The Year in Music

By Leslie Kandell

Autumn's news from Russia was about economics, but for three weeks in the spring, Russia dazzled the American opera world with a display of life beyond Boris. The Kirov Opera, chorus, and ballet brought four productions from St. Petersburg to the Metropolitan Opera under Valery Gergiev, its charismatic director and the Met's first guest conductor. Wildly mixed in vocal and dramatic quality, Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, Borodin's Prince Igor, Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa, and Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery made a collective entertainment spectacular, linking plot and musical context to often-heard excerpts. Gloriously colored Russian scenery, bel canto singing, Russian folksong, narrative ballad, epic tales of lovers separated and reunited, Swan Lake-style ballet, folk dance, snatches of Siegfried and Sleeping Beauty, operetta, blood and guts, and glory to the motherland were led with passionate commitment. Gergiev's idiomatic tempos brought the operas to life-most parts of them, anyway. Sets and props were vastly improved since the company's last tour, and computers were used to good effect in violent storms and flashing of supernatural eyes.

OTHER OPERA

Fans and critics hoping for a new Tristan and Isolde hailed Seattle Opera's production with Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner. Besides the musical power conjured by their physical size, the pair showed ardor, tenderness, and even naturalness in the strenuous title roles. At the Met, Heppner and Deborah Voigt sang wonderfully in Robert Wilson's glacial Lohengrin. Eaglen and Voigt are also on the Chicago Lyric roster, for La Gioconda and Ariadne auf Naxos, respectively. George Tsypin's set for The Netherlands Opera Ring interestingly placed the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Hartmut Haenchen on the stage itself. Glynn Ross' bare staging of the Ring in Flagstaff with the Arizona Opera Company was not wholly loved.

Luciano Pavarotti proclaimed soccer the "opera of the future" as the Three Tenors took their act to the Eiffel Tower in celebration of the World Cup. Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo both celebrated their 30th year at the Met-but on separate dates. Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, marketable marrieds, lost a Met contract in a dispute over La Traviata's production design. Lincoln Center Festival introduced Paula M. Kimper's Patience and Sarah, an unusual story of love between two women; the libretto is by Wende Persons. Smetana's The Two Widows, a sweet comic opera full of gem-like musical moments, was revived at Manhattan School of Music, while Juilliard's production of Hansel and Gretel, designed by Maurice Sendak, was telecast on PBS. Paul Kellogg moved into the artistic directorship of New York City Opera, bringing productions from his previous position at Glimmerglass: Britten's Paul Bunyan, Floyd's Of Mice and Men (the most popular opera by an American composer, according to Opera America) and Handel's Partenope were among them. Libby Larson's Eric Hermannsson's Soul, based on a Willa Cather story, had its premiere at Opera Omaha. The year's most frequently produced opera was La Bohème.

NEW MUSIC

Two large-scale sacred oratorios of Krzysztof Penderecki had premieres: his undeniably beautiful Credo, led by Helmuth Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival, and Seven Gates of Jerusalem (last year in Jerusalem, this summer at Lincoln Center Festival), honoring the 50 years since the founding of the State of Israel. Eternity's Sunrise, a William Blake setting in memory of Princess Diana, is John Tavener's first work for period instruments.

Tan Dun's music, less appealing to a wide audience, is full of treats for the eye and mind. The sections of his Orchestral Theatre III: Red Forecast-its American premiere was in Carnegie Hall-were named for weather conditions. There were television sets, a screen showing fantasy images, and a soprano who moved among lighted stands in the aisles. His slow-motion opera Marco Polo at New York City Opera confused critics but haunted the memory. Symphony 1997 (Heaven, Earth, Mankind), commemorating the return of Hong Kong to China, is for cello-Yo-Yo Ma was first, of course-children's chorus, and ancient Chinese chimes, which were played by the Imperial Bell Ensemble.

Hindenburg, another Steve Reich-Beryl Korot collaboration, the first in a projected trilogy about the onset of advanced technology, was heard at the Spoleto Festival. It adds fractured speech and film footage to the music. Many pieces in Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music had plot scenarios, such as Maurice Kagel's Westen, about the Africanizing of North America, and Henri Dutilleux's The shadows of time, for the 50th anniversary of the death of Anne Frank. Juilliard's "Focus!" festival, which reflects director Joel Sachs' catholic view of beauty, explored music from six Scandinavian countries. (Sachs noted that they were more helpful with scores and information than was the United States.) Kurt Masur led the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of The Spider and the Fly, in which David Del Tredici took a baby step away from Alice in Wonderland.

FLICKS

Movie music continues its expansion into recording studios and formal concert halls. Music from scores (as well as their concert works) by Rósza, Herrmann, and Korngold spice up Dvovrák and Stravinsky programs. Itzhak Perlman's "Cinema Serenade" spent the year on Billboard sales charts, and film scores are being played as live concerts under on-screen films.

John Williams, whose hugely popular scores draw on Mahler, Strauss, Holst, and Bernstein, assigned Tanglewood composing fellows to write music for selected four-minute clips from Empire of the Sun, Jaws, and Fatal Attraction. Williams first introduced and narrated the clips without music. Then the composers led their compositions with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra while the same clips were shown. He discussed balance and timing of music and visual image: "Musicians are like actors, looking for good parts for ourselves," he said.

MIXED MEDIA

Every year brings something unexpected, such as Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique used as a backdrop for an underwater swirling fabric and light show in New York's Soho district. Effects in the underground theater's 500-gallon water tank were akin to Disney's fantastic swells and colors for Bach's great Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia. Billowing and glittering bubbles, sheets and tinsel seaweed actually enhanced the music, recorded by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Divers in Florida's Big Pine Key were treated to six hours of Beethoven's music in an underwater Beethoven marathon. Peter Maxwell Davies' concert video, Mavis in Las Vegas, is part of his latest symphonic work.

Yo-Yo Ma's concert video, meant to show Bach's six Cello Suites embracing the whole world, went over like a lead balloon in many critics' opinions. The PBS broadcast turned the Suites into ill-fitting backup for a montage of Ma performing in Times Square, wise words of a dying Greek limo driver, Kabuki choreography, pretentious ice-skating, and a tawdry insurance scam. All the while the well-meaning Ma earnestly explained and explained, while Mark Morris kidded him and a Kabuki actor told him he thinks too much. (A recording of the complete Bach Suites that did win a Grammy was by Janos Starker; Ma's Grammy was for "Premieres: Cello Concertos," with David Zinman and the Philadelphia Orchestra.)

Software programs have made it possible to learn to play piano without a human teacher, but from all reports, practice is still best. (Sorry.) Technology is proving a help, however, in other musical matters: CAT scans reveal flaws and repairs in old instruments, and MIT has wired conductors in performance, seeking data that might reveal the physical anatomy of musical talent. The Royal Danish Opera has developed Braille captions for blind fans, supplied through a handheld Braille device linked to a computer. Now, too, scores can be downloaded from Web sites, and computers can accompany, karaoke-style.

ORCHESTRAS

Leonard Slatkin, on television, made the case that "pops" works should be taken more seriously. He cited Grieg's Piano Concerto and Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice as "sophisticated and insanely difficult." The New York Philharmonic, in fine shape right now, still plans to seek a successor to Kurt Masur when his contract ends. Its season began with three weeks of Beethoven, and for Christmas, three weeks of Gershwin, with the multi-talented André Previn playing the Piano Concerto in F. Riccardo Chailly survived the new repertory he brought to Amsterdam's venerable Royal Concertgebouw. "Seahorse Symphony," an exhibition at Chicago's Aquarium, is accompanied by the Chicago Symphony in Seahorse Serenade, composed for the event by Augusta Read Thomas, the orchestra's resident composer. To honor Israel's 50th year, Zubin Mehta led the Israel Philharmonic in a fund-raising tour of the United States; Strauss is back in their repertory, Wagner is still controversial.

MUSIC MAKERS

James Conlon's contract as Paris Opera's music director was extended for the next six years. David Zinman left the Baltimore Symphony for Aspen, where he plans Beethoven symphonies and American music by Harbison, Adams, and Kernis. Charles Mackerras becomes music director of the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Christoph Eschenbach took over the NDR Symphony in Hamburg, JoAnn Falleta went to the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Keith Lockhart succeeds Joseph Silverstein at the Utah Symphony but will still remain at the Boston Pops. Adding to his position as Spoleto Festival director, Nigel Redden takes on the Lincoln Center Festival. Simon Rattle made a farewell tour with the City of Birmingham Orchestra, and after a final Ring cycle, Glynn Ross retired as director of the Arizona Opera.

Eugenia Zukerman became director of the Vail Valley Festival, where the Detroit Symphony is in residence, and the Emerson Quartet's David Finckel is artistic director of SummerFest La Jolla, with his wife Wu Han. Deborah Sandler moved from Opera Festival of New Jersey to Kentucky Opera, and Richard Ortner, former administrator of the Tanglewood Music Center, assumed the presidency of Boston Conservatory.

SPACES

Bass Performance Hall is a new multi-purpose, 2,000-seat building in Fort Worth, but Seattle Symphony's new 2,500-seat Benaroya Hall, with its 540-seat recital hall, is-bravely-for concerts only. Lehigh University opened its Zoellner Arts Center. Baden-Baden also has a 2,500-seat hall dedicated to the late Georg Solti, and Lucerne's concert hall, slightly smaller, is the first part of a projected culture center. Santa Fe Opera Theater leveled its orchestra and added a new roof with a window to replace that pesky rain-space. The American Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cincinnati, with 26 inductees. Newly renovated halls are Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, Madrid's Teatro Real opera house (a $157 million budget buster, with Domingo singing a new opera), Barcelona's Gran Theatre del Liceu, Philadelphia's Academy of Music, Geneva's Grand Theatre (a former power plant), and San Francisco's War Memorial Opera, for the company's 75th anniversary. London's financially strapped Royal Opera closed for a year of mega-refurbishment, including staff and ticket-price cuts, and was the subject of an engrossing BBC documentary on its future.

SUMMER FESTIVALS

Lincoln Center's festival traversed most of the current millennium. The Peony Pavilion, a staging by Shanghai's Kunqu Opera Company of a 400-year-old opera, was prevented-despite fervent appeals -from leaving China by officials who claimed it contained material unsuitable for foreign presentation. A subsequent Paris production was also cancelled. It was not China's finest hour. Leonard Bernstein's symphonic works, gaining in public stature, received respectful performances.

Tanglewood's season was a success in terms of orchestral concerts, student enrollment, and the Festival of Contemporary Music. Indeed, it survived major administrative changes-reasons for which were kept mysteriously secret-amidst much anguish and unpleasantness. Boston Symphony members increased their involvement in student coaching, and Seiji Ozawa was more visibly responsible for activities.

Mostly Mozart, which this year really wasn't, featured several evenings of different string quartets playing Haydn and had particular success with period-informed works played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Concerto Cöln. Cincinnati's 125th May Festival paired works from its original festival with a premiere, for the occasion, of Alvin Singleton's PraiseMaker, for chorus and orchestra. The 50-year-old festival in Aix-en-Provence reinvented itself with widely differing productions, including Don Giovanni conducted by Claudio Abbado, Bluebeard's Castle under Pierre Boulez, and Monteverdi's Orfeo under René Jacobs. The Salzburg Festival mounted four hours of Messiaen's St. Francis of Assisi, with 300 musicians, and experimented with Abduction from the Seraglio as directed by François Abou Salem, who gave it a Turkish look and flavor, enhanced by Turkish instruments.

EDUCATION

The European Youth Festival drew 15,000 young musicians to Barce- lona, performing around the city for each other and the public. Kurt Masur led the Youth Orchestra of Germany on an American tour to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Berlin airlift. Georgia governor Zell Miller, believing it's never too early for music education, arranged for a CD of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart to be sent home from the hospital with every newborn. And since it's never too late to learn, Hinshaw published The Literature of Chamber Music, a four-volume compendium by the late Arthur Cohn describing and discussing chamber scores from dall'Abaco to Zwilich. Haverford College established a fund to subsidize Native American applicants; the donor premium is a Capstone recording of Native American music with the Emerson Quartet. Music of Taiwanese composers, in a series performed by the New Music Consort and the Elsner Quartet, was presented jointly by Taipei Theater and Manhattan School of Music.

RESURRECTION

Anthony Payne obtained permission to work fragments of Elgar's uncompleted Third Symphony into a new piece. It was introduced by the BBC Symphony in London and in America by the Philadelphia Orchestra, both conducted by Andrew Davis. Lincoln Center has plans to follow up with an Elgar week, featuring the London Symphony led by Colin Davis, as well as ancillary events. Two operettas, The Philosopher's Stone and The Beneficent Dervish, appear to be by Mozart, according to Northern Iowa University professor David Buch, who discovered them among manuscripts returned to Hamburg by Russia.

Opera Theater of St. Louis presented Monteverdi's Arianna, a lost opera recomposed by Alexander Goehr; it retained the musical ghost of the composer in a fresh, contemporary fabric. Antheil's Transatlantic, still cynical and jazzy after 60 years, surfaced at the Minnesota Opera. The "Concord" Sonata, it turns out, was culled from Ives' Emerson Concerto when the composer despaired of hearing the entire work. The concerto was introduced by pianist Alan Feinberg and the Cleveland Orchestra, with plans for a Paris premiere. James Conlon led Zemlinsky's The Mermaid, a picturesque sprawl through Wagner, Strauss, and '20's dance bands.

COLLECTIONS

Tchaikovsky was placed in social and literary context when the Bard Music Festival illuminated the composer's good relationships and less anguished musical side-namely, operas, religious works, and three-for-three smash hit ballets. Anne-Sophie Mutter performed Beethoven's ten violin sonatas in a 50-city world tour with 80 concert dates. Manuscripts and other materials of Paul Sacher were exhibited in New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, and included papers of Stravinsky, Webern, and numerous others of equal renown. In conjunction, James Levine led Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire there. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center paired Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat with A Fiddler's Tale by Wynton Marsalis, taking the program on a 13-city tour.

The annual Telemann Festival in Magdeburg focused on the composer's trip to France in 1737. Hundreds of musicians and performers attended. The death of Hermann Prey turned his exquisite singing of Schubert's final songs into a poignant postscript for the YMHA's Schubertiade in New York. One critic wrote, "He was singing of himself."

GLORY AND HONOR

Aaron Jay Kernis, the Minnesota Orchestra's adviser on new music, won the Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2. Judith Ingolfon of Iceland won the Indianapolis Violin Competition. The Gilmore Artist is Leif Ove Andsnes. Sofia Gubaidulina was awarded Japan's Praemium Imperiale, and André Previn received a Kennedy Center honor. The winner of a new grant called Ives Living is composer Martin Bresnick, and the Richard Tucker award, Patricia Racette. Pianist Audrey Ponochevny won the William Kapell, and the contemporary ensemble called "eighth blackbird" won the Concert Artists Guild Competition.

MILESTONES

Nationwide centennial concerts were in honor of Gershwin, concerts and speeches for Paul Robeson, a concert for Ernst Bacon at New York's Merkin Hall, and for Viktor Ullmann, a restaging of Der Kaiser von Atlantis at Columbia University. The much-decorated Elliott Carter, 90, continues to compose and take curtain calls; George Rochberg is 80, and Leonard Bernstein would have been. Ned Rorem, whose highly acclaimed new song cycle is Evidence of Things Not Seen, and soprano Phyllis Curtin are 75; Ursula Mamlok is 70; John Corigliano, John Harbison (at work on his opera The Great Gatsby), Frederic Rzewski, Joan Tower, and Charles Wuorinen are 60; the Tulsa Opera is 50, the same number of years Stanley Drucker has been a New York Philharmonic clarinetist. Classical Action, an organization through which performers and presenters donate to AIDS causes, is 5.

OBITUARIES

In the last year, the classical-music world recorded the loss of composers Michael Tippett, Alfred Schnittke, Mel Powell, Ivan Tcherepnin, Arthur Cohn, William Albright, Jean Françaix, and Federico Mompou (the latter two in 1997); conductors Klaus Tennstedt, Margaret Hillis, Edward Tatnell Canby; soprano Leonie Rysanek; tenor Richard Cassilly; baritones Hermann Prey, Todd Duncan, Matteo Manuguerra, Randolph Symonette; theramin soloist Clara Rockmore; educator Shinichi Suzuki, posthumously honored at 100 centennial celebrations; recording- and opera-company executive Terence McEwen; philanthropist Francis Goelet; Wanda Toscanini Horowitz; and musicologist Joseph Machlis. Georg Solti's ashes were buried in Budapest, next to Bartók's grave.

Leslie Kandell is music critic for the regional sections of The New York Times. She also writes for The Berkshire Eagle and other newspapers. She contributes to Opera News, American Record Guide, and Stagebill.