San Diego County: 1990’s Classical Scene : Black Ink Tops Off Quiet Year

With apologies to humorist Garrison Keillor, it has been a quiet musical year in San Diego. In this Lake Wobegon by the Pacific, not even the dread angel of fiscal crisis passed over the city’s major musical organizations this year, visiting instead the theater companies.

So it is fitting, then, that 1990’s biggest story, after a decade of financial woes, is that the San Diego Symphony inaugurated the year by retiring its $4.3-million debt on Symphony Hall. The combination of a $2.5-million gift from San Diego newspaper publisher Helen Copley and the forgiveness of the remaining $1.8-million debt by four local banks put the orchestra solidly in the black for the first time in recent memory.

Over at the San Diego Opera, ever-prudent general director Ian Campbell maintained a healthy surplus in the company bank accounts for the third year in a row.

It was a year in which both the symphony and the opera began to take 20th-Century repertory seriously.

San Diego Opera’s most successful production of its 1990 season was Francis Poulenc’s “Les Dialogues des Carmelites” in February. The melodious 1956 opera hardly qualifies for avant-garde status, but this austere, starkly realistic music drama had never been attempted by the local company. Dramatically persuasive and unusually well-sung, the production demonstrated to the conservative local opera public that there is viable operatic life after Menotti’s cloying Puccini reprises.

On the heels of the Poulenc production, Campbell announced he would include at least one challenging 20th-Century opera in each upcoming season. The offerings of the 1991 season feature both Benjamin Britten’s 1947 comic opera “Albert Herring” and American composer Carlisle Floyd’s new version of his 1962 grand opera “The Passion of Jonathan Wade.”

In a pair of concerts at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium in January and February, the San Diego Symphony featured major orchestral works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Charles Wuorinen and Roger Reynolds. Although these recent compositions (none earlier than 1984) were well-received, attendance was modest, and symphony management declined to continue this forward-looking series. Still, it was refreshing to hear the local orchestra play Reynolds’ 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition “Whispers Out of Time” with authority.

Although Yoav Talmi, who became the orchestra’s music director in October, has stated that he will integrate contemporary compositions into future symphony programming, his initial selections have been cautious, to say the least.

The Samuel Barber violin concerto he conducted on the second concert of the season, for example, is stylistically a far cry from either Reynolds or Wuorinen.

Contemporary music has been the rallying cry of the UCSD music department since its inception.

Notable offerings this year included a weeklong festival in early April devoted to the music of Iannis Xenakis. If the iconoclastic Greek composer’s verbal explanations of his complex music provided little insight, the cumulative effect of hearing a range of his works in succession ratified Xenakis’ lofty position in the current compositional pantheon.

SONOR, UCSD’s resident contemporary new music ensemble, premiered Reynolds’ “Personae” in March. This eloquent, chamber-sized violin concerto written for and played by UCSD violinist Janos Negyesy may be the vehicle by which Reynolds’ name enters the American musical mainstream.

At the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, meanwhile, despite its smug conservatism--executive director Neale Perl recoils at the mere mention of contemporary music--the well-heeled organization made several notable contributions to the local music scene this year.

Under the society’s aegis, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra brought John Adams’ new work “The Wound Dresser” to the Civic Theatre in February. The haunting work set Walt Whitman’s searing Civil War poetry in a rich, if subdued, orchestral fabric.

Elsewhere, when La Jolla SummerFest’s artistic director, Heiichiro Ohyama, selected Andre Previn as the annual festival’s first composer in residence, it raised more than a few eyebrows.

Indeed, Previn’s pair of chamber compositions sounded pleasant and slightly innocuous. But, if Previn is to be the Trojan Horse for more substantial resident composers in the future--as Ohyama has intimated--it will be another step in the right direction for the sponsoring La Jolla Chamber Music Society.

Among the memorable performances in 1990, German tenor Hans Peter Blochwitz’ La Jolla recital in October stands out. Beyond the beauty of his lyric instrument, the sophisticated and emotionally complex traversal of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” and Schubert’s “Die Schoene Muellerin” song cycles defined what a Liederabend should be.

In May, pianist Emmanuel Ax and cellist Yo-Yo Ma collaborated in a stirring, profound program of Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Prokofiev at Civic Theatre. Another cellist of the first rank, Janos Starker, brought virtuosity and great insight to lesser-known works by Martinu and Cassado at Sherwwood Hall in his October solo recital.

In the final concert of SummerFest, the Colorado String Quartet delivered a stunning, passionate interpretation of Alberto Ginastera’s Second String Quartet.

Among the notable conductors to grace local podiums, JoAnn Falletta should be at the top of any critical listener’s list. Falletta, who is music director of the Long Beach Symphony, made her local debut in January with the San Diego Chamber Orchestra. The local ensemble has seldom sounded as nimble, responsive, and polished.

The following month, German conductor Christof Perick rattled the rafters of Copley Symphony Hall with his noble, expansive approach to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony.

Earlier this month, American conductor Kenneth Kiesler brought a refreshing vision of Handel’s “Messiah” to Copley Symphony Hall. His approach peeled back pious tradition to get to the oratorio’s Baroque roots, and the San Diego Symphony and Master Chorale responded with laudable precision and spirit.

Among the disappointments of the year, Paul Dresher’s contemporary opera “Power Failure” comes immediately to mind.

Dresher’s Berkeley-based ensemble brought the minimalist work to the Spreckels Theatre in February amid much fanfare, but the opus turned out to be dramatically simplistic and musically static in a deadly way. But Dresher’s low-budget group had no patent on dullness. In April, the San Diego Opera took Mozart’s inspired “Die Zauberfloete” and imaginative sets by Maurice Sendak and somehow managed to squeeze all of the magic out of the opera.

In October, the rising Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky made his long-awaited West Coast recital debut in La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium. His shallow interpretations and callous over singing of the all-Italian program made many listeners wonder how the judges awarded him first prize in the 1990 Singer of the World Competition held in Cardiff, Wales.

But no performance was as maddening as guest conductor Alexander Schneider’s all-out attack on Bach and Haydn at the San Diego Symphony’s first Classically Baroque concert in November. Anyone with such antipathy for Baroque music should be enjoined from even picking up a score by J. S. Bach.

Two passings during 1990 also deserve mention. Zoltan Rozsnyai, music director of the San Diego Symphony from 1967-71, died in September at age 62. In more recent seasons, he had been music director of the International Orchestra and member of the music faculty at United States International University, at which the International Orchestra was based.

And the Los Angeles Philharmonic, after a laudable 69 years of playing concerts in San Diego, decided to terminate its series after its April 28 Civic Theatre concert. Although the local Philharmonic series had once been a coveted season ticket, in recent years the demand had waned significantly.