Exciting or Exasperating, but Not Dull

This was an active year in classical music, what with all the temptations for millennial merriment and contemplation. But it was also an unsettling time of transition, with new music directors being sought at major orchestras on the East Coast and changes in store at arts administrations all over the world. Here is a sample of the year’s notable achievements, mostly but not entirely local--and not necessarily in order of importance.

1. Salonen here and not here.

With so much uncertainty among American orchestras at the moment, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has the stability of eight years with a celebrated music director and the prospect of an exciting future in a spectacular new hall under construction. But it was, in fact, an awkward year for the Philharmonic. Esa-Pekka Salonen took a sabbatical to compose, although he wasn’t completely out of sight or mind. In January, he conducted the orchestra in a memorable evening of his own music; this month, pianist Gloria Cheng premiered his enchanting piano piece, “Dichotomie,” and Salonen made a brief appearance to open the season. A new managing director, Deborah Borda, inherited a sizable deficit and the problem of dwindling audiences. Then her top lieutenant, Welz Kauffman whom she had brought with her from the New York Philharmonic, suddenly decamped to Chicago, where he will head the Ravinia summer festival. But the year ends with a sense of spring on the horizon--the Walt Disney Concert Hall has begun to sprout out of the ground, Salonen returns full-time to the podium the first week of January, and a new artistic administrator, Edward Yim, from the Cleveland Orchestra, just signed on.

2. Opera alone.

New operas--even bad new operas--are always exciting occasions, if for no other reason than the sheer scope, ambition, spectacle and expense of the art form. And yet two of the most extraordinary evenings of lyric theater this year were extremely modest, one-man performances. Indeed, the most riveting operatic performance was by Rinde Eckert as the businessman-turned-sailor, Donald Crowhurst, in Steve Mackey’s “Ravenshead,” presented by UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. Eckert, with a vocal range of nearly four octaves and a brilliantly honed sense of irony, conveyed with scary authenticity the delusional rage that eventually overcame Crowhurst alone at sea. Cooler, but no less troubling or compelling, was Mikel Rouse in his one-man “Failing Kansas,” performed as part of the Eclectic Orange Festival at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Through a handful of songs and minimal staging, he took us into really deranged minds--those of the killers documented in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

3. New opera near and afar.

That is not to say that new opera doesn’t continue to be made--and financed--on a grand scale. The year’s two major American attempts--Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” commissioned by San Francisco Opera, and Carlisle Floyd’s “Cold Sassy Tree,” commissioned by Houston Grand Opera--proved to be tuneful, easy-listening crowd pleasers, though the former happens to be a grim story of rape, murder and capital punishment and the latter is a homey Southern tragi-comedy. Neither did anything to push the envelope. For that, the most notable opera premiere was Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” (Love From Afar), a sumptuously poetic meditation on love and loss in the middle ages that was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. Also attracting wide attention was Danish composer Poul Ruder’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on the novel by Margaret Atwood and given its premiere in Copenhagen.

4. Opera into the future.

Los Angeles Opera did not make such news this year, but that doesn’t mean Placido Domingo, its new artistic director, doesn’t have bold plans. His bombshell press conference at the beginning of the season sent journalists, the opera world and, reportedly, his board of directors into a tizzy. Instead of relying on safe productions of standard (or non-adventurous nonstandard) repertory, as many suspected the famously much-extended tenor would do, Domingo made grand pronouncements about a future that would include a new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, with designs and special effects from George Lucas and his Industrial Light & Magic laboratory, and new operas from Luciano Berio (including one on the life of Domingo), Deborah Dratell (“Nicholas and Alexandria”) and possibly a comic all-American effort from John Williams. Domingo also announced the very good news that Kent Nagano would become principal conductor of the company and that the dynamic Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, would be an annual guest.

5. A visa for MTT to return to his homeland.

Each season, Michael Tilson Thomas’ remarkable achievements with the San Francisco Symphony become more remarkable. But until this year, the only local sighting of the native Angeleno with his band of five years was on Visa television commercials. Finally returning to Los Angeles to conduct at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the first time in 15 years, he led the San Francisco Symphony in an astonishingly deep and penetrating performance of John Adams’ “Harmonielehre.” Meanwhile, MTT made his annual June festival with his orchestra in San Francisco more newsworthy than ever by devoting it to what he calls the “maverick” tradition in American music--a cleverly unspecific category that allowed him to concentrate on his favorite composers--for three well-packed weeks of arresting performances that opened the ears of large and eager audiences.

6. Formenti forte and piano.

Marino Formenti’s name is just beginning to attract attention. And so far Los Angeles has become the only place in America to find out about this wildly entertaining and technically astonishing player. Having caught the eye of Dorrance Stavley, who runs the Monday Evening Concerts series, Formenti was given an extraordinary four-concert run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He used it to explore 20th century music from four countries. The music was interesting and the playing even more so, in its extremes of speed and stillness, of ethereal pianissimos and earthquake fortissimos. Everything under this Italian pianist’s fingers is high drama.

7. Britten non-year year.

It may have been the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death and the 100th birthdays of both Aaron Copland and Kurt Weill, but the British composer Benjamin Britten needed no important anniversaries to receive the most impressive celebration in L.A. this year. Los Angeles Opera’s two most notxable new productions of the year, with the two most compelling performances, were “Billy Budd” and “Peter Grimes.” Meanwhile, in an amazing coincidence, the Los Angeles Philharmonic followed the “Grimes” a day later with a gripping performance of the “War Requiem,” led by Antonio Pappano and featuring the local debut of the haunting tenor Ian Bostridge.

8. What’s in a name?

UCLA tried to rename Schoenberg Hall in honor of donors Mo and Evelyn Ostin. But protests followed here and abroad over the university replacing the name of the greatest composer ever associated with any UC campus with that of a record industry executive, however well-respected. The school was ultimately forced to restore the music-building concert hall to its original name. Nor did an experiment to rename the Music Center the generic Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (generating a pharmaceutical-sounding abbreviation, PACLAC) succeed, and the county has now returned the complex to its original name. Unfortunately, the embarrassing Ralphs/Food 4 Less moniker for the auditorium in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall remains.

9. Passions for the millennium.

The most passionate idea for a millennial rite during a Bach year came from the Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, where Helmuth Rilling asked four composers to write new passions based on the story of Christ’s final days in the four Gospels. The stirring, new 90-minute works by Tan Dun (Matthew), Osvaldo Golijov (Mark), Sophia Gubaidulina (John) and Wolfgang Rihm (Luke) reflected not only the four points of view of the evangelists, but many different musics and cultures. Among them: black dance music from the Argentine Golijov and a Taoist interpretation in Tan’s ritualist “Water Passion.”

10. California dreaming.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Made in California” exhibition was ridiculed for trivializing, politicizing and commercializing its subject. But the music world responded much more positively, with a number of local institutions, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, paying rare attention to their home state. Downright historic was the Philharmonic finally performing a work by the 83-year-old influential eclectic Lou Harrison. At LACMA, the Monday Evening Concerts revived the thrilling work from the San Francisco Tape Center in the 1960s, which helped remove the bad taste left from the tacky CD of commercial music the museum has produced to accompany its exhibition catalog. As a further and spectacular counter to that CD, the heroic recording award goes to Southwest Chamber Music for releasing a magnificent 12-disc set of “composer portraits” that provides a fascinating and compelling overview of the diverse California musical scene.