Taking L.A. in New Directions

The year in music, as in the rest of life, was momentous. Below are 10 reasons why.

1. Planting New Groves. Everyone has a complaint about the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It’s too fat (29 volumes), far too expensive ($4,850), studded with copy editing errors, poorly bound, academically trendy, overly ambitious in its inclusion of pop, and so on. But it is the single greatest collection of musical knowledge ever assembled. And, now that it can be accessed and searched on the Web (for a fee, of course), it is also the most accessible.

2. Rite of Winter. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s four all-Stravinsky weeks--starting in mid-February, brilliantly conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and drawing sell-out crowds--once and for all disproved the conventional wisdom that there is no audience for music that speaks to our time. The festival did something else, maybe even more important. It created a genuine sense of occasion without marketing gimmickry and without condescension, simply by following its convictions and doing what it does best.

3. Domingo Takes Over. The first Los Angeles Opera season planned by Placido Domingo opened with a strong performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades,” the company’s first attempt at an opera in Russian. It made a musical, if not theatrical, splash, proving that the tenor-cum-administrator can attract top singers and a great conductor (Valery Gergiev), and remain, above all, a star tenor.

4. Nagano Takes Over. The following week, and four days after Sept. 11, Kent Nagano, having made an extraordinary effort to get from Berlin to L.A., put in his first appearance as Los Angeles Opera principal conductor.

Bringing eloquent and exciting direction from the pit to the company’s first production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” Nagano revealed himself a Wagnerian of distinction, the single most vital new source of energy for opera at the Music Center, and someone who could whip the orchestra into shape like no one before him.

5. Gershon Takes Over. On the heels of Nagano’s “Lohengrin,” Grant Gershon, the new music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, began his tenure as the third member of the Music Center’s triumvirate of outstanding young conductors.

His first concert--ranging from Thomas Tallis’ 40-part motet to a major work by Philip Glass--showed that all three musical institutions on Grand Avenue can be fresh, bold, exhilarating and visionary.

6. Christmas in January. John Adams’ opera/oratorio “El Nino,” given its first U.S. performance by the San Francisco Symphony early in the year (and released by Nonesuch later in the year), added a whole new multicultural dimension to the Christmas story (one that looks to Latin America and also to women). With music as fine as any Adams has written, it is another peak in the career of one of America’s great composers.

7. Berlin Benefaction. Berlin sent some of its best west. The Berlin Philharmonic highlighted the Eclectic Orange Festival with magnificent readings of Beethoven symphonies under Claudio Abbado, performances that not only confirmed what a supremely great ensemble this orchestra remains, but that also brought new insight into music so familiar that it is often taken for granted. Meanwhile, the German Symphony Orchestra and Radio Chorus, hosted by L.A. Opera in December, gave the city in which Schoenberg lived out his final years its first performance of his important opera “Moses and Aron.” While clearly Berlin’s second orchestra, it sounded nevertheless very impressive under Nagano, in his second season as its music director. The concert performance turned into the highlight of the Schoenberg year, even though the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death is most actively being commemorated by the L.A. Philharmonic.

8. Death and Transfiguration. In a Peter Sellars staging presented in May by Lincoln Center in New York, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson explored the art of dying with the help of two profound Bach cantatas that came as close to confronting the ultimate experience as a performer can and still be around to take a bow. Not only was this extraordinary mezzo-soprano, who has just undergone a battle with cancer, around to take that bow, she sang with a dramatic fervor that simply had to be heard to be believed. (The year’s low point was UCLA’s decision not to bring this program to Los Angeles.)

9. Teaching Tudor. After gingerly applying its resources to music, the Getty Research Institute took the leap and hosted a full-fledged and endlessly fascinating symposium on the great American pianist and inscrutable composer David Tudor, whose papers the institute owns.

10. Verizon on Hold. With the opening of Verizon Hall in the new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the Philadelphia Orchestra expects to bring the fabled Philadelphia sound to its audiences with greater immediacy than it ever could in the old Academy of Music. Even though nothing much went right for its dismal opening concert this month, there were occasional moments of pleasing sound in the otherwise clinically cold acoustics. But those occasional moments were enough to indicate that Verizon Hall can eventually be made to work.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.