The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

It was clearly going to be a year to remember in the U.K., the London 2012 Olympics sparking an extensive cultural program and everyone striving to do something arty for Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee. The most predictable thing about the jubilee was the rain that cascaded down on an extravagant 1,000-boat river pageant, giving the BBC a lame excuse for unbelievably crass presentation. Thirteen composers had created works especially for the event, and ten “music herald barges” graced the melee, but almost all were sunk without a trace, the only televised part of the music being some brave students from the Royal College of Music chamber choir belting out Land of Hope and Glory in the sheeting rain while the London Philharmonic carved away below decks.

There was a public outcry that the BBC man responsible should be called to account. A few weeks later, he was appointed director general.

Meanwhile the Cultural Olympiad scooped up vast numbers of events that would have been happening anyway, including the entire BBC Proms season, although 20 12-minute works under a 20x12 banner created an opportunity for new music which the televised river pageant somehow missed.

As the great sporting extravaganza approached, the Musicians’ Union came out fighting when musicians were asked to play for glory rather than hard cash.

RECORDING AND BROADCASTING
EMI Classics continued its spirited game of musical chairs, appointing Jean-Philippe Rolland as its third head of A&R within two years. While the company rearranged the deckchairs, Universal Music pursued its bid to purchase it, an idea that was frowned upon by Warner Music and the independent labels.

The deal was approved unanimously without conditions by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission but the European Commission’s approval depended on EMI ditching assets that provide nearly a third of its revenues, including EMI Classics and Virgin Classics, and on Universal getting rid of Sanctuary.

Prospective buyers were soon circling EMI’s classical labels, including Naïve, Richard Branson's Virgin group and Bertelsmann subsidiary BMG.

EMI Classics has suffered years of belt tightening and its catalog is seen as the main attraction, with legendary names like Elgar, Barbirolli, Klemperer, Yehudi Menuhin and Jacqueline du Pré. The question is whether its current high-flyers, including the budget-consuming Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic and Antonio Pappano, would remain under new ownership.

EMI’s Music Publishing division meanwhile was snapped up by a Sony-led consortium for a mere $2.2 billion. This did little to assuage the anger of 9,000 shareholders who turned up at Sony’s annual meeting to complain about four years of losses and a tumbling share price, asking whether the company faced financial collapse.

Universal’s parent company, Vivendi, lost its chief executive Jean-Bernard Levy following a fallout over strategy.

The most cheerful souls in the recording business were the Tallis Scholars, who knocked Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma” off the number one slot of the classical singles charts with a surprise surge in sales for its recording of Thomas Tallis’s motet Spem in Alium, following the work’s inclusion in a climactic part of the “mummy porn” bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey.

Britain’s communications industries watchdog declared that the U.K.’s five main television channels had spent considerably less on arts programming in the last six years, with investment in all arts and classical-music content falling by 39 percent.

BBC Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawney was arrested in Zimbabwe after hosting a children’s concert without a work permit. He was released after a few days, complete with a dislocated shoulder, not the result of the friendly attention of the local police, he stressed.

OPERA
Madrid’s Teatro Real secured the January 2013 world premiere of Philip Glass’s The Perfect American, a “nightmare vision” of Walt Disney, which will get its U.K. premiere as part of English National Opera’s season.

John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer finally made it to London. There was much speculation about angry protests marring the English National Opera performance but the first-night dissent was limited to a one-man vigil on the steps of the London Coliseum.

The Royal Opera House launched its 2012-13 season, the first with Kasper Holten and John Fulljames in charge as director and associate director of opera, respectively. British opera featured heavily, with George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, Britten’s Gloriana, and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur.

Veteran bass Sir Thomas Allen called for a ban on the pop “opera” stars who had never seen the inside of an opera house, let alone an opera. Fellow opera singer Bryn Terfel revealed an ambition to get someone to write an opera of Citizen Kane and cast him in the title role.

The Guardian newspaper turned broadcaster to stream six Glyndebourne productions online which, given the soggy British summer, allowed many to see the opera without getting soaked on the way.

Cologne Opera director Erich Laufenberg made a hurried exit after a full-scale punch-up with the city authorities, whom he dubbed “scheming, incompetent, and irresponsible.” The mayor called Laufenberg’s behavior “disgraceful and unacceptable.”

The reopening of Berlin’s Staatsoper opera house, due 2013, was put back by two years after an “unexpected discovery of wooden posts under the building” threw a spanner in the works.

European opera houses suffered a nasty dose of cancelitis with singers dropping like flies, among them Jonas Kaufmann, dropping out of the Royal Opera Les Troyens, Natalie Dessay missing the La Scala Manon, and Anna Netrebko canceling at Salzburg, Berlin, and the Bavarian State Opera.

A new version of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso was discovered in an Italian library, 270 years after his death. It was “a gift from heaven,” said a Vivaldi expert.

ORCHESTRAS
The Israel Wagner Society made its latest attempt to get works by Richard Wagner performed in the country by a full symphony orchestra but was thwarted when governors of the planned venue, Tel Aviv University, pulled the plug, claiming that the organizers had concealed their identity when booking.

In Scotland, where a new arts admin body crumbled into apology after widespread complaints about its incompetency, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra was feeling more cheerful with a new $22 million home in a purpose-built extension to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Scotland was also the center for a dose of El Sistema and Gustavo Dudamel’s Simón Bolívar Orchestra, getting children from a deprived housing estate actively involved in music-making.

Another change-the-world orchestra, Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan, played for the Pope in Rome and for the Promenaders in London.

The Association of British Orchestras and the Musicians’ Union put their heads together to create a set of principles outlining how managers and musicians should collaborate on performance review, professional development, and retirement planning.

In Germany, Pierre Boulez supported protests against Southwest German Radio’s plans to merge the SWR-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart.

Conductor Paul Daniel was named music director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine from the 2013-14 season. Maxime Tortelier, son of Yan Pascal Tortelier, was named young conductor in association for the Bournemouth Symphony. Matthias Pintscher was appointed music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande’s chief executive Miguel Esteban made a hurried departure just six months into a five-year contract, no reasons given.

In March, orchestras from North Korea and France joined forces in a concert in Paris conducted by the South Korean Chung Myung-Whun. The appearance of the Unhasu Orchestra marked the first time a North Korean orchestra had played in Europe.

There was concern for 84-year-old Kurt Masur when he broke his shoulder blade after losing his balance and falling from the podium during a concert by the Orchestre National de France in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

Another octogenarian conductor, 85-year-old Colin Davis, caused a flutter in the dovecots with an interview in which he expressed a view that “historically informed specialists” had scared many orchestras away from early music. “I think those people hijacked that repertory to give themselves something to do,” he said gamely.

Australia got a new orchestra in the form of the Perth Symphony, made up of 100 players assembled as needed, many said to be principal chairs in other of Australia’s orchestras, with young musicians invited to perform alongside the pros.

The London Philharmonic won the job of recording all 205 national anthems for the 2012 Olympics, arranged by Philip Sheppard, who was charged with avoiding the kind of embarrassment that marred a Kazakhstan medal ceremony where Sacha Baron Cohen’s spoof version of the national anthem was played by mistake.

The LPO was also booked for the opening of The Shard, Europe’s tallest building. With a ride in the elevator costing $140 for a family of four, there was some comment on the chosen inaugural piece: Fanfare for the Common Man.

NEW MUSIC
Sound and Music, an organization created out of a number of pre-existing U.K. music bodies, was roundly criticized by an open letter from senior composers and industry figures, followed by another from junior composers, prompting Arts Council England intervention and the appointment of a new chief.

On the first day of the 2012 Olympics the whole of the U.K. was invited to take part in a new work by Turner Prize-winning Martin Creed entitled Work No.1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes, which did what it said on the can, prompting spirited participation on everything from church bells to bicycle bells.

The BBC Proms pulled the stops out for new music in London’s Olympic year, with 22 world  premieres—the biggest number in recent years—and a further 14 U.K. or London premieres. There were 17 major BBC commissions, as well as an additional ten short compositions commissioned
as part of a John Cage celebration.

Among the world premieres were Bob Chilcott’s The Angry Planet, James MacMillan’s Credo, Thea Musgrave’s Loch Ness—a Postcard from Scotland, and Eric Whitacre’s Higher, Faster, Stronger, plus his arrangement of Imogen Heap’s The Listening Chair.

The London Symphony Orchestra was among artists performing music by Iamus, a computer programmed by boffins at the University of Malaga, with the release of a CD in September. Orchestra Chairman Lennox Mackenzie said, “By the end of it, I thought it was quite epic.”

It was not the only music with an unconventional parentage. The Proms season also saw the first ever BBC commission given to a nonhuman composer, a Wallace & Gromit concert offering My Concerto in Ee, Lad by animated plasticine model Wallace. The Daily Telegraph managed to run an interview with the composer, underlining the suspicion that madness was not confined to the hop, skip, and jump enthusiasts of the Olympic village.

PLACES
The U.K.’s music colleges were in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, the Royal Academy of Music’s finance director jailed for fraud and a former music director of Chetham’s School of Music arrested for alleged rape. On a happier note, Chetham’s gained a smart new home on six working  levels, describing itself as the western world’s first bespoke specialist music school building.

Wales Millennium Center chief Mark Taylor quit after just 16 months in the job, compounding the venue’s difficulty in keeping the hot seat filled. Its first chief managed to leave before the center even opened.

Birmingham’s Symphony Hall marked its 21st anniversary with a seven-month series of celebrations to mark its 7,500 events attended by ten million people.

Sydney Opera House chief executive Richard Evans quit after four years to run a company for tourists who like clambering over Sydney Harbor Bridge.

In Austria, the Vienna state prosecutor considered filing charges against a man suspected of removing the teeth of Johann Strauss, Jr., and Brahms from their graves.

WINNERS
Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw, 25, won first prize at the 2012 Kathleen Ferrier Competition. Russian violinist Andrey Baranov, 26, was first prizewinner of the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels.

New industry awards were launched by the Association of British Orchestras and Rhinegold Publishing, naming Intermusica chief Stephen Lumsden Artist Manager of the Year, Birmingham Symphony Hall Program Director Paul Keene Concert Hall Manager of the Year, and Sinfonia Cymru General Manager Sophie Lewis Orchestra Manager of the Year.

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