The Year in Music: North America

By Leslie Kandell

The revelation of the year came from a phone call to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to inquire about a John Cage concert. Innocent concertgoer: “What time is the John Cage performance at the Bang on a Can Festival?” MASS MoCA box-office rep: “John Cage is not performing today. He already performed July 14.”

Concertgoer was poised to growl that Cage died in 1992. But, whenever it took place, the event was among hundreds of tributes to him during the centennial of his birth. Suddenly the significance of the misinformation became clear: John Cage lives! His guileless quest—to reveal that there is no such thing as silence, and that life’s flotsam and jetsam can be perceived as music—has endured. His works for prepared piano, cactus spines, radios, and crumpling paper, not to mention the infamous 4’33” (which he called his “silent piece”), are not only still played but still far out, beckoning us to listen ever more openly.

These pieces, and plenty more, were heard during Juilliard’s Focus! Festival, which was devoted to Cage’s centennial and called “Sounds Reimagined.” John Cage Day at the Museum of Modern Art in August honored his 1943 New York City debut percussion concert there. It featured a collection of pieces five to seven seconds long, commissioned from 100 composers, and previewed in a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

A Cage retrospective held in D.C. during his September birthday week included music, watercolors, dance, theater, lectures, and panels. Among participants were the National Gallery of Art, American University, the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art, and the Library of Congress.

At johncage.org, centennial tribute notices disappeared after the events happened, so their day-to-day numbers varied. Periodic site checks indicate that the total of the year’s events is in four figures.

►In Paris in 1913, months after Cage was born, riot police broke up unprecedented fights in the audience at a ballet premiere. Now, a hundred years later, the score of that ballet, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, is venerated as the most important classical composition of the 20th century. The New York Philharmonic was among orchestras opening the season with it. More often performed as a concert piece than as a ballet, it has been realized in many forms, from animated film to belly dance.

Carolina Performing Arts and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are commemorating the centennial year of The Rite’s Paris premiere in a season-long exploration of its variants and impact. Martha Graham’s choreography is being performed, as well as 11 new works—nine world and two U.S. premieres—from artists inspired by Stravinsky’s original. At Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival, On Sacred Ground, a Duke University commission based on The Rite, was introduced by the Bad Plus, a jazz group that blended rock and other idioms into the Stravinsky.

►Other Minds, a San Francisco-based organization that champions new music, presented a fall festival celebrating not only the centennial of Cage but of the quirky, defiant Conlon Nancarrow as well. “Grand Pianola Brigade Event” was a highlight, as were performances of MIDI transcriptions of Nancarrow works, and rare film of Cage and his collaborators. Other Minds also reissued Michael Tilson Thomas’s long-unavailable CBS recording with the Buffalo Philharmonic of the complete works of Carl Ruggles.

► In October, the Empire State Building was (briefly) illuminated in red, white, and blue for the 50th anniversary of the American Symphony Orchestra, whose season offered a Cage celebration and 1962 ticket prices topping at $7.

►The San Francisco Symphony’s centennial celebration was enhanced by an ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming, to the orchestra and its music director, Michael Tilson Thomas. The orchestra also received the Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming for its two-week American Mavericks Festival of concerts, talks, and films, heard in several cities; that series introduced commissioned works by John Adams, Mason Bates, Meredith Monk, and Morton Subotnick. Also on the programs were works of Charles Ives, Ruggles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, and Morton Feldman.

FESTIVALS
Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer festival in the Berkshires, celebrated the 75th anniversary of concerts on its property with replications of programs from 1937 and 75 free audio streams of historic performances. For the occasion, the orchestra commissioned several pieces, including the brief Night Train to Perugia—smart, clear and delightful—from Michael Gandolfi, a former Tanglewood student who is now on its faculty, and Music for Boston from André Previn.

Carnegie Hall’s fall festival, "Voices from Latin America," was headed by Osvaldo Golijov and presented in partnership with "Celebrate México Now." Gilberto Gil, Chucho Valdés, and Gustavo Dudamel curated its citywide concerts and exhibitions. At the Ravinia Festival, James Conlon and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the American premiere of Kurt Weill’s Zaubernacht (“Magical Night,” his first completed stage work, a pantomime). At Glimmerglass, Weill’s Lost in the Stars featured Eric Owens’s “towering, heartfelt” (Wall Street Journal ) lead performance. By week three of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, Mozart appeared to have gone fishing. In addition to the “continuation of a 12-part Schubert focus,” there was a bird song-themed concert, with optional bird walks in Central Park.

HERE THEY COME: THERE THEY GO!
It’s hard to fault Fabio Luisi for leaving Rome Opera—and other companies that were counting on him—in the lurch. He was appointed principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. With Music Director James Levine’s return plans unclear, who could say Luisi should not have seized the opportunity?

But in mid-October, the Met announced that Levine’s health had improved so much that he could return at the end of the season to conduct three operas and a Met Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall. Luisi may be having second thoughts now.

Michael Christie resigned his post at the Phoenix Symphony to become music director of the Minnesota Opera.

In Texas, Dallas Symphony Music Director Jaap van Zweden took on a second post, to succeed Edo de Waart at the Hong Kong Philharmonic; and Hans Graf, at 12 years the longest-serving music director of the 99-year-old Houston Symphony, is leaving that post, sending the orchestra into search mode.

David Finckel, founding cellist of the Emerson Quartet, is leaving it, to be succeeded by Paul Watkins. Violist Roger Tapping succeeds Samuel Rhodes in the Juilliard String Quartet. New York Pops music director, Steven Reineke, becomes principal guest conductor of the Toronto Symphony. He is currently principal pops conductor of the National Symphony and associate conductor of the Cincinnati Pops. Also in Cincinnati, Louis Langrée succeeded Paavo Järvi as music director of the Symphony Orchestra.

Paul Plishka retired from the Metropolitan Opera after singing bass roles there for 45 years.

NEW, UNCOMMON, UNEARTHED
Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, dreamed up a creative program of music for multiple orchestras, headlined by Stockhausen’s Gruppen and paired with works by Mozart and Boulez, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Amid the tricky staging, orchestral placement, costumes, lighting, and running around, Stockhausen came off amazingly tame.

Elliott Carter was 103 years of age when he attended the spring premiere of his Two Controversies and a Conversation, for piano, percussion, and chamber orchestra, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Symphony Space, under David Robertson.

Alice in Wonderland, a two-hour one-act opera by Unsuk Chin, with libretto by David Henry Hwang, had its U.S. premiere at the St. Louis Opera Festival under Michael Christie.

The Houston Symphony brought Shostakovich’s bitter parody, Anti-Formalist Rayok, to Carnegie Hall’s Spring for Music series; the composer called it a “drawer piece” that he didn’t dare publish during Stalin’s lifetime. For its part, the Edmonton Symphony showcased a jazzy trumpet concerto by its resident composer, Allan Gilliland, encompassing blues, swing, Copland’s Quiet City, and Le Jazz Hot. The Alabama Symphony, under its must-see music director, Justin Brown, introduced the celestial-themed Astrolatry by Avner Dorman.

The Baltimore Symphony tackled Honegger’s top-heavy Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher, with Marin Alsop at the helm of massed forces that included orchestra, soloists, chorus, and children’s chorus.

The unifying theme of this year’s Princeton Symphony Orchestra concerts is Western composers’ fascination with Eastern culture. It may be how Stravinsky got on the same program with a premiere by Zhou Tian.

Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra finally dug out a concert staging that merits further attention: Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, a grand opera in the Wagnerian manner by Franz Schmidt, a cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic under Mahler. It is an emotional drama, purple with lust, murder, and religion betrayed. At Bard Summerscape, Botstein also made a strong case for Saint-Saëns’s neglected opera Henry VIII.

HIGHLY PRIZED
The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Kevin Puts for Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts, commissioned by the Minnesota Opera and introduced in 2011 under the baton of Michael Christie. Mark Campbell’s libretto, based on a 2005 French film, tells the true story of a spontaneous cease-fire among Scottish, French, and Germans during World War I. The 2012 Grawemeyer Award, diminished in cash if not cachet due to the stock market decline, went to Esa-Pekka Salonen for his Violin Concerto. Recipients of the five biggest NEA grants were the New York Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The latter emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a long, tense struggle, in time to welcome its incoming music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Seiji Ozawa, battling esophegeal cancer, received the 2011 Praemium Imperiale. Danill Trifonov won the 2011 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. American soprano Janai Brugger, a recent alumna of the Los Angeles Opera’s Young Artist program, was the female prizewinner of Operalia. The Beverly Sills award was given by the Metropolitan Opera to soprano Angela Meade.

The New York Philharmonic established the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, a $200,000 award for a composer selected every two years by a committee of musicians. To honor the first recipient, Henri Dutilleux, Alan Gilbert devoted a whole program to the French composer’s music.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT. . .
Sonoma State University opened Weill Hall in its Green Music Center, a structure made possible with a $12 million gift from Sanford and Joan Weill. The architectural firm of William Rawn and the acoustical firm of Larry Kirkegaard, the team that built Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall, which was modeled after Vienna’s Musikverein, were at pains to emphasize that Weill Hall resembled neither of these. But why shouldn’t it? They’re both fine halls. The inaugural Weill West season, designed to showcase the Santa Rosa Orchestra, includes Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Stephanie Blythe, and other soloists almost equally well-known.

The long-awaited new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, is now home to the Kansas City Symphony. Moshe Safdie was the architect of the hall, whose funding was largely from the private sector, and whose contours suggest both Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. The Arts Center is also the new home of the Kansas City Ballet and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bestowed a $4 million grant to Carnegie Hall in support of its citywide festivals, commissions of over 25 new works to be performed in the hall, broadcasts in a partnership with WQXR to listeners worldwide, and its Digital Archives Project to make its holdings increasingly available to the public.

Another Mellon grant went to Lyric Opera of Chicago, which received a $2 million grant to support Lyric Unlimited—a program of community engagement and new artistic initiatives. It will encompass Lyric’s current education programs and provide support for Bel Canto, the company’s planned commission of an opera from Jimmy Lopez, based on a novel by Ann Patchett.

The New York Philharmonic came in for some interesting philanthropy: Didi and Oscar S. Schafer followed a 2007 gift of $5 million with an additional $1 million to support the Concerts in the Parks. And in honor of Zarin Mehta, its retiring president and executive director, Alec Baldwin, one of whose many hats is announcer of the Philharmonic radio broadcasts, donated $1 million—the proceeds of his Capital One television ads.

Recognizing the need for a tangible hub, Opera America created a $14 million National Opera Center, in two floors of an old fur factory near New York’s Penn station. It houses an 89-seat theater, a rehearsal hall and rehearsing rooms, recording rooms, a library, learning center, and Opera America’s offices. To honor the occasion, 50 composers were invited to write a song for an “Opera America Songbook.” The songs, one volume for male voice, one for female, were recorded and published by Schott, and are being introduced throughout the 2012–13 season.

OBITUARIES
In 2012 and late 2011, the music world recorded the loss of composers Marvin Hamlisch, Paul Turok; conductors Hugo Fiorato, Paavo Berglund; sopranos Evelyn Lear, Camilla Williams, Montserrat  Figueras, Marguerite Piazza, Patricia Neway; contraltos Lili Chookasian, Florence Kopleff; tenor Charles Anthony; baritones Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ingvar Wixell; bass Andrij Dobriansky; pianists Alexis Weissenberg, Mihaela Ursuleasa; violinists Ruggiero Ricci, Zvi Zeitlin, Roman Totenberg; cellist David Wells; trumpeter Maurice André; harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt; organists Gerre Hancock, David Craighead; opera company founder Anthony Amato, Bargemusic founder Olga Bloom; impresario Omus Hirshbein; arts administrators Carlos Moseley and Martin E. Segal; recording producer Howard H. Scott; publicist Herbert Breslin; critics Mary Campbell, Howard Kissel; violin restorer Rene Morel. An article in the New York Times about the diminishing role of household pianos was called “For More Pianos, The Last Note Is a Thud in the Dump.

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