The Year in Music

By Leslie Kandell

TENORMANIA
The happening of the year was quite awful, from a purist view, but not at all uninteresting. As a prologue to the World Cup soccer game in Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium, a concert by three opera tenors was chosen over all other sports-tribute possibilities. It was seen or heard by 1.3 billion people in 71 countries, in bed at home and in airport bars.

“Tenormania” has become a word, “Nessun Dorma”  has pop-song status. Topping their smash success at Rome’s Caracalla Baths in 1990, the CD of which is still on the sales charts, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, with Zubin Mehta leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, belted out arias and pop tunes ranging from jewels to junk, delighting the crowd of 55,000. “Eve1ybody’s here, Melinda—everybody!” gushed one announcer, referring to Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, the Bushes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Bob Hope, and 0.]. Simpson’s lawyer, who declared, “These are the three most talented artists the world has ever created.”

The scene was quite different when Mehta led the Sarajevo Symphony with Carreras as a soloist in that war-torn city’s devastated library. For this performance of Mozart’s Requiem, chorus members came from the battle lines in fatigues, some instruments were damaged, and there was a brief lull in sniper fire, as if in tribute to the human spirit.

CLASSICAL RADIO
“No Longer Very Clear” is not only the title of a John Ashbery poem, but a metaphor for the classical-music radio scene. In honor of its 50th anniversary, New York’s endangered WNYC gave itself a benefit, for which it commissioned settings of the Ashbery poem by Laurie Anderson, Milton Babbitt, John Corigliano, Anthony Davis, Philip Glass, Morton Gould, Peter Schickele, and Joan Tower—to name a few.

The firebell in the night had been ready to ring for classical radio, and did so with a vengeance after the sudden midnight switch of WNCN, a New York commercial station, to a rock format and the demise of WQXR’s venerable music-talk program “The Listening Room.” Stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco have also “flipped,” and guest services in a Dallas hotel take three days to come up with the classical station’s correct ID. In the words of WQXR Program Director Tom Bartunek, “Old-line stations promoted the life of the soul and mind. Now music is a sonic prop—business sees it as a commodity.”

Factors that saved certain stations were due, as ever, to the strength of individual commitment. (1) Trusts: Boston’s WCRB became part of a trust assuring its future when its owner Ted Jones died. (2) Family interest: When the Bullitt sisters sold most of Seattle’s KING holdings, they kept the classical FM station. (3) Organized complaints: When Chicago’s WFMT was sold, listeners went to the newspapers and the FCC, making such a fuss that it was given to an educational-television channel, where it got back into the black.

OPERA
Overheard: “You know there’s a recession on when they play La Bohème all the time.” Opera America shows a lot of regional Turandots and even more Barber of Sevilles. The most charming Bohème, however, was a PBS telecast taped in Sydney, with the Paris setting moved up to the 1950s, and flip beatnik types with supple, accurate young voices. We never get a Bohème this sassy and lovable, and yet this ambience is exactly what the composer visualized.

Big grants are clown, private giving is up, and the Metropolitan Opera is in relatively good financial health, continuing to commission. It plans a revival of John Corigliano’s lavish Ghosts of Versailles, and finally produced Shostakovich’s daring, avant-verismo Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Some of the latter’s singers had already arrived in New York earlier in the season to appear in City Opera’s new production of Borodin’s Prince Igor.

Divas: Mirella Freni in Adriana Lecouvreur was described as “always honest onstage” by Opera Monthly, which said of Dawn Upshaw in Dialogues of the Carmelites that “in the lyric soprano fach she has no peer.” Hildegard Behrens, lithe as a young dancer, sang a couple of absolutely outstanding Elektras, one on a telecast. Andrea Gruber was an “impressively full if somewhat unrefined” Aida, and also sang Elsa in Seattle Opera’s Lohengrin.

Death in Venice indicated that Britten operas belong in a smaller venue than the Met. But some operas need a larger house, which is what some—not all—thought about the Swedish Folkopera’s version of Don Carlos at BAM, stripped down in staging and libretto. Others liked its intensity. Tippett’s King Priam received its first American hearing at the San Francisco Opera Center. Andrew Litton led a Falstaff at Saint Louis that starred David Evitts in an especially sympathetic portrait of the old fool. In a push for Hispanic audiences, Los Angeles Music Center ventured into the zarzuela repertoire (which Domingo clips into so beautifully) with El Gato Montes, which was reportedly “more than a little like Puccini.” Chicago Lyric Opera’s Wozzeck was well clone.

NEW MUSIC
We are recrafting our view of what newness is. Our newest music goes back to old—witness the rage for chant and the success of Arvo Pärt’s style. America is drawing on the cultural tradition Dvorák advocated: jazz, rock, folk, and varied generations of pop. The dotted note seems to be fading out with serialism, and more pieces sound as if they want listeners. Alfred Schnittke said that the artist’s greatest task is “to influence the world by merging with it.” His weird “poly-stylistic” music, which is creeping into the repertory, explores the ugly and vulgar, as passages of rumbling murk give way to raucous tangos; but there are tunes, allusions to Bach chorales, and folk tales—something for everyone, almost.

Judith Weir’s problematic Blond Eckhert was the talk of Santa Fe’s opera festival. Based on an unpleasant German folk tale, its score draws from Weir’s native Scottish influences, but also—depending on who’s telling it—Bartók, Messiaen, and others. Chicago Lyric Opera ‘s composer training/showcase center offered Bruce Saylor’s setting of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending. Mixed reception for the unexpectedly European-style score, but project approved.

Cello concertos for Yo-Yo Ma turn premieres into box-office events. A Boston Symphony concert at Tanglewood attracted 13,600 for a John Harbison cello commission, which showed the composer in control of his jazz-inflected, percussion-heavy harmonic idiom. Christopher Rouse’s elegiac Cello Concerto, commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, meditated on death with “marvelous effects.”

Mario Davidovsky and Louis Andriessen (a Dutch composer not too well known here) shared the composer- in-residence post at Tanglewood; the Contemporary Music Festival featured two Andriessen premieres. His longer pieces, strong, steady, and motoric, benefit from their visual aids. Bang On A Can All-Stars played a short piece at the festival’s opening concert. Bang On A Can has its own festival in New York, which has elevated its plucky composer-virtuosos from their “downtown” beginnings to sold-out happiness at “uptown’s” venerable Lincoln Center.

A preview article on the premiere of John Adams’s “dazzling” Violin Concerto by the Minnesota Orchestra reportedly drew 2,500 phone calls. In his El Dorado for orchestra, Adams mixes minimalism and late Romanticism. Leonard Slatkin, who introduced Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra in Saint Louis, recently began to tour with it. Mel Powell’s Settings for Small Orchestra was commissioned jointly by orchestras in New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Saint Paul.

Having launched the New Juilliard Ensemble for new music, the indefatigable Joel Sachs continues his death-defying explorations of such composers as Morton Feldman and Gyorgy Kurtag in concerts by his other group, Continuum. He also organizes the conservatory’s annual Focus! Festival, which this year was devoted to the fusion of Western and world musics. Pro Musica Nipponia was invited by Kurt Masur to give the American premiere of Minoru Miki’s Symphony for Two Worlds, composed for the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Masur’s “other” orchestra. Ned Rorem’s English Horn Concerto, which Masur and the New York Philharmonic took on tour, was dubbed “spacious, ambling, tonally centered.” Calgary’s quadrennial organ festival awarded a prize for interpretation of Gunther Schuller’s new Organ Concerto.

NEW LEADERS, NEW SPACES
Beverly Sills was unanimously elected to the chairmanship of Lincoln Center. The former soprano is the first woman and first performer to hold that post; she succeeds George Weissman. Leonard Slatkin, who has done so much for the Saint Louis Symphony, will follow Mstislav Rostropovich as director of Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony, and is expected to make the influence of American music felt. Eiji Oue of the Erie Philharmonic follows Edo de Waart at the Minnesota Orchestra.

The Washington Opera has appointed Plácido Domingo to succeed Martin Feinstein as artistic director. Joseph Horowitz is the new artistic adviser and executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Nigel Redden is now at the Santa Fe Opera, Lawrence Leighton Smith is headed from the Louisville Orchestra to Yale’s School of Music, and Omus Hirshbein left New York’s 92nd Street Y for the NEA. The ever-inventive Bobby McFerrin is the new Creative Chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Some of this year’s departures were on the noisy side. Gian Carlo Menotti left his Charleston Spoleto Festival in a huff, but with emendations it stayed afloat, to the relief of those involved. Not a good year for Menotti, he was later fired from the Rome Opera. The Paris Opera dismissed Myung-Whun Chung, appointing three substitutes, but a court ruled they had no right to do so. The matter is settled only in the legal sense. The Metropolitan Opera’s Battle battle exploded when Kathleen Battle was publicly fired during rehearsals for being too difficult to work with. Dishers and watchers were all agog as the soprano denied that she had behaved in other than lamblike fashion.

Quieter departures: Lorin Maazel will leave the Pittsburgh Symphony for the life of a composer. Marin Alsop will leave the Long Island Philharmonic—she has several other conducting posts. After 25 years, the Cleveland Quartet will disband at the end of 1994-95, as first violinist William Preucil has been appointed concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra. Charles Kaufman will step down as president of the Mannes School.

Two new halls, built largely with private funds, have acousticians itching to iron out quirks after the season. Glyndebourne’s new hall, which seats 1,200 (instead of the former 300) and cost almost $50 million, is imposing. Tanglewood’s, about the same size but costing $10 million, is sweet. Sony President Norio Ohga, whose gift was biggest, named the hall for his friend Seiji Ozawa. Timely adjustments seem probable, though each has requirements that made faithful copying of other halls impossible.

Barcelona’s opera theater was destroyed by fire, but plans to rebuild are mired in factional struggles. After an 18-year delay due to financial woes, the Finnish National Opera has a new house but may have to lay off some musicians, to the dismay of all. The Philadelphia Arts Bank is a new commercial space with performing theater and rehearsal hall.

ORCHESTRAS
It’s hard for orchestras to make plans when they’re not sure of finances, and how—or how much—to seek out younger listeners and those of other cultures. Even the dwindling regular audience is tentative about committing to full subscriptions. Orchestras in Tulsa and Tampa are among those who have asked players for concessions. Los Angeles and San Antonio have tried producing works by Hispanic composers, which did more to close the funding gap than the audience one.

As one player from Israel put it, “Selling tickets is something that if we wanted to, we would do something else.” Herewith some ticket-selling gimmicks: For two weeks, people in Paris could buy a ticket and get another, courtesy of the city; 66,000 were sold, mainly to young people. The concept concert, focusing on a theme with art (the American Symphony has been a trendsetter, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic taking up the idea). Famous love poems read by noted actors, preceding a concert of “romantic” music. Mostly Mozart Meet-the-Artist theme-menu dinners preceding the concert. A Florida Philharmonic audio-visual series with a short rehearsal and commentary before the performance. Call a number at Lincoln Center and hear a one-minute sound bite of upcoming Great Performers programs.

Innovative program notes: Richard E. Rodda includes a timeline in Dallas Symphony programs. Beethoven was born the year Messiah was first heard in New York, one sees, and Benjamin Lees, whose Echoes of Normandy had its world premiere by the Dallas Symphony under Andrew Litton, was born 20 years before D-Day. (You could spend intermission glued to the program.)

FESTIVALS
Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, bloody but unbowed, survived the angry departure of its founder Gian Carlo Menotti, and the death of his warrior/ publicist Tom Kerrigan. The administration reorganized, made concrete plans to reduce the debt, and crowded 110 events into 12 days, down from 17. Fidelio, moved up in time to a 20th-century war, looked a little underdone, but-the silver lining-it was also under budget. The Westminster Choir is the chorus pool, so in addition to its own concerts, it turned operatic in Fidelio as well as in Handel’s Acis and Galatea.

The Mostly Mozart muddle: Last summer’s programs hewed to the original—mostly Mozart. Trying, like the words of the old round, to make new friends but keep the old, Lincoln Center will not close the financially ailing seven-week festival, as was rumored, but reduce it to four, merging it with a “multi-disciplinary” festival to be developed. Former New York Times music critic John Rockwell will be in charge, with Nigel Redden his associate.

The Waterloo Festival’s Russian programs had trouble drawing crowds, even with André Watts, but Ojai managed all right with its usual contemporary fare. Atlanta’s National Black Arts Festival highlighted Anthony Davis; Jeffrey Mumford’s as the air softens in dusklight won three performances with the Atlanta Symphony.

James Levine triumphed in his first Bayreuth Ring cycle, with Deborah Polaski, Spoleto’s compelling Elektra, as Brünnhilde, and Siegfried Jerusalem as Loge. (Excellent choice.) In Salzburg, Jerry Hadley starred in The Rake’s Progress, a role he repeated at the Chicago Lyric Opera (though Renée Fleming sang Anne Truelove instead of Salzburg’s Sylvia McNair). Peter Sellars did his own inimitable thing to Oedipus Rex. American music must be coming into its own: Tobias Picker set up a weeklong festival in Bucharest, which was recorded by the Romanian Composers Union. The closet opened wide at New York’s Gay Games cultural festival this year, with concert repertoire by John Corigliano, Ned Rorem, Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Britten, Barber, Copland, and younger composers. Performers at this astonishing event included the Gay and Lesbian Baroque Orchestra and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.

FOCUS WEEKENDS
This format is gaining interest: Staring Friday night, it offers performances, demonstrations, lectures, exhibits, and films about a particular composer and his era, giving audiences a chance to hear the whole thing, buy the T-shirt, and be educated, without too much expenditure. “The Russian Stravinsky,” the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s examination of folk elements influencing Stravinsky, also featured the Pokrovsky Dance Company, a troupe that re-enacted peasant dances figuring in Le Sacre du printemps and Les Noces. (In the lobby, vodka was free, but soda was $2.)

Earlier in the season, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a weekend called “Dvorák: From the New World,” which had been the theme of summer 1993’s Bard Music Festival. Dennis Russell Davies led the Brooklyn Philharmonic in works of Dvorák and his ever-so-much lesser contemporaries. Meanwhile, the American Symphony at Bard moved to Schumann, with musicians performing a spectrum of his works while psychiatrists tackled questions of his exact species of madness. Director Leon Botstein presided despite ill health, the death of regular guest Rudolf Firkusny, and adjacent Woodstock ‘94.

EARLY MUSIC
Really early music is the latest thing; Gregorian chants recorded by Spanish Benedictine monks top the sales charts, reflecting an interest in refined vocal tone, and hold the accompaniment please. All this purity evidently lends a welcome sense of removal from the in-your-face grind of society’s ills. After chants, Charpentier’s French baroque opera Medée is relatively modern. Like previous successes of the Paris-based Les Arts Florissants, it was exquisitely produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with only its director William Christie noting its eclecticism. Some of its members also performed at the Berkeley Festival, as did gambist Jordi Savall and his “Hesperion XX.”

Anonymous 4 continues its stunning concert and recording schedule with such eruditions as “Music from the Codex Calixtinus.” Utrecht’s early-music festival featured music of Orlandus Lassus in this 400th year of his death.

THE COMPLEAT . . .
When Vincent La Selva realized it was seven years till the new century, and that Verdi had written 28 operas, he mounted “Viva Verdi! ,” the complete oeuvre, chronologically—four fully staged freebies in Central Park each summer by his New York Grand Opera. Once under way (and presented with the city’s Handel Medallion by the mayor), he saw the perils of early operas that aren’t very good, and upcoming blockbusters with high-budget processionals and pyramids. Too late to look back. In 2001, the centennial of Verdi’s death, he will lead the Requiem in January—indoors.

EDUCATION
Pianist Vladimir Feltsman’s dream of a public school for musically gifted primary-grade children has come to pass at New York’s Abraham Goodman House; Columbia University’s Teachers College will help coordinate the curriculum. San Francisco has an Elementary Music Festival, with children drawn from the area’s 10,350 who study with the 13 assigned teachers. (One hopes that none of the kids are so arithmetically inclined as to compute that dispiriting ratio.)

At Carnegie Hall’s Solti Orchestral Project, which cost $500,000, the maestro gave master classes, workshops, and performances for conductors and players; intrusive video cameras prompted one reporter to call it a showcase for the teacher. Marilyn Horne’s Foundation for the Future, enhanced by her Carnegie Hall workshops and 60th-birthday gala, is to “support, encourage and preserve the art of the vocal recital.” She doesn’t like chatting up the audience, but has discovered it helps. Wynton Marsalis used Tanglewood, where Sony is persona grata, to make a series of Sony educational videos with the student orchestra and an audience of children bussed in.

THINGS JUST TURNED UP
Berlioz burned his Messe Solennelle, which he used as a sketchbook for later works, but a copy found in an Antwerp Church in 1991 has begun to make the rounds in Europe and the United States. The Boston Symphony took the entire Tanglewood Festival Chorus on its Japan tour to introduce it there. Six piano sonatas of Haydn—or perhaps a forger—also turned up. Debunkers are currently winning the inevitable scholars’ dispute.

Bach, Wagner, and others received great exposure in 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, a film which is just that, with Colm Feore portraying the eccentric pianist over music recorded by Gould himself.

Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla was semi-staged on tour by the New Opera of Moscow. If the production left something to be desired, the rich Russian voices were a treat. Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi was satisfactorily unearthed by Eve Queler and the Opera Orchestra of New York. Kurt Masur’s finest performances yet of American music with the New York Philharmonic were in a series of works by Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Brant called “The American Eccentrics.”

PRIZES, HONORS
Big ones: Gunther Schuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Of Reminiscences and Reflections, commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, and also won a lifetime achievement award from BMI. Another lifetime achievement award, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, went to Henri Dutilleux, and Morton Gould was honored by the Kennedy Center. Quincy Jones took Sweden’s Polar Music prize. Toru Takemitsu won Louisville’s Grawemeyer for his clarinet-and-orchestra Fantasma/Cantos. Garrick Ohlsson won the Avery Fisher, soprano Patricia Racette the Marian Anderson, Theresa Santiago the Naumburg vocal award, clarinetist Igor Begelman the Ima Hogg Competition, conductor Roben Spano the Seaver award. The Indianapolis and six related awards were won by Canadian violinist Juliette Kang.

MILESTONES
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra marked its 250th season. The New Haven Symphony celebrated its centennial by commissioning and introducing Ezra Laderman’s Eighth Symphony. The Minnesota Orchestra is 90. Orchestras in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Oslo are 75, as is the Manhattan School of Music, where Kurt Masur conducted a student concert in tribute. Janos Starker and Victoria de los Angeles are 70; her recital shows her vocal artistry is still to be admired. Van Cliburn is 60, and his tour was less successful. Perhaps Elly Ameling’s farewell recital will be the first of several.

OBITUARIES
Last year the music world recorded the loss of composers Witold Lutostawski, William Bergsma, Alexei Haieff, Nicolas Flagello, Leon Theremin, Vittorio Rieti, Lejaren Hiller; conductor Roben Black; pianists Artur Balsam and Rudolf Firkusny; soprano Lucia Popp, tenor Giulio Gari, baritone Thomas Palmer; violinist Daniel Majeske, violist Rosemary Glyde; opera director Vlado Habunek; musicologist Paul C. Echols; music publisher David Huntley; philanthropists Avery Fisher and Alice Tully.

Leslie Kandell has chronicled the MA Directory’s Year in Music feature since 1986 Among the innumerable publications to which she has contributed articles on music are the New York Times, Musical America magazine, Opera News, American Record Guide, Stagebill, Symphony magazine, and Chorus magazine. She also writes for the Berkshire Eagle (Lenox, Mass.) and other newspapers.