To survive and revive

On the surface, 2002 looked like a bad year for classical music. Audiences were slow to return to theaters after Sept. 11 and the economic downturn made fund-raising dicey. Hardly a week passed without reports of another orchestra or opera company in trouble, another major record label cutting back.

In Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, great orchestras plunged millions of dollars in the hole. America’s second and third largest opera companies, in San Francisco and Chicago, posted such severe deficits that they canceled or replaced some of their most interesting prospects next season. As news of high-tech billionaire Alberto Vilar’s falling portfolio sank in, institutions worldwide were forced to cope with the fact that this benefactor would not be fulfilling pledges. One consequence: We waved goodbye to Los Angeles Opera’s much-anticipated import of Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” from the Kirov of St. Petersburg, Russia.

But classical music is resilient. For all the institutional headaches caused by red ink, the makers of music demonstrated that they have in them the wisdom and vision to address troubled times.

A wave of brilliant young music directors took charge in 2002, from Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic to Antonio Pappano at the Royal Opera in London to Franz Welser-Most at the Cleveland Symphony.

More important, 2002 proved an exceptional year for resourceful, visionary, substantive work, the real sign of classical music’s nonfrivolous, optimistic, possibly even exuberant future.

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Mark Swed’s notable events of 2002

Ten musical happenings that went inspiringly right in 2002.

“Sun Rings.” Terry Riley’s empyrean masterpiece for the Kronos Quartet, chorus, electronic sounds from outer space, and lavish visual projections provided one wild ride at its University of Iowa premiere, along with music of supreme beauty and spiritual impact. A response to the Sept. 11 attacks and a comprehensive call for peace, this cosmic, 95-minute string quartet is a whole new chapter in the age-old quest for a music of the spheres.

“The Transmigration of Souls.” Composer John Adams’ powerfully understated orchestral work offered a sophisticated, meditative, gratifying and non-manipulative Sept. 11 “memory space,” an aural cathedral for a new age. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to open Lorin Maazel’s first season as the orchestra’s music director, it also demonstrated that this often too-flashy conductor has a profound side.

“La Pasion Segun San Marco.” Confirming the stunning response to its premiere in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2001, Osvaldo Golijov’s “Passion According to Saint Mark” marched across America to huge acclaim from Boston to Costa Mesa. An extraordinary exultation of Latin American musical idioms, this recounting of Christ’s last days by an Argentine American Jew demonstrates a near universal appeal.

“Saint Francois d’Assise.” With a spectacularly produced U.S. premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s master work, the San Francisco Opera overnight went from being one of America’s least inventive major companies to one of its most venturesome. And this was no one-night stand for the organization under its new general manager, Pamela Rosenberg; Messiaen’s uncompromising sacred opera was followed by insightful new productions of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” and Handel’s “Alcina.”

Simon Rattle. In the most reported classical music story of the year, Rattle assumed the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic. On their wedding night, in the opening concert of Thomas Ades’ “Asyla” and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the daring conductor and great orchestra perhaps tried a little too hard. But there can be little doubt that the match of this intrepid British conductor with the gravitas of this great German orchestra will help revolutionize symphonic music everywhere.

UCLA International Theatre Festival. The hugely successful and risk-taking festival inaugurated by David Sefton doesn’t exactly fall under the purview of classical music, but many of the undertakings were so far-reaching in their genre-bending zeal that they couldn’t be musically ignored. Robert Wilson’s “Woyzeck” provided exceptional music theater, whereas Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s “Genesi” and the Wooster Group’s “To You, the Birdie!” used music and electronic sound in wildly imaginative new ways.

Dmitri Shostakovich. For no particular reason, Shostakovich turned out to be the composer of the year. His 15th String Quartet was the subject of the illuminating “The Noise of Time,” a collaboration of the British troupe Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet at UCLA. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Esa-Pekka Salonen began his five-year exploration of the Russian composer’s 15 symphonies with revelatory accounts of the first three. And the Kirov saved the day at Los Angeles Opera with its gripping production of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” a replacement for Prokofiev’s “War and Peace.”

John Cage. 2002 commemorated the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth in Los Angeles and the 10th anniversary of his death in New York. The highlights were composer-pianist James Tenney’s illuminating performances of Cage’s prepared-piano classic Sonatas and Interludes at CalArts and the MAK Center. British pop producer Mike Batt made an ugly scene trying to cash in on Cage’s famous silent piece, “4’33”,” but Margaret Leng Tan revived the spirit of the seminal work by performing it in August at Maverick Hall, almost 50 years to the day after the work’s controversial premiere in that historic outdoor venue in Woodstock, N.Y.

“Ice Field.” At 88, composer Henry Brant probably thought he had seen it all. But not a Pulitzer Prize. In a gesture that indicates there is justice in this world, the Pulitzer music composition award went to this Santa Barbara purveyor of spatial music for his life-affirming “Ice Field.” Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the work, in which instruments sing from the farthest reaches of the concert hall, is so exuberant that the jury found it irresistible even on tape.

Walt Disney Concert Hall. Even though it’s not yet completed, Disney Hall is already making an impact downtown. The luminous steel went up, and with it the glowing sense of new possibilities for Los Angeles became, by year’s end, palpable.

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Disappointment

The first Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition in Pasadena tried to invent itself as an important new talent show. It had support on both the civic and the state level, as well as from the Rachmaninoff heirs and the Kawai piano company. But it turned out to be a clumsy and unimaginative competition, awarding its first prize to a Russian banger, the second to a drab Japanese pianist and no third at all. At the inept, musically insubstantial awards ceremony, California’s first lady and Pasadena’s mayor shared the stage with ostentatious sponsors, demonstrating just how gullible our politicos can be when it comes to the arts.