Sweeps, for lute-like pipa and Western orchestra, and Weir's quirky Chinese tale The Consolations of Scholarship, with all roles brilliantly sung and acted by Janice Felty, accompanied by Boston Musica Viva.

The New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia orchestras, as well as the Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey symphonies, performed works by Christopher Rouse, most of which are referential. Alberich Saved, for the Baltimore and percussionist Evelyn Glennie, is a Wagner exploration, while Seeing, for pianist Emanuel Ax with the Philharmonic under Leonard Slatkin, is a riff on the Schumann Concerto, a piece that Ax has so far avoided. Kabir Padavali, a song cycle, was introduced in Minnesota by Dawn Upshaw under David Zinman, the Górecki Third Symphony pair. The Minnesota Orchestra, during a residency of the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, introduced his choral work In the Shade of the Willow and his opera Aleksis Kivi.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic toured with John Adams's overlong, quiet Naive and Sentimental Music, under the exciting, focused Esa-Pekka Salonen. Walt Whitman's poetry was the subject of an American Composers Orchestra concert led by Dennis Russell Davies that introduced William Bolcom's Whitman Triptych. Judy and Robert Goldberg, friends of Yo-Yo Ma, commissioned the six-movement Goldberg Variations for cello and piano, with individual movements composed by John Corigliano, Kenneth Frazelle, Christopher Rouse, Peter Lieberson, Richard Danielpour, and Peter Schickele. The English horn had its moment with the U.S. premiere of The World's Ransoming, a Maundy Thursday meditation by James MacMillan, performed by Thomas Stacy and the New York Philharmonic under Colin Davis, and Beyond Autumn, a French horn concerto by Joseph Schwantner, introduced by soloist John Gregory and the Dallas Symphony under Andrew Litton. Houston Grand Opera commissioned Tod Machover's Resurrection, a morality tale set in Siberia, with a score notable for its ravishing blend of orchestration, electronic sounds, and voices.

Festivals

A luxurious version of The Peony Pavilion, episodes of the 20-hour Ming Dynasty Kunqu opera that was forbidden to leave China last summer by Shanghai officials, finally made it to New York's Lincoln Center Festival and Festival Paris d'Automne. The original cast and crew, plus many from other countries, prepared the production at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival facilities in Becket, Massachusetts. A traditional version, as well as a preview of scenes 28 and 29, was presented earlier, acclimating the audience to the medium's stylized gestures, scooping falsetto cadences, and sweeping sleeves.

Cronaca del Luogo, an opera by Luciano Berio and starring Hildegard Behrens, was introduced at Salzburg. Also premiered at Salzburg was a new Don Giovanni with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Karita Mattila, and Busoni's Doktor Faustus, with Thomas Hampson in the title role.

Works by Vasks, Pärt, Tchaikovsky, and Piazzolla were conducted by Gidon Kremer in a concert at, of all places, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival.

Stravinsky and Schoenberg, once excoriated by music's general public, were given the royal treatment in a pair of summer festivals. A generous two-week Stravinsky event was mounted by the San Francisco Symphony, with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the biggest and best pieces; "Stravinsky in Miniature" was a concert of small, later, and lesser-known ones. With his usual insight, Leon Botstein held Schoenberg's legacy up for a closer look in Bard College's two weekends of concerts, symposia, and talks. "Moondrunk," a version of Pierrot Lunaire staged by John Kelly and Sarah Rothenberg, led a Lincoln Center Great Performers presentation that took place in the fall at several New York City locales.

Works by Steve Reich, including a revival of the mixed-media The Cave, were featured at the Lincoln Center Festival. Also, the Kronos Quartet performed his Triple Quartet (one live quartet and two taped), which had been introduced earlier in the year at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C.

Wagner's name evokes the most grandiose of grand opera, but the New Jersey Symphony, assisted by the imaginative Joseph Horowitz, mounted three weeks of concerts of orchestral Wagner, a format popular in the first half of the 20th century.

Old Friends

Horowitz also guided "Musical Boston a Century Ago"-several days of talk and music of Ives, Beach, Chadwick, and Negro melodies. Serge Koussevitzky played the double bass before he became a conductor, and he even composed a concerto for his instrument in 1905, which soloist Gary Karr performed with the American Symphony Orchestra under (who else?) Leon Botstein. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's intricate, anguished Requiem for a Young Poet, led brilliantly at Carnegie Hall by Michael Gielen with the Southwest Radio Symphony of Freiburg, is for speakers reading poetry, soloists, three choirs, electronic sounds, orchestra, jazz combo, and organ. Ives's "Emerson" Concerto, assembled by David G. Porter from fragments, had its premiere at Cleveland's Severance Hall; it was judged by The New York Times to be "too much for our own good." The American premiere of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's 1927 Sly was given at the Washington Opera, with José Carreras as the vagabond poet of the title. Two Gilbert and Sullivan scholars restored "Reflect My Child," a song cut from H.M.S. Pinafore before its opening night.

Education

A little good news: The besieged National Endowment for the Arts managed six $100,000 grants for organizations like the Lincoln Center Institute to collaborate with all grade levels of committed public schools. It's a drop in the bucket, though; who will push the uncommitted schools, and where will the money come from?

A couple of stopgap ideas: Crossing Paths 99, a Minnesota-based conference hosted by Opera America, addressed itself to the advantages of combined artistic disciplines at all age levels. Music Outreach, which is available to 45,000 grade-school children, brings musicians who demonstrate their instruments and put together eclectic concerts. The Chicago Symphony's hi-tech music education center, ECHO, is a carpeted lab with cubicles, portable equipment, monitor screens, and global music choices to click on.

Under its founder, Claudio Abbado, 130 young professionals of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, from Europe and the former East Bloc, tour annually. After a two-week Tanglewood residency, they played Mahler in Europe, South America, and Cuba. Their 91 counterparts in the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra toured with 20th-century works by Russian and American composers. Conductors included Valery Gergiev and Leon Botstein.

Music and Other Media

Amplification in an opera house? Lincoln Center's New York State Theater is trying it with multiple inconspicuous speakers, as is the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At the Academy's Majestic Theater, James Maddalena sang a staged version of Schubert's Winterreise, enhanced by visual installation, dramaturgy, blinding light effects, and costumes. It was surely food for thought.

A fiddle was the protagonist in the film The Red Violin, played by the unseen Joshua Bell, to a spotty score by John Corigliano. Hilary and Jackie exposed the sad doings of the Du Pré sisters and gave Elgar's Cello Concerto the kind of boost that Shine gave to Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto, or Platoon did to Barber's Adagio for Strings. Philip Glass composed music for the scoreless 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, performed by the Kronos Quartet and re-released in theaters and on video by Universal. Kronos subsequently performed the music live at screenings of the film in four cities.

Glass's surreal Monsters of Grace, in collaboration with Robert Wilson, had the audience wearing special lenses to view eerie images slowly moving across the screen, as Glass and his group performed his score and a quartet of singers vocalized.

Co-operating with the Louvre, New York's Walter Reade Theater presented "Great Pianists of the 20th Century on Film," an astonishing series of generous restored clips of 60 pianists such as Alfred Cortot, Josef Hofmann, and Paul Wittgenstein.

On the air, Metropolitan Opera broadcasts reached Brazil for the first time.

Brave New Roles for Music

Classical music had a six-week tryout at railway stations in Sydney, Australia, to see if it would chase off hooligans. The railway union said it was a lot of nonsense, while proponents worried that the project would fail if the hooligans happened to like Mozart. Montreal subway officials gave the idea a try, settling on opera recordings of Callas and Pavarotti, which they felt have greater repellent value.

Vanessa Redgrave starred in Eleanora, a new opera made from 18th-century choral music, and commemorating 200 years since a Neapolitan uprising-as well as making a case against the death penalty.

New mothers were being sent home from the hospital with classical CDs to improve the minds of their newborns, and in Dallas, classical music was piped into kindergartens. One study concludes that the effects wear off in minutes; two others say it doesn't work at all.

Anniversary

The National Association of Performing Arts Managers and Agents (NAPAMA) celebrated its 20th anniversary. Joanne Rile, a past NAPAMA president, aptly described the organization as the collegial voice in a competitive business.

Glory and Honor

Alfred Brendel, only the third pianist to become an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic, gave a well-rounded series in Carnegie Hall and other places, during which he performed as recitalist, concerto soloist, Lieder accompanist, and reader of his own collected poems. This year's Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Melinda Wagner's Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion, while Oscar Peterson won the Praemium Imperiale of Japan, which also honored Juilliard's great violin teacher Dorothy DeLay. Yo-Yo Ma took Canada's Glenn Gould Prize. Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe won the Richard Tucker Award. The Van Cliburn Foundation inaugurated a competition for amateur pianists over 30; its winner was Joel Holoubek, a Parisian coin dealer. For the first time, three violinists-Sarah Chang, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Pamela Frank-won the Avery Fisher Prize.

Milestone Birthdays

Leon Kirchner and Julius Karr-Bertoli, 80. Pierre Boulez, Janos Starker, Benjamin Lees, and the Curtis Institute of Music, 75. George Crumb, Charles Wadsworth, André Previn, and Gary Graffman, 70. Marilyn Horne, 65. Jonathan Harvey, 60.

Obituaries

In 1999, the music world recorded the loss of composers Joaquín Rodrigo, Earl Kim, and Moondog (Louis Hardin); conductors Robert Shaw, Paul Sacher, and Leonard de Paur; pianists Jascha Zayde, Beveridge Webster, Samuel Sanders, and Jeanne-Marie Darré; violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Howard Boatwright; organist Vernon de Tar; opera directors August Everding and Rolf Liebermann; sopranos Bidú Sayao and Maria Stader; tenor Alfredo Kraus; guitarist Alexandre Lagoya; administrator Judith Arron.

Leslie Kandell is music critic for the regional sections of The New York Times. She also writes for The Berkshire Eagle and other newspapers. She contributes to Opera News, American Record Guide, and Stagebill.