The Year in Music: International

By Keith Clarke

In a year still licking the wounds of September 2001, music continued to play its part-bringing solace, creating memorials, paving the way for a return to normal life at a time when the world had suddenly become anything but normal. International performers found they had a more difficult task getting through newly heightened immigration procedures to play in the U.S., but elsewhere the music business threw up its usual quota of lively stories, from the furor that hit the Hong Kong Arts Community when the chairman of the funding council attacked local arts groups as being mediocre and undeserving, to the planeload of Russian musicians from the Kirov who were barred from a Finnish plane because they had been so drunk and disorderly on the outbound flight.

The Beijing Music Festival, celebrating its first anniversary, consolidated its reputation for attracting the world's top artists by welcoming the New York Philharmonic, which also toured to Macau for the city's 16th International Music Festival and the new Esplanade (Theatres on the Bay) in Singapore, which opened in October. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth threw open the grounds of Buckingham Palace for two concerts in honor of her golden jubilee as monarch-one classical, one pop. The man who wrote the Te Deum for the monarch's coronation, Sir William Walton, was celebrated with a year of performances, publications, and recordings in honor of the centennial of his birth. Berlin saw another new festival, zeitfenster, largely devoted to Spanish music.

Salzburg was declared a disaster zone in the middle of the festival when 1,000 buildings were submerged in floodwaters of the River Danube in August, but the city center and festival escaped the deluge. The following month, Mstislav Rostropovich conducted English and German singers in a peace concert at Peenemünde, East Germany, where the V2 missiles were developed and tested, featuring a 40th-anniversary performance of Britten's War Requiem.

The economic downturn closed the mighty IMG Artists' Paris office, digital-television arts channel Artsworld won an 11th-hour reprieve from closure, and performing organizations and venues worldwide crossed their fingers for the continued financial and physical health of multi-millionaire philanthropist Alberto Vilar.

Recording

With Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Philips said to be pulling the plug on new full-length operas on CD, the long-awaited "One Fine Day" for the recording business continued to look more like a Tosca bloodbath. Vivendi Universal reported a $11.81 million net loss for 2001 and found itself having to deny accounting irregularities as its stocks plunged. Chairman Jean-Marie Messier was ousted (and was also fired as president of the Aix-en-Provence Festival), and also heading for the exit was Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff following a clash with shareholders. The EMI Group cut 1,800 jobs in its recorded music unit, a reduction of 20 percent, but EMI Classics emerged as the one division of EMI Records to survive the axe.

With doom and gloom all around, the only graph that seemed indisputably on the up was for the number of pirated CDs. Faced with figures that-in Britain alone-the practice had grown by 30 percent to cost the industry $40.75 million a year, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), an umbrella organization for U.K. recording companies, called for a mandatory ten-year jail sentence for copyright infringement.

As rip 'n' burn took over as the music lovers' mantra, the hard-pressed record companies turned to the boffins for protection. A copy-proof CD was designed to crash computers if infringement was attempted, but drew criticism from Mac users who found that the disc froze their machines the moment it went in the drive.

German musical journalists lambasted Teldec when the company decided that Nikolaus Harnoncourt, loyal to the firm for over a half-century and offered a lifetime contract on his 70th birthday, would not be allowed to record Bruckner's Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival. The company cancelled the proposed recording, along with one of the Berg Violin Concerto, citing commercial reasons, and the conductor's contract with the company was subsequently cancelled by mutual agreement.

As classical was increasingly defined as anything with a violin in it, the U.K. industry made its annual attempt to stoke up sales with a televised Classical Brits show with a rock combo and choir on stage, scantily clad dancers writhing, fireworks, light show, tickertape shower, and a white-suited Russell Watson trying to work out whether he was a rock star or a classical crooner. Not a single note was allowed to sound into the Royal Albert Hall without first passing through a gruesome amplification setup.

Orchestras

As the saga based around Simon Rattle's contract with the Berlin Philharmonic headed for a happy ending, the British conductor settled into planning for his first season, starting September 2002, and promising to inject "a few new vitamins" into the programs. The bank balance saw a useful injection, too, in a tie-up with Deutsche Bank that guarantees a healthy advance for at least three seasons.

In London, Leonard Slatkin had survived a baptism by fire with a hastily replanned post-9/11 Last Night of the Proms 2001, but in March announced his decision to step down as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony in 2004 after a one-year extension of his three-year contract. No reason was given, but a lack of chemistry between conductor and orchestra was suspected. In the same month the orchestra called off a major U.S. tour scheduled for March 2003, citing funding difficulties. The Israel Philharmonic pulled out of a U.S. tour, too, sparking a row over whether it was terrorism or lack of dollars prompting the move.

Lack of Euros halted a proposed new home for L'orchestre de Paris, but there was better news for the Royal Philharmonic when a London real-estate firm offered to convert a century-old Christian Science Church into a multimillion-pound performing arts center.

The European Union, famed for legislation that proposed to outlaw bent bananas, looked like becoming a threat to the continent's orchestras with a directive to limit noise in the workplace to 83 decibels, considerably lower than a solo trumpet, prompting fears that musicians would be forced to play in ear muffs.

Riccardo Chailly raised eyebrows by announcing he would leave the Royal Concertgebouw for the Gewandhaus Orchestra. British conductor Bramwell Tovey was named chief conductor and music director of L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxem- bourg. Austrian conductor Johannes Wildner, a onetime violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic, became artistic director of the Sarajevo Philharmonic. Composer Oliver Knussen stepped down as music director of the London Sinfonietta.

London Philharmonic Orchestra chief executive and artistic director Serge Dorny quit after seven years to become director general of L'Opéra National de Lyon in France, and the New Zealand Symphony found a new CEO in Peter Walls.

Opera

While Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic were rejoicing in their lucrative new relationship with Deutsche Bank, at the Staatsoper Daniel Barenboim complained that the crumbling condition of Berlin's venerable opera house was posing a danger to performers and audience. His complaint came four days after an aged hydraulic stage lift collapsed during a performance, bringing down parts of the set. The opera houses of Paris also showed themselves in need of attention, with a large part of the set falling on stage during a performance at the Opéra-Bastille and an incident at the Palais Garnier where veteran bass Kurt Moll found himself singing above the sounds of colliding scenery and offstage cursing by stagehands.

At La Scala, Milan, there were understandable nerves when a small fire broke out, but a bigger fuss resulted over claims that the major renovation was more demolition than restoration. In Moscow the Bolshoi Theater commissioned a new opera-an unknown occurrence in today's Russia-but something even more explosive turned up a few days later with the discovery of a World War II-era mine in the theater's backyard.

That one didn't go off, but the explosives at English National Opera provided a fiery display. With a bit of red on the balance sheet and some high-profile flops, including a Masked Ball that opened with the chorus sitting on the john with their pants round their ankles, general director Nicholas Payne found himself walking the plank. He had seen the company through many notable triumphs and his departure prompted shocked and widespread dissent. The rumor machine soon led to reports that the company home, the London Coliseum, undergoing a major renovation, would remain closed for far longer than planned and that the company would return as a part-time shadow of its former self, claims that were swiftly dismissed as colorful speculation.

Up the road in Covent Garden, the Royal Opera pressed on with its campaign to bring opera to the masses, lowering half of all ticket prices to below $72 and experimenting with telecasting performances in public parks. New music director Antonio Pappano unveiled what promised to be a sparkling first season.

Welsh National Opera was lifted out of the doldrums with news that its long-awaited new home, the $150-million Wales Millennium Center, had finally been given the green light, and with a cash injection from the English and Welsh Arts Councils.

Places

Rome saw the opening of the largest concert hall complex in Europe-three separate theaters around an open-air arena, the city's first major-league auditorium, costed at $140 million. It will be used to showcase chamber music, opera, contemporary music, theater, ballet, and symphonic performances. However, the London Times said the complex was millions of dollars over budget, three years behind schedule, and the "auditorium still looks like a building site."

After a 13-year delay and countless false dawns, London's Royal Festival Hall finally got the go-ahead for its renovation. The work includes renewal of the foyers, a new education center, and improvements to the acoustics and technical facilities of the auditorium. It is part of a wider redevelopment of the South Bank Center, described by a parliamentary committee as a "squalid, seedy, and menacing environment." The center also acquired a new CEO in Michael Lynch, formerly in the same job at Sydney Opera House, which venue was the subject of a scathing attack in the Sydney Morning Herald.

While the South Bank Center struggled to make headway, its London cousin the Barbican Center netted $45.5 million from the Corporation of London for a major refurbishment and ongoing maintenance. Another London venue braced itself for upheaval, though not involving plaster and paint: Wigmore Hall faced the end of an era with the retirement in April 2003 of director William Lyne after more than 35 years in the job.

Winners

A 12-year-old violinist became the youngest person ever to win the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition. Jennifer Pike carried off the prize with a performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto on a Stradivarius borrowed from the Royal Academy of Music.

The 20-year-old Italian, Giuseppe Andaloro of Palermo, scored a double, winning the Venice Prize of the Teatro de Fenice in March and the grand prize of the London International Piano Competition in April. Piotr Anderszewski, 33-year-old pianist of Polish-Hungarian descent, was named the 2002 Gilmore Artist.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt won the $135,000 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. American soprano Deborah Voigt and Italian baritone Leo Nucci were presented with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in Paris. In Sweden the $100,000 Polar Music Prize was awarded to Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina and South African singer Miriam Makeba.

In London, the Genesis Prizes for Opera, a scheme launched by Boston-born philanthropist John Studzinski, announced their first composer-librettist winning teams-Jonathan Mills and Dorothy Porter from Australia; Paul Frehner and Angela Murphy of Canada; Jürgen Simpson and Simon Doyle of Eire.

New Music

For a composer to reach his greatest fame through someone else's music is an irony that Anthony Payne came to live with following the tumultuous success of his completion of Elgar's Third Symphony in 1998, but his own moment of glory came with the world premiere of his Visions and Journeys at a BBC Prom in August. Also among the lineup of Proms world premieres were John Harle's The Little Death Machine, Joseph Phibbs's La noche arrolladora, David Sawer's Piano Concerto, and Mark-Anthony Turnage's Uninterrupted Sorrow.

Most topical new work of the year was Michael Zev Gordon's cantata Red Sea, a meditation on the Middle East conflict, premiered at the Cheltenham Festival. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the inspiration for Monster by composer Sally Beamish and writer/librettist Janice Galloway, given its first performance by Scottish Opera in February.

The major opera premiere lined up for the year was Sophie's Choice by Nicholas Maw, bringing together conductor Simon Rattle and director Trevor Nunn in a three-hour adaptation of William Styron's novel at the Royal Opera House in early December. An anguished story of inhumanity, it has certainly found its time.

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