The Year in Music: International 2002

By Keith Clark

"I don't think any of us will ever forget where we were on September 11." Conductor Leonard Slatkin's words, quietly spoken into the vast spaces of London's Royal Albert Hall but broadcast throughout the world, summed up the numbing horror of the week when America was targeted by terrorists. He was speaking at the end of his first season of BBC Proms as the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The occasion, just four days after the attack, was the Last Night of the Proms. Designed as a celebration of the musical links between the U.S. and the U.K. and normally the occasion for a loud and exuberant party, this was a Last Night with a difference. Out went "Land of Hope and Glory" and "Rule Britannia!" In came Barber's Adagio for Strings, America's music of mourning, and the choral finale to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, injecting a hint of defiant optimism.

"It's not the Last Night you wanted to hear," said Slatkin, "and it's not the Last Night I wanted to conduct." But it presented music's very special power to heal, he said. "I promise you that every note, every bar, every phrase tonight comes from our hearts and our souls to all of you." The audience stood to sing the American and British national anthems, the Promenaders waving the stars and stripes along with the union flag. "God Save the Queen, Long Live America!" came a voice from the crowd.

Elsewhere in Europe, the New York Philharmonic was stranded on tour in Stuttgart. The Chicago Symphony was at the Lucerne Festival, but voted to go ahead with the scheduled Mahler Seventh, prefacing it with the American national anthem. In Berlin, three of the city's orchestras-the Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle of the Deutsche Staatsoper, and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper-joined forces for a tribute concert "In friendship and solidarity," and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester scheduled the Mozart Requiem in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left half ruined as a reminder of the horrors of war. The Staatsoper cancelled performances of Don Giovanni and a ballet program entitled "American Way of Dancing."

The Philharmonia Orchestra was scheduled to fly from London to New York on September 11 for concerts there and in Washington. A group of its players, booked to perform extra concerts at the U.N. building in midtown Manhattan and another venue adjacent to the World Trade Center, were about to leave for the airport when the news broke.

London-based artists agents Van Walsum Management had set up a New York office in the World Trade Center on September 10. Its New York director was on the 44th floor of the northern tower when the terrorist plane struck, but she managed to escape before the building collapsed.

Hamburg cancelled four planned Stockhausen concerts when the composer referred to the atrocity as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos," prompting questions about his sanity.

As the long-term significance of the attacks became apparent, many people's feelings were summed up by Daniel Barenboim as he introduced the Chicago Symphony program at the Lucerne Festival. They had been asked to begin the concert with the American national anthem, he said, and that is what they would do. "For tonight, we are all of us Americans."

A few months earlier, before the year lost its innocence, Barenboim was involved in a clamorous music story that started with a little Wagner trilling out from an Israeli journalist's cell phone. Given the country's 53-year unofficial ban on playing Wagner, the irony was not lost on Barenboim, in Jerusalem to conduct a German orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle. They were to have played the first act of Die Walküre, but under pressure the Jewish conductor had conceded to substitute a Schumann symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring instead. Having done so, however, he asked the audience whether it would like to hear some Wagner as an encore. The vast majority cheered approval. Barenboim raised the baton on the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, setting off a furor that filled column inches to truly Wagnerian length, with Barenboim accused of arrogance and insensitivity and labeled a fascist amid calls for a boycott against any further appearances in Israel.

There was a warmer welcome for Leonard Slatkin in the U.K., arriving to take over the BBC job. The Brits were glad that at least one American had managed to make the trip across the Atlantic, with Britain's outbreak of foot and mouth disease keeping many U.S. visitors away and making life difficult for many rural-based festivals, although Glyndebourne escaped. While TV screens filled with pictures of burning carcasses, white-coated professors from Leicester University emerged from the milking sheds to publish research suggesting that cows like music.

In China, interest in western classical music was said to be booming as a result of a Three Tenors concert. The $10 million gala was part of China's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, but locals were shocked at ticket prices-from $60 to $2,000-and the hoped-for publicity went belly up with reports of a man being beaten by police in a crowd outside the event.

Sydney, scene of the 2000 Olympics, announced a new arts festival, based on the success of the 2000 Olympic Arts Festival. The Hong Kong Festival posted a 20 percent increase in ticket sales, but the Israel Festival closed down. Gérard Mortier presided over his last Salzburg Festival, lambasting the government as he went; but he came in for some fierce criticism of his own, with reviewers panning his "atrocious Fledermaus," "Bomb of a Figaro," "Tepid Lady Macbeth," and "Tasteless Ariadne."

In Spain, Montserrat Caballé raised a wry smile with reports of her battle to be accepted by Barcelona's Cercle del Liceu, an exclusive all-male opera club. The soprano was blackballed along with eight other women, despite having made her career in the house and contributed $35,400 toward its rebuilding after the 1994 fire. The 150-year-old club put up a proud fight before bowing to the inevitable and letting the ladies in.

Recording and Publishing

Doom and gloom prevailed among record companies in an orgy of downsizing. None of this was apparent at the second Classical Brits Awards, a televised extravaganza that boasted some impressive CD sales figures. But the organizer, British Phonographic Industries chief Matthew Cosgrove, quit when the feisty all-girl quartet Bond was booked for the ceremony without his approval.

CD sales were not aided by a growth in Internet piracy, which the European Union pledged to fight. In Britain, the Office of Fair Trading launched an investigation of the major record labels, suspecting that they were acting as a cartel to fix prices. In retailing, as Tower Records felt the pinch in the U.S., London's Tower store in Piccadilly put out the flags to celebrate its 15th anniversary. Not long afterwards, The Times reported that the mighty retailer was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The delayed New Grove finally made it onto European bookshelves but ran into a battery of complaints over its $4,130 price tag. Novello abandoned plans by the Elgar Society to finish a complete edition of the composer's works, so the Society launched a charitable foundation to pick up where the publisher left off. Rival journals BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM Magazine got in a tiff over alleged economies with the truth in quoted sales figures. The Royal Philharmonic Society decided to raise cash by selling its entire archive of scores, including Beethoven's Choral Symphony. The National Sound Archive, part of the British Museum, went live online with almost 2.5 million sound recordings.

Broadcasting

Following the furor that greeted Hilary and Jackie, the controversial movie version of Jacqueline du Pré's life, director Christopher Nupen made a film for British TV that claimed to put the record straight.

British-based OnlineClassics.com launched a digital arts TV channel, hard on the heels of Artsworld, a similar enterprise founded by former Royal Opera House chief Jeremy Isaacs.

Winners

Romanian tenor Marius Brenciu won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. American soprano Karen Frankenstein, granddaughter of the late San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein, won the Opera Prize at the 23rd International Singing Competition of Paris.

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.

Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie-commissioned by English National Opera and premiered at the London Coliseum on February 19, 2000-beat strong competition from the Kirov Opera and the Royal Opera House to be named outstanding opera achievement of 2000 at the Laurence Olivier Awards. In Spain, Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki was named winner of a 2001 Prince of Asturias Award.

Orchestras

The will-he-won't-he Rattle/Berlin Philharmonic saga struggled into its second year. The recalcitrant politicians of a newly impoverished city obdurately continued to block Rattle's two conditions for signing his contract to succeed Abbado as principal conductor-converting the Philharmonic into a foundation and providing more cash for the orchestra-until his patience was said to be at an end. It took the feminine touch to resolve matters, Berlin's new senator for cultural affairs Adrienne Goehler sweeping objections to one side almost as soon as she arrived in her office.

There were new cultural appointments also for Munich, where Lydia Hartl became the first woman to become head of cultural affairs, and Vienna, where Andreas Mailath-Pokorny became chief of the city's Council for Culture following an election that returned the Social Democratic Party to power after 30 years.

Back in Berlin, another question mark hung over Kent Nagano's intentions with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. It was a well-made match, which saw the DS-O named official orchestra in residence at the Salzburg festival for 2002; however, the umbrella organization's shaky financial condition gave cause for concern, and the conductor issued a her-or-me ultimatum when Bettina Pesch was lined up as the orchestra's new Intendant.

In Britain, things orchestral were also penurious, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's players voting for a pay cut to keep the ship afloat. But Simon Rattle's old band, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, was saved from bankruptcy by a $3.45 million Arts Council bailout. There was a $5 million rescue package for the Hallé Orchestra, too, where Mark Elder took over as music director.

There was a bid to revive the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, which bit the dust in 1999 with the withdrawal of state funding. Meanwhile its parent orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony, announced the appointment of Marin Alsop as the first woman to become chief conductor of a major European orchestra and managed to clear its deficit into the bargain. The English Chamber Orchestra celebrated 40 years and the arrival of new principal conductor Ralf Gothoni.

The National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland lost its traditional place at Wexford Festival to the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus. But Eastern European orchestras did not have it all their own way, with the Czech Philharmonic in a steady decline, struggling with major financial and artistic problems despite the presence of Vladimir Ashkenazy as music director.

The Orchestre de Paris was on the move again, having occupied three homes since its formation in 1967 and awaiting the construction of a new auditorium that should become its permanent home. Meanwhile, Christoph Eschenbach and Pierre Boulez stirred things up in Paris, accusing the city of having "lousy" facilities for orchestral music.

In January, 12 veterans of the Hong Kong Philharmonic were fired after failing a controversial test to weed out substandard players. In July, a former director of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta was arrested for allegedly stealing $6.2 million from the orchestra and for falsifying accounting records.

André Previn was named music director of Oslo Philharmonic from August 2002, succeeding Mariss Jansons, who is to leave the orchestra after 20 years to take over from Lorin Maazel as music director of the Bayerische Rundfunk. Claudio Abbado planned to start a new Lucerne-based orchestra after handing over his post as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to Rattle in 2002.

Opera

The ongoing Bayreuth saga continued to Wagnerian length with the 81-year-old Wolfgang Wagner clinging to his directorial throne with great tenacity, his daughter Eva Wagner-Pasquier withdrawing her bid to succeed him, and the late Wieland Wagner's daughter Nike Wagner throwing her hat into the ring. The old man was reportedly determined to leave the festival feet-first only, and probably with a view to coming back to haunt the Festspielhaus unless his chosen successor-his second wife, Gudrun-was handed the crown, though rumors began to circulate regarding the possible succession to 42-year-old Christian Thielemann, Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, who proclaimed glowing support of the old man.

As sagas go, Berlin gave Bayreuth a run for its money, compounding the Rattle/Philharmonic predicament with an all-out opera crisis, the government declaring that it could no longer afford to support three opera houses at an annual cost of $112 million. Yakov Kreizberg quit the music directorship of one of the three-the Komische Oper-firing a broadside at its management as he went.

The Kirov ran into a full-scale fiasco with its visit to Covent Garden where an ambitious program of six Verdi operas plus a concert performance of the Requiem came in for a critical pasting. Director Valery Gergiev took a swipe at promoters Victor and Lilian Hochhauser for setting ticket prices too high. There was trouble at the Bolshoi, too, where artistic director Gennady Rozhdestvensky walked out after only nine months in the job, writing an open letter accusing the management of an attempt "to frustrate the premiere of [Prokofiev's] opera The Gambler," according to Pravda.

The Vienna State Opera managed to post profits but ran into some flak when it ditched the Vienna Choir Boys, complaining of "unprofessionalism." The boys' representatives retorted with two smoking barrels, and the opera ate its words within days.

Places

The major redevelopment of London's South Bank Centre was thrown into confusion when chief executive Karsten Witt announced an organizational review that would effectively put him out of a job early in 2002. The Royal Festival Hall celebrated its 50th anniversary during the year, while the Wigmore Hall marked its centenary. There was a green light for a new $132 million opera house for Wales, and English National Opera announced a $59 million redesign. It was not such good news for Helsinki, where plans to build a $60 million concert hall faced tough political opposition. Berlin, as in other matters, had mixed fortunes, with the possible closure of its Theater des Westens, but the Berlin Academy received $4 million from Alberto Vilar. (The philanthropist was as active in the arts as ever, with the year's donations including $23 million to an arts program in Vienna and a star-studded 90th-birthday gala for Gian Carlo Menotti at the Spoleto Festival.)

Vienna's Sofiensaal was destroyed by fire, Venice reopened the 322-year-old Maliban Theater, which had been closed for restoration for 15 years, and plans for a new opera house in Bahrain got a ministerial thumbs-up.

New Music

The results of Peter Maxwell Davies's sojourn in the ice were heard in his Antarctic Symphony, which premiered in May at London's Royal Festival Hall. David Sawer made a creditable full-length opera debut with From Morning to Midnight for English National Opera in April, but Philippe Manoury's opera K, based on Kafka's The Trial, got a drubbing from the Paris critics.

BBC Proms commissions added ten new works to the repertory, with pieces by Harrison Birtwistle, Julian Philips, Sally Beamish, John Casken, Alexander Goehr, James MacMillan, Colin Matthews, Tobias Picker, Ian Wilson, and Poul Ruders.

Not all the new music was so fresh off the page-some of it was over 200 years old. No sooner had a "lost" Mozart manuscript turned up in the north of England than a Handel Gloria was discovered in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. A performance of the latter drew a standing ovation and perhaps created excitement further than expected, with subsequent reports that Handel's house in London was haunted.

Keith Clarke is editor of Classical Music magazine and a regular contributor to MusicalAmerica.com.