The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

While high-tech whizz kids' courtroom battles over copyright put a big smile on lawyers' faces, in the real musical world it was the year of a late-Baroque choirmaster noted for his output of both music and children (20, all told). The 250th anniversary of the death of J.S. Bach had choral societies far and wide blowing the dust off their B minor Mass and chamber groups putting on more Brandenburg Concertos than you could shake a stick at.

With fortunate timing, the music the great man wrote for his own funeral service was discovered in a dilapidated Ukrainian archive. As it turns out, it was actually written by his uncle, but JSB wrote an instrumental accompaniment to it not long before he died. The piece was unearthed by Cristoph Wolff, William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University.

The real Bach biggy of the year was conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner's year-long Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, taking the loyal troops of his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists on a 93-concert, 59-program extravaganza in 63 churches throughout 15 countries. They got a right royal send-off, with Prince Charles throwing his weight behind a glittering launch at which he suggested that nothing short of apotheosis would do for Gardiner. "Someone will have to commission a cloud somewhere for him," said the Prince. Some of Gardiner's artists could have suggested other fitting ends-he is a conductor known for his uncompromising rehearsal style-but the results were generally brilliant.

Recording and Publishing

Gardiner chewed the carpet when record giant Deutsche Grammophon pulled out of a proposal to record the entire Bach beano. But record companies far and wide were tightening belts, battening down hatches, and fingering their worry beads.

It wasn't all doom and gloom. DG released its first DVD product, the Beethoven symphonies by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; EMI signed Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov to an exclusive long-term contract; and budget label Naxos commissioned Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to write 10 string quartets. The British were able to boast that they were leading the world in minidisc sales with half of the one million world total. The U.S. market for minidisc was too small to register in a survey by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

The IFPI was less cheery about Italy's contribution to the recording market, the federation claiming that the country accounted for more than half of all pirate CD-recordable equipment seized globally. Italy has been toying with anti-piracy legislation for some years, but in a country where they change governments more frequently than they change their socks, no one is holding their breath.

A controversial new awards ceremony, the Classical Brits, was broadcast on prime-time U.K. television. There were creditable winners, including baritone Bryn Terfel, tenor Ian Bostridge, and pianist Martha Argerich, but the show itself-a downmarket pop-style presentation with hardly a note of classical music-upset critics with its apparent suggestion that classical was just pop with violins attached. For the record industry it was a great showcase, with a sizeable TV audience. To others it was an industry in crisis making a desperate attempt to shift some product.

A sure sign of the writing on the wall for the major record companies came when BMG Classics pulled out of European recording contracts as part of a no-holds-barred restructuring. With major names like Evelyn Glennie and James Galway hitting the contract scrapheap, the world sat up and took notice. A popular view was that the major companies had failed to make artistic investment during the good times and were now caught on the wrong foot as a generation of downloaders was appearing. If the majors were becoming overdependent on blockbuster releases like Titanic, they increasingly appeared to be sitting on its decks.

It was no less dramatic a time for European journals, which logged the recording business. Family-owned stalwart Gramophone having been sold to Haymarket, the publishing firm owned by former Conservative deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, 2000 saw Classic FM Magazine going the same way under license. Meanwhile Hi-Fi News cut its classical music section to a few pages and got rid of all its classical contributors. Classic CD, a pioneer of covermount CDs, celebrated its tenth anniversary in May 2000, but with falling sales and subscriptions it was bought by the BBC's commercial arm four months later, only to be closed. The value for the BBC was in the subscriber list, in the hope that readers would transfer to BBC Music Magazine. Amid allegations of a general dumbing-down in the sector, a group of former Gramophone employees set up a new monthly, International Record Review, a weighty journal which was supposed to represent a kind of return-to-real-values Gramophone. With 1,500-word reviews and a thoroughbred approach, it seemed to have the opposition rattled, with one journal threatening its freelance writers with dire consequences should their names appear in the new upstart.

The music-book publishing event of the year was due to be the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but it was put back to the early weeks of January 2001, so Grove aficionados had to wait patiently to discover whether it would carry a notorious entry from the 1980 edition which gave chapter and verse on a fictitious composer whose name turned out to be that of an obscure Norwegian railway station.

The music-related book of the year, leaving aside shelf-filling dictionaries, was the second volume of David Cairns's Berlioz biography, which picked up a shelf of glittering awards, including the $45,000 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.

Winners

Antti Siirali, a 20-year-old Finn, won the World Piano Competition in London; 32-year-old Italian Filippo Gamba won the Eighth International Géza Anda Piano Competition in Zurich; and the young Russian Marina Kolomiitseva won the Seventh Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia. A Ukrainian viola player, 21-year-old Maxim Rysanov, won the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Gold Medal.

New Music

Harrison Birtwistle was commissioned to mark the opening of London's new contemporary art gallery, Tate Modern. Unlike the cultureless Millennium Dome, which became the subject of a satirical magazine feature-"1,000 uses for a dead dome"-Tate Modern clocked up a million visitors within six weeks, and it was good that its opening was accompanied by a piece (17 Tate Riffs) from one of new music's more iconoclastic figures.

British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage triumphed with his opera The Silver Tassie for English National Opera and found time for a double percussion concerto, too. Michael Berkeley hit the headlines when the unfinished score of his new opera, Jane Eyre, was stolen from his car. There was no copy, so he set back to work and had the full score ready in time for a June 30 premiere at the Cheltenham Festival. The work was generally liked, but criticized for over-compressing the story.

Robin Holloway and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies came up with new symphonies, both premiered at the BBC Proms. South African composer Kevin Volans was commissioned by the Duke Quartet to write a quartet for live and recorded musicians.

The Tallis Scholars demonstrated that new music does not get all the firsts by becoming the first early-music a cappella group to visit China, singing in the fifth International Chorus Festival in Beijing.

Orchestras

It was a difficult year for orchestras, with the "job vacant" sign hanging outside many and "please give generously" outside even the mighty Berlin Philharmonic, whose music director Claudio Abbado said it was losing an alarming number of players because of inadequate government funding. Berlin's troubles were compounded when Abbado's successor, Sir Simon Rattle, proved in no hurry to sign a contract before some extended political maneuvering over the choice of Intendant and a bid to move funding responsibility for the orchestra from city to state.

In the U.K., orchestral heads rolled, with the managing directors of both the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic quitting. The BBC Symphony Orchestra bade farewell to chief conductor Andrew Davis, who conducted his last Last Night of the Proms before handing the baton to Leonard Slatkin and heading for Chicago Lyric Opera.

Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer threatened to cancel all engagements in Hungary with his Budapest Festival Orchestra, following a funding cut and the appointment by politicians of a managing director without the approval of Fischer and the orchestra. The Hungarian authorities found themselves on the receiving end of a protest on behalf of the orchestra by such high-profile institutions as Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Centre, Royal Festival Hall, and Cité de la Musique. The situation was temporarily saved with a reported one-time $100,000 grant from the Soros Foundation.

South Africa lost two of its orchestras, lack of funding causing the demise of the National Symphony Orchestra and the National Chamber Orchestra within a month of each other. Also suffering from a cash crisis was the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2000 but may not make it to 2001.

Opera

Shockwaves hit Berlin when Die Welt reported that the Senate was responding to Daniel Barenboim's discontent over the funding of his Deutsche Staatsoper by offering to put him in charge of the larger Deutsche Oper, too, and possibly throwing in the Komische Oper for good measure. [At deadline, MusicalAmerica.com reported that this "epic battle" had turned nasty, amid political debates to curb funds and accusations of anti-Semitism.-Ed.]

The Opéra Bastille in Paris was forced to cancel the first night of a new production of Der Fliegende Holländer at 45 minutes' notice when the chorus went on strike, and the Opéra de Lyon was closed in February when a report revealed that stage machinery was unsafe. It reopened the following month. In Barcelona, a court threw out charges against 11 people accused of negligence in the fire that destroyed the city's Gran Teatre del Liceu. The theater had reopened in October 1999 after a $120 million reconstruction. In Toronto, the saga of Canadian Opera Company's proposed new downtown opera house continued, the project hitting the buffers again when the province of Ontario allowed the company's purchase agreement on the site to lapse.

But the saga to beat them all was at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, whose reopening in December 1999 after a controversial lottery-funded $343 million redevelopment turned farcical when problems with the stage equipment caused delays and cancellations on a wide scale. A union leader called for the house to be closed again until the problems were sorted out, but executive director Michael Kaiser declared that the show must go on, occasionally rolling up his shirtsleeves and helping shift the sets himself. Just as the house seemed to be getting on an even keel, Kaiser dropped the bombshell that he was moving on. An incompatibility with chairman Sir Colin Southgate and a frustration with the ROH committee system were rumored as reasons. Kaiser said he just wanted to go home to America (and, as it turned out, the lure of the Kennedy Center), and it was generally accepted that he would be able to do so with his Turnaround King reputation untarnished.

Politics

The success of Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party in the Austrian polls caused waves throughout the cultural community. Many major artists planned to leave the country, and others cancelled scheduled visits and performances, but Vienna State Opera director Ioan Holender said this was the wrong approach: "If we close the doors now, we do exactly what happened with the Nazis." Salzburg Festival director Gérard Mortier received hate mail when he threatened to quit a year before the end of his contract in reaction to the election. In Paris, police evacuated a theater where the Vienna Philharmonic was performing after receiving a bomb threat. The orchestra later gave a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Mauthausen, Austria's most infamous concentration camp.

Austria came in for more criticism when a former member of the Vienna Boys Choir alleged cruelty by the management, saying that boys aged 9 to 14 were punished by being forced to stand still for hours at a time by their beds and were subject to inhumane conditions. The choir denied all allegations.

Places

London's major venues, the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican Centre, both planned short-term closure for refurbishment-though not at the same time-and one of England's oldest music schools, Wells Cathedral School, announced plans for a $450,000 International Centre for Young Musicians. In Vienna, just as they thought things couldn't get any worse, a new interactive House of Music opened with Tod Machover's Brain Opera.

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