THE BECKMESSER AWARDS OF 1985

I t was a happy, sad, frustrating, exhilarating, discouraging, encouraging, soothing, frazzling, stimulating, depressing, uplifting, benumbing, painful, joyful, dull, exciting, hysterical, lackadaisical, exceptional, humdrum year. Just like 1984.

To commemorate the high--and low--points, The Times proudly and shamelessly presents the 18th annual awards dedicated to the spirit and memory of Nuremburg’s immortal and most noble, most misunderstood humanitarian, critic, musicologist, lutanist, poet, bon vivant and guardian of public virtue, Sixtus Beckmesser.

Let us know if we have overlooked anything.

CHEERS

Man of the year (we hope): Andre Previn, battle-scarred in Pittsburgh, uncomfortable with his lingering local image as a popsy Wunderkind , amused by Tinseltown brouhaha, bemused by subscription-audience conservatism, eminently serious about the enormous task at hand and eager to expand horizons--ours and his--as he takes over the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Most welcome symphonic guests: Riccardo Muti and the new Philadelphians (at Ambassador).

Chief champions of chamber-music adventure: the Kronos Quartet.

Most illuminating balletic triumph: Natalia Makarova, whose Ballet Theatre Juliet proved that youth is wasted on the young.

Silver-rose award: to Kathleen Battle, for the most exquisite vocal recital of the year (at Ambassador).

Most promising podium newcomer: Esa-Pekka Salonen, the thoughtful young maestro from Finland, who quickened many a pulse in a diversified repertory with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Baritone most worthy of watching: Thomas Hampson, erstwhile Los Angeles hopeful, who returned from operatic successes in Germany and France as a recitalist of striking taste and perception.

Best unoperatic opera performance: Puccini’s overfamiliar “La Boheme,” explored with a fresh perspective by a young professional cast and an even younger student orchestra under an inspired Michael Tilson Thomas at Hollywood Bowl, of all places.

Television-may-be-worth-watching-after-all award: to Gabriel Bacquier, for his witty, amusing yet wise and potentially tragic Falstaff in the Goetz Friedrich almost-great performance inexplicably hidden in PBS vaults for seven years.

Damn-the-unfriendly-skies award: to Michael Tilson Thomas, for halting the Mahler Eighth in mid-performance at the Hollywood Bowl and stalking offstage for an unplanned half-hour intermission because of aeronautical interference.

Nicest balletic nostalgia: (1) the all-Ashton bill assembled by the Joffrey Ballet at the Music Center, with the arch, elegant and unjustly neglected “Wedding Bouquet” serving as primary attraction; (2) “Fancy Free,” Jerome Robbins’ snazzy ode to 1940s sailordom, as interpreted by the spunky Dance Theatre of Harlem in Pasadena (and, oddly, thus-far denied New York).

Nicest balletic jolt: David Gordon’s bright and brash duet for dancers and folding seats, “Field, Chair and Mountain,” as introduced by American Ballet Theatre.

Girlish matriarch for all seasons: Agnes de Mille, feisty heroine of numerous damn-the-system lectures and iconographical quarter-protagonist of the fascinating “De Mille Dynasty” exhibit buried somewhere in Century City.

Most eloquent lobbyist for continued and increased arts subsidy: Sir Claus Moser of the Royal Opera, who warned Great Britain that “if ‘candle-end economies’--to use the Prime Minister’s phrase--cause . . . artistic institutions to cut activities and standards built up over decades, both country and government will lose much more than our masters in the treasury may realize.”

PUZZLEMENTS

World’s most heart-rendingly mercurial administrator: Ernest Fleischmann, who announced that he would give up his post at the Los Angeles Philharmonic to take the job of top maitre d’ at the Paris Opera. “One would be a mouse not to accept it,” he roared to The Times. A few days later, the mouse squeaked a soggy retraction: “The immense outpouring of appreciation for my work here, and affection for me personally, not only from the board, the musicians and my staff, but also from many members of the public, made me realize that it was impossible for me to leave.”

Most-idiotic-puff-in-advertising award: to the enlightened arts mavens at USC who used this hype to sell a Bach recital--”Imagine . . . Julia Childs (sic) cooking dinner for you. Charles Lindbergh flying you to San Francisco. Rembrandt painting your portrait. Such is the experience of hearing the great Detlef Kraus play for you.”

Still-a-prophet-with-limited-honor award: to Ernst Krenek, revered by audiences and major performing institutions in Europe, ignored by just about everyone outside academia in America.

Xeroxed-arpeggio award: to the multitudes who continue to find stimulation and, they assure us, spiritual salvation in the deafening minimalist doodles repeated ad nauseam, and beyond, by Philip Glass and his friends.

Year’s most dauntless but dubious survivalists: the people who put on the dull, academic, would-be avant-garde formula rituals known as Monday Evening Concerts, and the small audiences that stay awake during those rituals.

The first annual Marni Nixon Award: to Alex North, for concocting a witty score for the film “Prizzi’s Honor” that makes continual, knowing use of Puccini and Rossini without the film’s credits ever acknowledging the sources.

Most ominous artistic development: a report from Italy that the Paris Opera now employs something called “sonorization”--which apparently is an evasive way of saying “electronic amplification.”

Second most ominous development: the ubiquitous adoption of supertitles, not just for foreign-language operas but even for operas in English--an invitation for lazy audiences to read but not look and listen, an excuse for lazy singers to muddle the text as well as its meaning.

Unanswered unrelated questions of the year: When and how will Placido Domingo take over the direction of operatic fortunes, or absence of same, at the downtown Music Center? Will the powerful, intrinsically cautious, administratively arrogant Orange County Music Center be able to fulfill its campaign promises? When will the Los Angeles Philharmonic inveigle some of the world’s finest conductors to grace the local podium--conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Carlos Kleiber, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Carlo Maria Giulini, Eugen Jochum, Daniel Barenboim and, er, Michael Tilson Thomas?

More unanswered unrelated questions: Can the Joffrey company continue to fill the local ballet gap properly without drastically widening its repertory and strengthening its roster? Will Peter Hemmings really turn out to be the long-awaited savior of Music Center opera? Who will succeed Gerard Schwarz at the helm of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and when and can he/she succeed at all, given the inherent musical stresses and financial strains? Does the Greek Theatre, as run by the Nederlander monolith, offer the supporting community any profits beyond the obvious commercial ones? Will the new Symphony Hall in San Diego, formerly a superdeco movie palace, eventually find its wonted financial and acoustical health?

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

Most (over)zealous operatic dreamers of the year: the good people in Ontario, who thought they could validate an exhumation of Halevy’s “La Juive” with blood, sweat and pluck alone.

The how-much-is-that-in-hemidemisemiquavers award: to the U.S. Postal Service, which issued a Jerome Kern stamp worth 22 cents and an Igor Stravinsky stamp worth only 2 cents.

The year’s most star-cross’d lovers: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, blandly delineated (most of the time) in ill-fated, competitive revivals by both Joffrey and ABT.

A-house-is-not-a-home award: to the cockeyed optimists who thought the Embassy Theatre was a proper place for opera, or even for a recital of cabaret songs by a misguided Peter Schickele.

The Uncle Miltie Cross Award for misplaced verbiage: to Christopher Hogwood, for constantly talking (down) to his Hollywood Bowl audience as if a normal grown-up program were a kiddie koncert.

The cold-and-new-isn’t-always-better award: to the often exciting Long Beach sometimes-Grand Opera, for its painful, sterile, fatally anti-atmospheric production of “Eugene Onegin.”

The Ernest Fleischmann memorial on-again-off-again award: to the local cIVIL WARriorS who promised us “Einstein on the Beach,” then canceled, then held up hope, then. . . .

Cultural-chauvinism blunder of the year: The Los Angeles Times headline of April 18 that announced, “MRS. CHANDLER, 11 OTHERS TO GET NATIONAL ARTS MEDAL.” The relatively insignificant “others” included Elliott Carter, Martha Graham, Louise Nevelson, Leontyne Price, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jose Ferrer, Ralph Ellison and Lincoln Kirstein.

Most embarrassing retrograde inversion: the booster photo of the Philharmonic in a tourist brochure printed by our sophisticated board of supervisors. Apparently no one noticed that the picture had been inadvertently flopped, showing the cellos and basses to the left of the conductor, the fiddles on the right.

Reluctant we-told-you-so-awards: to John Clifford, who finally discovered that he could not sustain a ballet company afflicted with artistic as well as fiscal poverty; to Johanna Dordick, who abandoned her quirky Los Angeles Opera Theater just as it was taking its most dangerously ambitious steps and thus bequeathed seemingly unavoidable disaster to her successors.

Most stale, least nourishing mass production: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best-selling, easy-to-take, ultra-cornball Requiem, marketed with superb cynical aplomb by Angel Records.

Operatic myopia award: to the new Music Center chieftain who believed that “The Beggar’s Opera” could be a hit at the Embassy, who regarded a third-hand “Tosca” as an appropriate calling card for the Berlin Opera and who thought he could attract the masses to five performances of “Le Nozze di Figaro” in a single week.

Strangest priorities award: to the geniuses at KCET who miss no opportunity to praise themselves for profound public service, who constantly beg for money on “non-commercial televison” and who have relegated most operas and concerts--even the so-called “live” ones--to ineptly publicized, sleepy Sunday-matinee delayed telecasts.

Thanks-for-inventing-the-wheel award: to the hypesters at the Mark Taper Forum who introduced three “micro-operas” for the New Music America festival (one amateurish, one a mini-minimalist trial, one a potentially interesting mechanical failure) and pretended that they were bravely exploring new fusions of music and drama.

Who-cares-about-Tchaikovsky award: to the geniuses of the Arts & Entertainment cable network who imported a Bolshoi “Swan Lake” (good) and allowed Gene Kelly to provide voice-over narration during--repeat, during --the ballet (unspeakable).

Anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-vulgarer awards: to Alvin Ailey and Maurice Bejart in dance, to Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in song, to Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Bernstein in music.

The 30th annual who-are-all-these-mediocrities award: to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for engaging (and usually re-engaging) the likes of Sir Charles Groves, Mark Elder, Guenther Herbig, Garcia Navarro, James Loughran, Jan Latham-Koenig, Claus Peter Flor. . . .

Shotgun unions of the year: Pilobolus and Joffrey; Mikhail Baryshnikov and a stupid Technicolored cold-war-propaganda would-be thriller; the Harlem Dance Theater and an antebellum “Giselle”; an often gritty Grace Bumbry and a sometimes shrill Shirley Verrett in a competitive Bowl concert; a seemingly distracted Bernard Haitink and an off-night Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Mahler Fifth at Ambassador; the fine German basso Kurt Moll and an obscure debut recital in an unworthy locale (Hancock Auditorium at USC).

MILESTONES

Many-happy-returns awards: to Sir Michael Tippett at 80; Ernst Krenek and Aaron Copland at 85; Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel at 300.

Farewell-to-alarms award: to Leontyne Price on the occasion of her extraordinarily dignified, poignant, operatic valedictory.

Transitional awards: to the Sequoia Quartet for eloquently surving the departure of half the team; to William Kraft, whose years of service to modern music and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have been rewarded with premature retirement; to Roger Wagner, whose musical dedication, undoubted artistic achievement, egocentric personal politics and sometimes abrasive manner have earned him quasi-banishment from the chorale he created; to Fernando Bujones, whose demands for more interesting repertory got him fired at ABT by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had left Russia and the Kirov Ballet in quest of more interesting repertory.

Ave atque vale: Karl Schmitt-Walter (Beckmesser in excelsis), Seymour Peck, Raoul Pene du Bois, Selma Halprin, Lovro von Matacic, Gustl Breuer, Mary Van Lear, Emil Kahn, Carol Brice, Eugene List, Alice Shapiro, Efrem Zimbalist, Alexander Scourby, George Schick, Joseph Wolman, Eugene Ormandy, Roger Sessions, George London, Frank Granato, Marc Chagall, Robert W. Holton, Mario Petri, Ronald Stear, Leon Collins, Rudi Gernreich, Benvenuto Franci, Albert Minns, Al Williams, Rubino Profeta, Marco Stefanoni, Sammy Warren, Bridget D’Oyly Carte, Ben Sommers, Gary Fifield, Toni Lander, Audrey Elizabeth Connally, Gyles Fontaine, Andy Keyser, John Martin, Gitta Gradova, Maude Douglas Tweedy, Ferenc Molnar, Ria Ginster, Sheldon Gold, Charles Elsen, Joseph Fishman, Julian Olevsky, Rudolf Gamsjaeger, Alfred Siercke, Leon Collins, Karel Shook, Harold Lang, Carolyn Farnham, Wilhelm Brueckner-Rueggeberg, Mark Lothar, Joseph Rogatchevsky, Richard Yardumian, Mischa Spoliansky, Paul Creston, Ines Alfani-Tellini, Wilhelm Reinking, Mosco Carner, Harold Gomberg, William Alwyn, Dane Rudhyar, Allen Skei, Coe Glade, Louis Sgarro, Nelson Riddle, Mischa Schneider, Guillermo Sarabia, Kenny Baker, Sara Tucker, George Movshon, Benjamin Gibner King, Fernando Previtali, Yoshiyuki Takada, Antonino Votto, Martha Schlamme, Emil Gilels, Joseph Rosenstock, Jean Gordon, Paul Godkin, Barry Kay, Viorica Ursuleac, David Barnett, Dimiter Uzunov, Cveta Ahlin, Franco Ferrara, Saturno Meletti, Muriel Smith, Richard Condie, Anthony Bassae (a.k.a. Tamara Karpova).