The Year in Music: North America 2002

By Leslie Kandell

- "And the Oscar for best film score goes to...Tan Dun for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon!" (Wild applause for, who? A Chinese composer whose soundtrack soloist was the better-known Yo-Yo Ma.) In parallel with Ma's extended performance project, "The Silk Road," Tan notated ancient silk-road tunes in Western style for the film's star-power cellist. Hans Zimmer's shrewd score to Gladiator, which quotes from The Planets and Götterdämmerung (as have others before him), was also nominated. Is this a trend in the making? "I see boundaries being crossed," observed Tan in his acceptance speech, alluding to John Corigliano's 1999 Oscar for his score to The Red Violin.

Hooray for Hollywood: Classical composers win Academy Awards, and film music arrives in the concert hall. Styles merge too: What's that playing on the radio-is it Richard Strauss or Superman? A Carnegie Hall concert by the American Composers Orchestra, called "Hollywood," included Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound Concerto and excerpts from David Raksin's score for The Bad and the Beautiful and Dimitri Tiomkin's The Thing. John Williams, film composer supreme, was artist-in-residence at Tanglewood-a revealing choice for a venerated classical music institution. Psycho is in: The plucky little EOS Orchestra cobbled together an entire program of Bernard Herrmann, called "More Than the Movies."

Film director Bruce Beresford hadn't even heard of Alma Mahler's music before making Bride of the Wind. This film was a decorative flop, and no one was afraid to say so, but it ends with Renée Fleming singing Alma's songs, accompanied by Jean-Yves Thibaudet. James Conlon, insightfully noting listeners' apprehensions about classical music and confident responses to film, said, "Film is our art, made in our time. We have no baggage about expressing opinions."

Opera

From Seattle to Savannah, anything by Verdi was called a tribute to his death centenary. Most houses produced at least one opera, and some smaller companies went for lesser-known Verdi, but that's business as usual. The Metropolitan Opera presented Un Ballo in Maschera, Aida, La Traviata, Il Trovatore, and Nabucco. The New York Grand Opera completed a first-ever full cycle in Central Park, for which Vincent La Selva received a Guinness Book of Records award.

Outside of Verdi were Busoni's Doktor Faust and Prokofiev's The Gambler at the Met. Alan Woodrow, the Seattle Ring cycle's Siegfried, severed a leg muscle before Götterdämmerung, and sang from the sidelines while Richard Berkeley-Steele lip-synched. (By the third cycle, Berkeley-Steele had taken over the whole job.) Janácek's The Makropulos Case, brought to Brooklyn from Glyndebourne, had a brilliant, affecting Emilia in Anja Silja, while the Met revival had Catherine Malfitano. Houston Grand Opera revived Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas, based on writings of unrequited love by Gabriel García Márquez. Opera Festival of New Jersey risked Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero, and Dominick Argento revised Miss Havisham's Fire for Opera Theater of Saint Louis. Plácido Domingo now holds the Metropolitan Opera record for performing on opening night, having sung 18 to date.

New Music

Charles Wuorinen was composer-in-residence at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music, where director Oliver Knussen emphasized connections rather than newness. Hence Jo Kondo's 1994 piece based on a Noh play, with a ritual dancer who brought Piero della Francesca to mind. Ma's long-term Silk Road Project commissions works celebrating musical connections among countries along the silk route from Europe to Asia. Also new: John Adams's oratorio, El Niño-the Nativity, not the weather pattern-sung by Paul Hilliard's Theater of Voices and staged by Peter Sellars in Paris, then San Francisco.

Aside from cross-currents: Hans Werner Henze's 1997 Ninth Symphony, given its U.S. premiere by the New York Philharmonic and Berlin Radio Choir under Kurt Masur, moved some people to tears. Christopher Rouse composed a Clarinet Concerto (which the Chicago Symphony introduced), and Corigliano's Second Symphony, introduced by the Boston Symphony, was, as usual, aimed well. Gaggle and Flock is Steve Mackey's two-movement octet, introduced at the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival by the Borromeo and Brentano String Quartets. (Mackey's Tuck and Roll is its counterpart for electric guitar.)

Voices of Light by Stephen Paulus, commissioned by Westminster Choir College of Rider University, was pleasant enough and took no risks. Emanuel Ax and Evelyn Glennie took a big one: Their piano-percussion recital-tour focused on The Axe Manual by Harrison Birtwistle. So did Peter Serkin in "Perspectives," his series exploring works of Knussen, Wolpe, Takemitsu, and, bless him, more. (An eye problem kept him from taking part, unfortunately.) Allen Ginsburg's "C'mon Pigs of Western Civilization Eat More Grease," was abrasively set by Peter Lieberson for Carnegie Hall's "Making Music" series. The fashionable human genome sequence has been assigned rhythm and tone (West Side Story-type rhythm, Barber-like strings) by Tom Barton, in residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Orchestras

"It's about holding up your head, even as orchestras in America languish and die out, victims of their own rigidity and stuffiness and of a sea change in American culture." (Garrison Keillor, writing about his instrumentalist wife.) Disparaging the gray-haired audience may become less comfy as medical advances increase the cohort that has time and money for classical music. Some financial and attendance figures show that orchestras are in trouble, others show they are not, and still others reveal facts interpreted more than one way.

East-West detente event: the debut of the Thai Elephant Orchestra, the love-child of elephant behavior student Richard Lair and David Sultzer, a Columbia University neurologist. Among the instruments are slit drums, gong hammers, thunder sheet, and harmonica.

Nine orchestras hosted residencies through Meet the Composer-Bun-Ching Lam's Song of the Pipa was composed for the New Jersey Symphony. Osvaldo Golijov is resident at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

David Zinman relinquished his Emeritus post of the Baltimore Symphony to protest his successor Yuri Temirkanov's neglect of American works.

Seasons with a theme: The Brooklyn Philharmonic, under the leadership of Robert Spano, performed a series of works about love and death called "Liebestod," encompassing a range from The Art of Fugue to Oedipus Rex. The Los Angeles Philharmonic had a successful month-long Stravinsky Festival, which Esa-Pekka Salonen excerpted for a tour. The Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic planned seasons as conductor farewells to Seiji Ozawa and Kurt Masur, respectively.

New Leaders

As the smog clears, Lorin Maazel is to direct the New York Philharmonic. Zarin Mehta, executive director of the New York Philharmonic, speaking on secrecy in choosing conductors: "At General Electric, those who don't get the job don't have to come back as guest CEO's. You have to do a lot of damage control. Nobody wants to come out second best."

The Boston Symphony, typically slow to appoint, will vamp with long-absent guest conductors-names include Masur, Dohnányi, and Tilson Thomas-while awaiting a larger field of available candidates. (James Levine, often mentioned as one, has meanwhile added the Verbier Festival to his résumé.)

Christoph Eschenbach will succeed Wolfgang Sawallisch as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra; less than a year after its centennial, the ensemble moved from the venerable Academy of Music to the new Verizon Hall in an arts space called the Kimmel Center.

The Finnish-born Osmo Vänskä will be the new director of the Minnesota Orchestra, Donald Runnicles took over from Sir Charles Mackerras at the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and the Bournemouth Symphony announced the appointment of Marin Alsop as music director. Jésus López-Cobos departed the Cincinnati Symphony and is succeeded there by Paavo Järvi. Cho-Liang Lin is music director of Summerfest LaJolla and Emmanuel Villaume, of the Spoleto Festival. Carnegie Hall's executive director, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, left for a similar post with the Berlin Philharmonic. Erich Vollmer of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival was appointed President of Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts.

Festivals

Damning the critical torpedoes, Lincoln Center went full speed ahead with its most eclectic summer festival yet: Among musical events were U.S. premieres of Philip Glass's complete The White Raven, Salvatore Sciarrino's Luci mie traditrici (both billed as operas but hardly that) and another of Benjamin Bagby's fascinating, hypnotic Norse sagas. In Gerard Schwarz's last season, Mostly Mozart, granddaddy of Lincoln Center summer events, focused also on Schumann and Haydn, while the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Amadeus Festival expanded by adding Tchaikovsky.

Ozawa's last Tanglewood hurrah was Salome in concert, with Deborah Voigt in command; Peter Sellars staged Bach cantatas, with Dawn Upshaw; composition fellows wrote short pieces for student dancers at Jacob's Pillow. Glass's The Screens was featured at Spoleto, which had a new Manon Lescaut and a minimalist Dido and Aeneas. The main event at Ojai was Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars in an outdoor setting appropriate to its genesis. The newest festival is the Tacoma International, with Byron Janis as artistic advisor. California's Eclectic Orange Festival sent out a plea for 100 metronomes for a rare performance of Ligeti's Poème symphonique.

Education

For 25 years, Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education has connected teachers and arts, students and artists. Teaching personnel attend the Lincoln Center Festival, as well as related programs and workshops. They choose the ones they want for their own schools and learn how best to prepare their classes to benefit from them.

Interactive pianos are being touted as enhancers of school skills. Texaco has underwritten Sesame Street Music Works, which can be accessed through the Web site sesamestreet.com. The site now has Sesame Radio, which plays songs from the television programs. Key-Note is a child-oriented program of the Israel Philharmonic that sponsors orchestra members in an Arab-Jewish ensemble, which toured North and South America with the orchestra, performing for children.

Carnegie Hall held an eight-day workshop on Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, run by the composer, with members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain coaching young performers. (Other events were a performance of that Boulez work, naturally, and Vienna Philharmonic concerts conducted by Boulez-"Viennese Cream," a review called it.)

Old Friends

Jessye Norman, with Levine as her spectacular accompanist, gave a recital series with repertory chosen as the spirit moved them from a long list of standards printed with texts in a lavish booklet. Brahms and Mahler songs were also the subject of Christa Ludwig's workshop and concert (by workshop participants.) New York City Opera revived Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe and Erich Korngold's Die Tote Stadt. Glimmerglass Opera dug out Chabrier's lightweight L'Étoile, and Marc Blitzstein's opera Sacco and Vanzetti was the subject of a symposium and reminiscences in Westport, Connecticut. Sir Simon Rattle performed Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder with the Philadelphia Orchestra, both at home and at Carnegie Hall.

Rachmaninoff, with no anniversary or other musical hook, was coincidentally featured by both Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center throughout the 2001-02 season. The start of LC's Great Performers series, highlighted by Vladimir Ashkenazy leading London's Philharmonia Orchestra in three concerts, was postponed when the terrorist attack caused flight cancellations.

"From the Homeland": Czech music in film, performance, and discussion. "Dvorák," said Michael Beckerman, "wrote achingly beautiful music we don't even know." Some of the works programmed in Bard College's festival of Debussy and friends came in for some hard knocks, and "Reich Redux," at Miller Theater, looked back at 20 years of the American composer's works. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented "A Great Day in New York," nine concerts and three symposia celebrating the city's musical life.

Fame and Fortune

Pulitzer Prize: John Corigliano, Symphony No. 2; Kennedy Center Award: Itzhak Perlman. The Van Cliburn was divided between Olga Kern and Stanislav Ioudenitch, the Rome Prize between Derek Bermel and Kevin Matthew Puts, and Avery Fisher Prizes went to Edgar Meyer and David Shifrin. Grammys were awarded to recordings by the Emerson String Quartet (complete Shostakovich quartets); Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic (Mahler Tenth); Doktor Faust under Kent Nagano; Maw's Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell; Orpheus, Cecilia Bartoli, George Crumb. Martin E. Segal Awards were presented to tenor Eric Cutler and the Borromeo String Quartet, the Charles Ives living grantee is composer Chen Yi, living inductees into the Classical Music Hall of Fame are Van Cliburn, George Crumb, Itzhak Perlman, New York Philharmonic, and Juilliard String Quartet. Leonard Bernstein was honored with a black-and-white commemorative stamp. Aspiring young conductors can enter a new competition set up by Lorin Maazel, who wishes to pass on a career's conducting lore, and philanthropist Alberto W. Vilar. Winners, soon to be announced, will have subsidized training.

Centennials

Verdi's influence was everywhere. Besides New York Grand Opera's eight-year cycle of Verdi operas, Juilliard's intriguing theme for its annual Focus Festival was "100 Years of Italian Music Since Verdi." The Philadelphia Orchestra celebrated its founding with a week of concerts featuring its signature soloists and musical selections. Jascha Heifetz's centennial was the theme of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. The centennial of Joaquín Rodrigo, who died in 1999, was almost unmarked.

Milestones

Reaching significant marker birthdays in 2001 were Gian-Carlo Menotti, who turned 90; Earl Wild, Henri Dutilleux, Milton Babbitt, 85; Julius Rudel, Robert Mann, Francis Thorne, Karel Husa, 80; the Naumburg Award, 75; Alfred Brendel, Sofia Gubaidulina, 70; Philip Glass, 65; Plácido Domingo, Riccardo Muti, 60; the Marlboro Festival, 50.

Obituaries

In 2001, the music world recorded the loss of composers Iannis Xenakis, Robert Starer, Jack Elliott; conductors Jens Nygaard, Giuseppe Sinopoli; pianists Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Yaltah Menuhin, Brooks Smith; violinist Isaac Stern; soprano Rita Hunter; mezzo-soprano Frances Bible; bass-baritone Walter Berry; oboist Henry Schuman; orchestra manager Kenneth Haas; record producer Teresa Sterne; harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler; opera impresario Boris Goldovsky; music critic Herbert Kupferberg; publicist Alix Williamson.

Attack on America

The destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon may well be the defining event of the decade, if not the century. Reaching into lives around the world, it called forth myriad expressions of solidarity against terrorism. Among the music world's varied responses were opening-night cancellations, benefit and free concerts, dedications, postponements, flag displays, and program changes. Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man appeared on many concerts, as did Barber's Adagio for Strings, patriotic songs ("America the Beautiful" most), and requiem masses. Many performers donated fees to charities that aided victims.

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.