Year in Music

By Leslie Kandell

Exactly half a millennium ago, Columbus reached the New World. This year’s most startling musical tribute, parallel to that event in more ways than one, was the arrival of minimalism at the Metropolitan Opera. One of its first commissions and premieres since moving to Lincoln Center 25 years ago was The Voyage, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, in what Glass called “the spirit of exploration and discovery.” The colorful sets and plot combined an Ice Age spaceship with the Santa Maria and the Statue of Liberty; the music, dominating the singers, extended Glass’s repetitive style to include hints of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and Milhaud’s spiky harmonies in orchestration heavy on brass and percussion. The premiere was broadcast live to radio audiences throughout the United States and Canada.

In a happy confluence, Milhaud’s centennial inspired a flurry of performances, most grandiose being his ambitious, difficult Christoph Colombe in its first full U.S. staging. There have been a few one-act versions, and San Francisco had a semi-staged production, but Brooklyn College Opera Company tackled the whole 28-scene, 48-role, multi-orchestra, large-chorus enchilada, presenting it first in Albany. Milhaud’s prodigious, neglected oeuvre was also honored in a marathon day at New York’s Merkin Hall. Alberto Franchetti’s 1892 Cristofaro Colombo, with its best act set on the Santa Maria, was unearthed by the Greater Miami Opera.

Rossini’s bicentennial was on his 50th birthday, which fell, like Frederic’s in The Pirates of Penzance, on February 29. Beyond the three overtures that were everywhere in concerts and on radio, beyond Il Barbiere di Siviglia, we heard Semiramide too, as well as La Donna del Lago at La Scala, Otello in Chicago, Guillaume Tell and Ermione in San Francisco and Omaha, Armida in Tulsa, Il Viaggio à Reims and L’ ltaliana in Algeri in Central City. Marilyn Home is the standard-bearer for the Rossini resurgence, drawing spectacular acclaim for her bel canto and mezzo coloratura in trouser roles, particularly Arsace in Semiramide, which she sang in the United States and Europe. Her Rossini recordings, and those of the young, very exciting mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, Musical America’s 1993 Vocalist of the Year, were charted best-sellers, and her programs of serious arias were fast sellouts, like Bartoli’s. Bartoli was called the real thing and a hot property, while Home’s reviews claimed that if Rossini hadn’t existed, she would have invented him.

OPERA
To mark its silver anniversary in Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera presented John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, its first commission—along with The Voyage—since moving to Lincoln Center. Based on William Hoffman’s virtually total rewrite of the last of Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy, the long, lavish, high-tech fantasy veered between drama and spoof, with props, singers, and time frames suspended along with audience disbelief. This lyrical, eclectic “grand opera buffa” was nationally televised—a wonderful free gift to those who couldn’t get to the Met—and a video of the production was released by Deutsche Grammophon.

Two visiting Russian companies, St. Petersburg National and the Kirov, brought nearly identical repertory, to their mutual dismay. Both offered Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades; St. Petersburg did Rimsky’s rarely seen Le Coq d’Or, and the Kirov, Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel, a co-production with Covent Garden. The voices received good reviews, but productions—particularly St. Petersburg’s after the loss of government subsidy since the Soviet Union collapse—suffered from shaky sets and shabby props. The goal of both troupes was enhanced reputation, which might offset touring expenses.

Elektra had several productions: At the Met (with Otto Schenk’s massive, steeply raked stage), Hildegard Behrens withdrew after one performance, to be impressively replaced by Penelope Danner. Deborah Polaski returned to opera to take the role in Spoleto’s stark, black-and-white version (designed by Carlo Diappi), whose bizarre props intensified the focus on demented family relationships. Helga Dernesch was Klytamnestra—confined to a wheel-chair, and much different from her turn opposite Gwyneth Jones in San Francisco the previous fall. At Chicago Lyric Opera, Eva Marton, fresh from her Salzburg triumph under Solti as the Dyer’s wife, was Elektra to Leonie Rysanek’s Klytamnestra. Contrasting Parsifals were seen at the Met, with Siegfried Jerusalem and Waltraud Meier heading an enviable cast, and in Houston, in a quirky, kabuki-like staging by Robert Wilson.

Britten’s operas are enjoying attention on stage and in recording. Bernard Haitink conducted Peter Grimes at Covent Garden, with Anthony Rolfe-Johnson and Felicity Lott. In Colin Graham’s vision at St. Louis, Central Park was the dangerous magical forest of Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Glyndebourne, just before its building was demolished, mounted an affecting Death in Venice with Robert Tear. In the Met’s powerful Billy Budd, Thomas Hampson and James Morris sang with nuance and inflection. Opera Colorado put on a trilogy of the chamber operas: The Prodigal Son, Curlew River, and The Burning Fiery Furnace. The San Diego, Long Beach, and Berkshire companies won converts for The Rape of Lucretia, as did Glimmerglass for The Turn of the Screw.

New York City Opera’s General Director Christopher Keene says he wants to make opera as popular as baseball; proportionally, in the classical-music world, it is a contender. Money problems forced cancellation of the company’s annual Janácek revival, but Busoni’s compelling, orchestra-centered Doktor Faust had its first professional U.S. staging. Nicolas Muni’s updated Traviata, with Germont offering Violetta a cash bribe in her penthouse, was judged irritating.

After a tortuous journey, Aulis Sallinen’s violent saga Kullervo received its world premiere in Los Angeles’ Music Center with the Finnish National Opera, Jorma Hynninen in the title role. In contrast to Chicago’s Elektra, which Hackney designed, Kullervo’s voices were more admired than its production.

The premiere of William Bolcom’s McTeague, based on the 1924 film Greed and directed by Robert Altman, is part of Chicago’s project “toward the 21st century.” Anthony Davis’s small, jazz-inflected Tania, based on Patty Hearst’s caper with the Symbionese Liberation Army—remember that, anyone?—opened at Philadelphia’s American Music Theater; straddling the atonality fence, it was called “assured and convincing.” OperaDelaware introduced Libby Larsen’s warm but eerie A Wrinkle in Time, with acoustic instruments.

A possibly prophetic Tosca was telecast in Europe from the three locations in Rome where its action was supposed to have taken place. It took two days to transport sets and cast (headed by Catherine Malfitano and Plácido Domingo), so there were extended periods between acts.

Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim were among conductors appearing in Paris’s busiest season in years; Wozzeck was a highlight. Berlin’s Komische Oper ended a 20-year run of Offenbach’s satirical Bluebeard.

NEW MUSIC
The trend is moving from crossover to blur. John Harbison, taking over Tanglewood’s contemporary music week during Oliver Knussen’s summer sabbatical, attempted a crossover of a geographic nature—East Coast meets West—with the Kronos Quartet and the boldly versatile California Ear Unit as New England guests. The music, which included a rare performance of Schoenberg’s imposing Violin Concerto, was inspired by politics, science, rock, and late greats. Events under the misleading rubric “festival” presented not the newest music, but the almost, or “rather,” new. Boston’s first New Music Harvest (late in 1991) featured the Boston Symphony in the premiere of Ned Rorem’s Swords and Plowshares, a Whitman setting; it was antediluvian—not to say antebellum-contemporary. Sir Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden, knotting jazz to Shakespeare, had a deft staging at Boston University, and Collage played complex chamber works by MIT composers.

Brooklyn Academy’s Next Wave season opened with a quasi-operatic theater piece about Frida Kahlo (Diego Rivera’s wife) introduced last year in Philadelphia, and featured a revival of Philip Glass’s 1976 Einstein on the Beach, as well as a Glass orchestral program under Dennis Russell Davies. Juilliard’s Focus week looked at the American ‘80s, though not necessarily at their most charming or exciting compositions.

Individual events with dash: Life with an Idiot, a satiric opera by Alfred Schnittke, first heard in Amsterdam under Rostropovich , who proved an enthusiastic apologist; the new Violin Concerto by Elliott Carter, Musical America’s 1993 Composer of the Year; Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’AuDela, a posthumous premiere with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, which commissioned it; Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Double Concerto, introduced by the Louisville Orchestra with soloists Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson. The AIDS Quilt Songbook, conceived by William Parker, combined poetry with songs composed by Lee Hoiby, William Bolcom, and other established names.

Joan Tower’s energetic Violin Concerto, introduced by the Utah Symphony under Joseph Silverstein, runs through a sound spectrum from forceful to shimmering. Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony gave the premiere of Henri Lazarof’s virtuosic Second Symphony. Leslie Bassett’s Concerto for Symphony Orchestra, first heard with the Detroit Symphony, was termed beautiful, with moods ranging from haunting to triumphant.

ORCHESTRAS
Around the country they stalk the elusive audience, with pre-concert lectures, recitals, rush-hour concerts, trimmed series, casual concerts, public forums, lower top ticket prices, free child admission, and tie-ins with concurrent art exhibits. A study commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra League found that in the past 20 years, the cost of enticing one ticket buyer had climbed from $5 to $26. A Canadian arts-consumer profile showed two-thirds of the classical concert audience to be over 45. Seven-tenths of the study sample group bought records and tapes; main reasons for not attending concerts were expense and being busy at home. Of those who did go, two-thirds decided on the basis of repertory, while the rest went to hear the soloist.

The New York Philharmonic is celebrating its 150th year; it added series for “the young, the rushed, the casual, the single and the inquisitive,” and programmed masterworks that the orchestra had introduced in its early years. The opening of its second season under Kurt Masur, Musical America’s 1993 Musician of the Year, was carried again by public television, and the Museum of Television and Radio is mounting a season-long exhibit. Last year’s playing, particularly of Britten’s War Requiem, had new vigor and optimism. Though part of their South American tour was canceled, they recouped by playing four Tchaikovsky concerts in Carnegie Hall. Leonard Bernstein’s conducting scores were donated to the Philharmonic archives.

The Vienna Philharmonic, also 150, “visited Carnegie Hall, bringing an exhibit of photos, letters, and possessions of Brahms, Beethoven, and others.

The NYPO signed a four-year contract with the almost unique feature that both sides seem satisfied. Other contract agreements involved the Atlanta Symphony, which got no raise, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, whose players donated seven concerts.

David Zinman is using his sense of humor to attract audiences to the Baltimore Symphony. Interviewing James Galway about new music, he played straight man with a question about audience-building. The canny Irishman remarked, ‘‘I’m bein’ slowly convinced y’ll hafta pay them.”

Succeeding Catherine Comet as director of the American Symphony, Leon Botstein is linking some of his programs with museum exhibits on surrealism and American modernism.

Christoph Eschenbach took the Houston Symphony on its first European tour; this orchestra, which has begun radio broadcasts while others have cut back on them, has a new summer home in Woodlands, Texas.

FESTIVALS
After Hurricane Hugo and the management wars, which Spoleto advance notices called “the storms of nature and man,” Director Gian Carlo Menotti remained in charge, but the festival was somewhat downsized because of late planning. Chamber music, genially emceed by Charles Wadsworth, was an artistic and box-office success as usual. Tanglewood came up with glitzy stars and moments of great beauty. Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa was recovering from an injury the first two weeks, and he left early to open Japan’s 11-day new Saito Kinen Festival; without him—and Bernstein—things were oddly tranquil. Highlights were Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky film score, Alfred Brendel’s traversal of Beethoven’s piano concertos, and YoYo Ma’s evening of Bach cello suites.

Aspen had a French flavor, paying homage to Milhaud on his centennial with Le Pauvre Matelot and Les Malheurs d’Orphée.

Gérard Mortier seems to be freeing Salzburg of domination by the late Herbert von Karajan. Peter Sellars staged Messiaen’s St. François d’Assise, a mammoth mix of bombast and birdsong said to resemble a sophisticated lightshow. José van Dam took the role he had created at its 1983 Paris premiere. Graz’s month-long Styriarte Festival centered on music related to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. San Francisco’s Wet Ink new-music festival featured the talented composer-pianist George Benjamin and the highly popular but maligned Kronos Quartet, accused in a review of “punkoid mountebankery.”

CYCLES
The Mozart Bicentennial arrived at closure, mopping up with a spate of operas—including several U.S. premieres—from his teenage and pre-teen years, heard in concert at Alice Tully Hall. It took 19 months and groups from around the country performing in Lincoln Center’s 11 concert spaces to get through Mozart’s 835 works; no one claims to have heard the whole thing—nor to doubt the depth and versatility of Mozart’s genius. Gerard Schwarz and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra completed their first national tour, with respectable reviews.

The 92nd Street Y Schubertiade, derailed last year, was back on track, avoiding the prodigious juvenalia that had shrunk earlier audience counts. This instalment of the Compleat Schubert had better-known lieder; Hermann Prey was an illuminating interpreter as vocalist, speaker, and teacher.

The Bard Festival honed in on Richard Strauss and his contemporaries, complementing its events with a revival of a 1938 Düsseldorf exhibit shown last year in Los Angeles, now called “Banned by the Nazis: Degenerate Music.”

A week of Shostakovich concerts and films was offered in Troy, with Yvgeny Yevtushenko, musicologist Harlow Robinson, and the composer’s son Maxim as speakers. Performing groups were the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Manhattan String Quartet, and the St. Cecilia Chamber Orchestra.

The Little Orchestra Society’s chapter of Vivaldi’s Venice featured The Seine Rejoicing, a cantata in praise, ironically, of Paris.

EARLY MUSIC
Lully’s 1676 opera Atys had a gracious, gorgeous staging by Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Founded and led by William Christie, this French group’s young singers and period chamber orchestra added sparkle to scholarship, in this production as well as in concerts of Charpentier and Purcell. The opera was part of BAM’s three-year French Baroque project.

One might guess that this year’s Berkeley Festival and Exhibition would concentrate on the quincentennial, but in fact, the week of concerts, symposia, and classes focused on Bach and—not unexpectedly—making connections in present-day performance practice. Quincentennial concerts were given by, among others, the Waverly Consort and Boston Camerata, showing music of Central America influenced by Spain, and raising the question of what we know about performance practice of 500 years ago.

OLD FRIENDS
An 1831 Schumann piano concerto had its first hearing (since the composer played it) at Oberlin College. It was performed by Semara Rutstein, who likened it to later Romantic concertos. For the Unveiling of the Beethoven Monument, a Liszt cantata highly praised in its time—though not recently—was performed by the Indianapolis Symphony under Raymond Leppard.

Donizetti’s 1839 II Duca d’Alba, finished by a pupil in 1882, had its first full U.S. staging at Spoleto. Only some of the arias were vintage Donizetti, but the original sets, which were used, were stunning evocations of 16th-century Belgium. Stefan Wolpe would have been 90, and devotees of his thorny, demanding music are becoming aggressive. Wolpe evenings were presented: ballet music, a cantata on Jewish themes, as well as a variety of piano and vocal music. Continuum, North/South Consonance, Parnassus, and the Wolpe Society are among groups into the cause.

Ten years after Glenn Gould’s death he was honored by a daylong retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. Britain’s new Classic FM station aired a Gould tribute with music and interviews.

NEW FACES, NEWS OF SPACES
Hugh Wolff has become music director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; his former New Jersey Symphony post has not been filled, but Zdenek Macal will be musical advisor for the next two years. Samuel Wong went to the Ann Arbor Symphony. David Shifrin, new leader of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, has taken on the onerous task of stemming the tide of disappearing subscribers. Personnel and repertory choices of his predecessor, Fred Sherry, angered more than a few, and Sherry’s stepping down is taken as a call for less 20th-century music. Isidore Cohen was succeeded by Ida Kavafian as violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio.

Marin Alsop now directs the Cabrillo Festival, Heiichiro Ohyama is director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Marcus Overton is Spoleto’s executive director, replacing Nigel Redden. John DeMain resigned as Houston Grand Opera’s music director, while Joel Revzen successfully took over the Berkshire Opera.

Marta Casals Istomin assumed the presidency of the Manhattan School; Bruce MacCombie left Juilliard to succeed Phyllis Curtin as dean of Boston University’s School of the Arts. Carol Birkhead heads the American Symphony Orchestra League; Philip Brunelle was appointed to the National Arts Council; Jane Moss is Lincoln Center’s new programming director.

The Rose Building, Lincoln Center’s first new space in over 20 years, has a spacious 268-seat auditorium called the Walter Reade Theater. Avery Fisher Hall has undergone acoustical renovation so that musicians can hear each other better onstage; two years of acoustical improvements were completed at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, affecting aisles, walls, and floors.

The estate of Leonard Bernstein will found an educational center named for him, which will be a division of the Nashville Institute for the Arts. Charles Ives’s birthplace in Danbury, Connecticut, became a museum, with memorabilia and a concert salon.

AWARDS, GRANTS
When the dust settled after the Pulitzer prizefight, the board (not made up of musicians) had rejected the jury’s sole candidate—Ralph Shapey’s Concerto Fantastique—and insisted the jury submit an alternative, which was promptly chosen. It was Wayne Peterson’s The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark. The incident was the first in the board’s history; it claimed that the Peterson was more accessible and that it is not bound to rubber-stamp the jury’s choice. The jury (George Perle, Roger Reynolds, and Harvey Sollberger) was not amused; Peterson said he had mixed feelings.

The Grawemeyer Award went to Krzysztof Penderecki’s Adagio for Large Orchestra. Mstislav Rostropovich, who announced he will leave the National Symphony in 1994, won three medals: the Kennedy Center, for his contribution to the performing arts, the Four Freedoms (of the Roosevelt Institute), and Barcelona’s Premi Internacional Catalunya. Paul McCartney won the first Polar Music Prize, given by the Swedish Academy of Music. Shulamit Ran’s Symphony won the top Kennedy Center Friedheim Award; Richard Wernick and George Tsontakis came in second and third. Marilyn Horne and Robert Shaw received the National Medal of Arts; Awadagin Pratt won the Naumburg piano competition; and soprano Deborah Voigt, the Richard Tucker Award. Pianist Laura Dahl is the first person outside of politics to receive Germany’s Humboldt Foundation Scholarship.

Grammy awards went to Leonard Slatkin’s recording of Barber’s Symphony No. 1 and Piano Concerto with John Browning and the St. Louis Symphony, Elliott Carter’s four string quartets with the Juilliard, Corigliano’s First Symphony with Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony.

The Juilliard School received a $10 million grant from the Aaron Diamond Foundation. The Copland Fund will award grants to support new recordings of contemporary music. AT&T underwrote the Houston Symphony’s encore performances of 20th-century American music.

MILESTONE BIRTHDAYS
The recent performances of pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Musical America’s 1993 Instrumentalist of the Year, who is 100, convey deep musical understanding. Miss Alice Tully turned 90, as did Max Rudolf and Joaquin Rodrigo; Georg Solti and Rudolf Firkusny are 80. Lou Harrison is 75; so is Dorothy DeLay, in whose honor Aspen commissioned three violin concertos. Renata Tebaldi, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Francis Thorne are 70; Mstislav Rostropovich is 65, the Central City Opera Company is 60, and the American Symphony Orchestra League 50. Handel’s Messiah is now 250.

OBITUARIES
This year the music world recorded the loss of composers John Cage, Ernst Krenek, William Mathias, Olivier Messiaen, Astor Piazzolla, and William Schuman; conductors James Aliferis , Charles Groves , Andrew Schenk, William R. Strickland, Werner Torkanowsky, and Roger Wagner; pianists Andor Foldes, Robert Goldsand, John Kirkpatrick, William Masselos, Franz Rupp, Vitya Vronsky-Babin; organists Leonard Raver and Skinner Chavez-Melo; singer and guitarist Richard Dyer-Bennet, soprano Stella Roman, mezzo Helen Olheim, tenor David Eisler, baritone Geraint Evans; Allen Sven Oxenburg, founder of the American Opera Society; Joseph Patelson, of Patelson’s music store in New York; program annotator Leonard Burkat; journalist Quaintance Eaton. Paderewski’s remains will be returned to Poland; Rachmaninoff’s may go to Russia.

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, Stagebill, Symphony magazine, and Chorus magazine. She also writes for the Berkshire Eagle (Lenox, Mass.) and other newspapers.