Year in Music

By Leslie Kandell

This was the year that Mozart mania hit the music world, which marked the bicentennial of the Salzburg master’s death with Mozart festivals, retrospectives, films, colloquia, cycles, and publications. Most ambitious of the commemorations is at New York’s Lincoln Center, where all 11 of its constituents are still engaged in a 19- month traversal of Mozart’s entire oeuvre—835 compositions. The huge project has been enhanced by exhibits, a week-long symposium on performance practice, and merchandise from serious to souvenir. The tribute began on Mozart’s birthday, January 27, with a televised replication of a three-hour Vienna concert that Mozart produced and performed in 1783. On December 5, Mozart’s death date, the Requiem was performed under Erich Leinsdorf with the New York Philharmonic.

The center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, last July celebrating its own 25th anniversary, provided a bicentennial focal point; in addition to concerts under music director Gerard Schwarz, the festival included related programs of “Mozart and the Dance” and a Roger Norrington weekend called “The Mozart Experience.” The festival also made its first tour, to Tokyo, where it plans to travel again next summer.

Fifteen other states (notably Texas and California) and several European countries mounted significant 200th-anniversary observances: the Salzburg Festival centerpiece was four operas, among them a new Magic Flute designed by Rolf Guttenberg. Idomeneo was thought more compelling at Glyndebourne than Tanglewood, and Don Giovanni, mounted at the Vienna Staatsoper, was also recorded on period instruments in Sweden’s 18th-century opera house for L’Oiseau-Lyre.

Centennials
Dearly beloved Carnegie Hall took the year to celebrate the centennial of its opening. With premieres of its commissioned works, eminent visiting orchestras playing relevant selections, exhibits around New York of historic Carnegie-related photos and memorabilia, and the opening of new spaces and a museum in the building, the frenzy increased toward the first week of May—when out came the floral arrangements and elaborate program books—and finally, to May 5, the actual anniversary of the first concert, which had been conducted by Tchaikovsky and Walter Damrosch. Arguments about the hall’s post-renovation acoustics were set aside for four hours of concertizing, with a seemingly endless parade of classical superstars, and a public TV broadcast, intercut with video bites on such historic Carnegie denizens as Toscanini, Heifetz, and Benny Goodman.

The Chicago Symphony marked its centennial in Carnegie Hall, too, as the departing Sir Georg Solti led a tenure-concluding performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s Byzantium, a setting of the Yeats poem for soprano and large orchestra, composed for the CSO. That same week at the hall, Luciano Pavarotti shook off an incipient cold for a fine first Otello in a Solti-led CSO concert version with a ravishing Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Three CSO conductors—Solti, Rafael Kubelik, and incoming music director Daniel Barenboim—were at the October centennial culminating concert in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, which took place just a few weeks after a 15-day walkout by CSO musicians over their health benefits. Barenboim, who with the CSO has recorded Corigliano’s prize-winning Symphony No. 1 on Erato, plans more new music, notably works by his Paris-years colleague Pierre Boulez, coupled with late-Romantic repertoire aimed at appealing to audiences.

Prokofiev, for whom 1991 marked a birth centennial, was mostly edged out of commemorations. The San Francisco Opera did, however, mount its long-awaited War and Peace, sung in Russian and super-titled in English, with the Kirov Theater’s conductor Valery Gergiev and a huge cast featuring eight Kirov singers. With the National Symphony, Mstislav Rostropovich played the flamboyant Sinfonia Concertante, originally composed for him. The Boston Symphony offered the score to Alexander Nevsky, accompanied live by the film itself, in both Boston and New York. And Yefim Bronfman began to record all the piano concertos and sonatas for Sony Classical.

Opera
In its first visit since 1975, the Bolshoi brought three ambitious operas to the Metropolitan: Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin in a world premiere of a sensitive new production and Maid of Orleans in its first New York performance, as well as the American premiere of Mlada, Rimsky-Korsakov’s luscious, weird opera-ballet. (Mlada and Onegin were also seen at Wolf Trap.) More memorable than any individual voice was the rich ensemble work, particularly the Imperial Chorus, which sang and moved with casual fluidity, sensitively evoking the Russian folk idiom.

More Onegins: In Chicago, the Lyric Opera’s Tatyana, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, looked a shade too mature but brought the right Slavic flavor (LOC also produced a questionable modern setting of Alceste, starring a dominating Jessye Norman); Onegin's scenes of alternating domestic intimacy and stage-filling crowds were gracefully handled in Colin Graham’s traditional staging for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

Janáccek’s long-neglected Katya Kabanova , directed by Jonathan Miller and sung in Czech at the Met with Leonie Rysanek and an exquisite Gabriela Benackova, was described by Musical America as “far and away more lyrical and acessible” than the later Jenufa. Schweigsame Frau, another rarity, was part of Santa Fe general director John Crosby’s determined effort to mount all the Strauss operas. (Santa Fe’s grotesque Oedipus by Wolfgang Rihm was called by The New York Times “an 80-minute exercise in unpleasantness.”)

Ariadne auf Naxos, from the financially troubled Boston Lyric Opera, offered the important debut of Deborah Voigt; Helen Donath’s long-awaited Met debut year included a wonderful bonus when she substituted as Susanna in Marriage of Figaro. A concert version of Elektra with Eva Marton highlighted a Vienna Philharmonic tour. As the Met’s surprisingly good Parsifal, Plácido Domingo was praised in New York magazine for his forthright honesty and smooth middle register. Hildegard Behrens, who as Tanglewood’s Elettra in Idomeneo> had looked like a Mikado caricature, was a vocally passionate—if theatrically one-dimensional—Salome at the Met.

In the golden west, Dame Gwyneth Jones, who studied with the great Puccini soprano Eva Turner, was cheered in her first Fanciulla with Domingo and Justino Diaz at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera. San Francisco mounted the American premiere of Hans Werne Henze’s stark, passionate Das Verratene Meer. Wagner’s Ring cycle, with Valkyries flying on fiberglass horses, is thriving again in Seattle.

New York City Opera’s array spanned a controversially updated Traviata to the serial complexities of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s powerful Die Soldaten, with stops in between for a televised Marriage of Figaro and a vocally satisfying Cav and Pag in a Little Italy setting that The New Yorker alas deemed “unrealistic, distanced and convention-bound.”

Phenomenal sales of London’s In Concert CD and video of Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras belting a mélange of arias and pop and folk songs (would you believe Nessun Dorma as a trio?) parallel such media ventures as a $35 cable pay-per-view opera telecast, which was the way an estimated 35,000 households shared opening night of the Met’s silver anniversary season in its Lincoln Center building. (Like the Carnegie Hall centennial concert, the star-studded pastiche program was hosted by network newscasters, whose questions infused news-and-sports angles into music events: (“How did you feel about singing tonight, Luciano?”) Under James Levine, the Met has also begun to record for Sony Classical and Deutsche Grammophon.

New Music
New works tended toward refinement of style rather than experimentation. John Adams’s minimalist opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, melds drifting lyricism with French Impressionism and combines traditional and electronic instruments to tell the tale of the terrorist hijacking of a cruise ship in the Middle East. After its Brussels premiere, Klinghoffer began traveling to its other commissioners—houses in Lyons, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Glyndebourne. (It will eventually be released on Elektra/ Nonesuch.) Meredith Monk gave minimalism an inward, spiritual bent in Atlas, her dance-influenced music-theater piece about a woman explorer. Although the work was commissioned by Minneapolis and Philadelphia, it had its premiere in Houston.

Alfred Schnittke’s dramatic, difficult Concerto Grosso, depicting the four seasons, received its first performance at Carnegie Hall (which commissioned it) by the Cleveland Orchestra and Gidon Kremer as the persuasive violin soloist. The Cleveland Orchestra itself commissioned Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “clean, firm, unobtrusive” oboe concerto for the 25th season of its principal oboist, John Mack. The Detroit Symphony’s annual salute to African-American composers introduced Muhal Richard Abrams’s eloquently orchestrated, jazz-flavored Transversion #1.

Andrew Imbrie was featured as composer- in-residence at Tanglewood’s contemporary music festival, which also highlighted David Del Tredici’s freewheeling Alice (in Wonderland) symphony, under Oliver Knussen, in its first complete performance. Another Tanglewood premiere of note was Tod Machover’s Begin Again Again, which required soloist Yo-Yo Ma to wire his wrist and bow to a synthesizer as he played a cello-oid “hyperinstrument.” Machover teaches at MIT’s Media Lab and his compositional techniques will no doubt spread southward, since the Peabody Conservatory has opened a graduate level production and psychoacoustic research facility and inaugurated a two-year Master’s degree program in computer music.

The Baltimore Symphony introduced John Harbison’s Third Symphony while the San Francisco ushered in George Perle’s piano concerto; both premieres were led by David Zinman. San Francisco also premiered Peter Leberson’s contemplative World Turning.

The Kronos Quartet continues to present programs of new works by established and unknown composers who like to experiment with mixed styles and influences. The quartet’s Black Angels CD for Elektra/Nonesuch has been a top seller for more than a year.

New York’s Bang on a Can Festival of contemporary music had a promisingly good attendance, and in the scaled-down New York International Festival of the Arts, rock star David Byrne’s foray into classical composition, The Forest, was a major attraction.

Lincoln Center has received a $ 1 million grant from the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation for four years of new works. It will surely be the envy of other new music groups hit by cutbacks based on size of audience, appeal of any given work, and numerous other criteria.

New Leaders
A year sooner than planned, Kurt Masur became music director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding Zubin Mehta, who ended his 13-year tenure with a program devoted to Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. Masur’s opening program of Adams, Copland, and Bruckner embraced the New World and the Old World, where he retains leadership of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Since jet-setting conductors increasingly depend on resident orchestral management, Deborah Borda, coming from Minnesota to succeed Albert K. Webster as the Philharmonic’s managing director, is expected to bring her energetic approach to expanding the regular subscription audience.

More New York changes: Fred Sherry, controversial director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, stepped down. William Lockwood, Lincoln Center’s executive programming producer and Mostly Mozart maven, has also resigned. Catherine Comet will leave the American Symphony, to be succeeded by Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, and Dennis Russell Davies assumed leadership of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

This is Riccardo Muti’s last season with the Philadelphia Orchestra, though he will almost be sharing next year’s podium duties with director-designate Wolfgang Sawallisch. Antonia Joy Wilson is now music director of the Women Composers Orchestra of Baltimore, Sergiu Comissiona took over at Vancouver, and Christopher Perick of Deutsche Oper Berlin now directs the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Sir Donald Runnicles the San Francisco Opera, and Lawrence Foster the Aspen Music Festival. Ardis Krainik of the Chicago Lyric Opera has been elected president of Opera America.

Temporarily staying on are Gunther Herbig at the Toronto Symphony and Hugh Wolff at the New Jersey. Taking over for Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach and Michael Tilson Thomas now direct Japan’s Pacific Music Festival, with the Houston Symphony in residence.

Orchestras
The Gulf War brought predictable changes and a triumphant image of musical commitment: Isaac Stern, in an air raid during his concert with the Israel Philharmonic, bravely performing before an audience in gas masks. Among the orchestras cancelling foreign tours were the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, Juilliard, and Minnesota orchestras, who all stayed home and attempted to defray some of the lost revenue by programming American music. Leonard Slatkin filled in in New York for Zubin Mehta, who was one of several musicians who flew to Israel to lend moral (and musical) support. (The Jerusalem Symphony cancelled its tour overseas, but the Israel Philharmonic did not.) The Philadelphia Orchestra changed plans slightly, postponing its London concerts a year, amidst a swirl of controversy over the musicians’ supposed “fear of flying.”

The Boston Symphony’s European tour was unchanged, and the Cleveland Orchestra filled in for it at Tanglewood’s final weekend, with Christoph von Dohnányi leading Varèse’s Ameriques and a thrilling Beethoven Ninth; the Cleveland is the first American orchestra to sign a long-term pact for appearances at the Salzburg Festival. More transcontinental events: As the final concert of its five-country tour, Japan’s marvelous Saito Kinen Orchestra, under Seiji Ozawa, opened Carnegie Hall’s post-centennial season; Sarah Caldwell’s Boston-based festival, “Making Music Together II,” finally made it to Moscow; and the Berlin Philharmonic paid a visit to the United States with guest conductor Bernard Haitink. On the domestic side, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra has formed the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, a free-lance group to be conducted by John Mauceri, which will take over for the LAPO in some summer concerts.

Orchestras continue to try varied ways to reach a larger audience. A few send informative brochures and advance program notes, others—the Milwaukee Symphony and the Philharmonia Virtuosi—reach out to families, either in programming or children’s freebies. But some ensembles still have been forced to trim their seasons, and the troubled New Orleans Symphony has gone down for the second time.

Cycles
The possibilities of CD technology to compress many minutes of music onto a few silvery discs has enlarged the way we think of series and traversals. Item: Philips advises us to clear a few feet of shelf space for its issue of the complete Mozart. Item: Haydn’s symphonies—104 plus—with Dorati and the Philharmonia Hungarica, have been reissued by London and act as forerunner to the label’s projected period-instruments version with Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. Item: Sony’s buyout of CBS’s classical division has produced 15 CDs of concert and studio recordings from the Marlboro Festival, with much magic from Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin. Although Leonard Bernstein did not live to complete his Mahler symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, the series will be filled out with a 1975 Salzburg Festival performance of the Eighth.

Shostakovich’s string quartets have been recorded by the Manhattan Quartet on ESS.A.Y and the Brodsky Quartet on Teldec. Boulez, as composer or conductor, is slated for 50 Sony CDs. Also on Sony, the Juilliard Quartet, honoring its own 45th anniversary, has recorded Elliott Carter’s four string quartets and its own arrangement of Bach’s Art of the Fugue.

In concert, Tanglewood featured all Mozart’s “mature” piano concertos. Alfred Schnittke, the Soviet composer whose exposure here has grown greatly, had a four-quartet retrospective by the Kronos (cleverly enhanced by lighting), and several Schnittke works were introduced as part of Carnegie Hall’s centennial. The Bard Music Festival gave listeners a closer look at Mendelssohn in two worthwhile weekends of varied programs titled “Mendelssohn Rediscoveries.”

Milestones
John Corigliano won the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No. l; Corigliano and Ezra Laderman have both been appointed to the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Shulamit Ran, now taking Corigliano’s place as the Chicago Symphony’s resident composer, won the Pulitzer Prize for her atonal but lyrical Symphony; Ralph Shapey and Robert Kraft won Friedheim Awards. Gunther Schuller received a MacArthur grant, Maurice Abravanel and Isaac Stern the National Medal of Arts. Pianist Yefim Bronfman won the Avery Fisher Prize, cellist Wendy Warner the Rostropovich Competition, violist Misha Amory the Naumburg Competition, and pianist David Owen Norris the new “non-competitive” Gilmore Artist A ward. Grammys went to Bernstein’s Shostakovich First and Seventh with the Chicago Symphony, James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera’s Das Rheingold, and perennial favorite Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in Walton’s Belshazzar's Feast and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

Alan Hovhaness, Shura Cherkassky, and Gian Carlo Menotti are all 80; in bitter disputes at the Spoleto Festival, Menotti retained artistic control for the coming season. Earl Wild, Yehudi Menuhin, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and the Baltimore Symphony are all 75, Ralph Shapey and Margaret Hillis are both 70; Hillis is soon retiring from the Chicago Symphony Chorus. And Mirella Freni, Alfredo Kraus, and Nicolai Ghiaurov celebrated 25 years of singing at the Metropolitan Opera with a scenes-and-acts program.

Obituaries
The music world recorded the loss of composers Elie Siegmeister, Andrzej Panufnik, and Jean Langlais; conductors Max Epstein and Robert Irving; pianists Rudolf Serkin, Claudio Arrau, Wilhelm Kempff, Walter Klien, Malcolm Frager, and Robert Goldsand; violinists Zino Francescatti and Daniel Guilet; cellist Paul Torteller; organist Carl Weinrich; tenors John Alexander and Richard Lewis; baritones Frank Valentino and Scott Reeve; bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni; opera coach Alberta Masiello; musicologists Paul Henry Lang and Wolfgang Hildesheimer; and opera executive Anthony Bliss. And 50 years after his death, the remains of pianist and composer Ignace Jan Paderewski have been returned to his native Poland.