Actually, it’s alive and well

SENSATION-SEEKING premature reports of the death of a mature art, classical music, did not cease in 2005. Naysayers howled into the wind. But it was a very good year.

Peter Sellars continues to make waves and move mountains.

If there had been any question that Sellars is the single most creative force in the world of opera today, he took care of that in 2005. He urged from soprano Dawn Upshaw a profoundly penetrating performance of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments” at Carnegie Hall. With the help of conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and video artist Bill Viola, he revolutionized Wagner staging for a “Tristan and Isolde” in Paris. He cajoled composer Osvaldo Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang into successfully rewriting their troubled Lorca opera, “Ainadamar,” for Santa Fe. Most important, he contributed a brilliant libretto and overpowering staging to John Adams’ magnificent new “Doctor Atomic,” premiered by San Francisco Opera.

Just in case you thought it was easy to put Lorca or Kafka on the stage ...

Ian Krouse’s inept “Lorca, Child of the Moon” wasted UCLA’s resources. Poul Ruders’ “Kafka’s Trial,” written for the opening of a new opera house in Copenhagen, verged on anti-Semitism with its kvetching Kafka.

And in case you thought every big-deal opera project was a big deal ...

Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,” commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, had a stellar cast and a first-rate production team but remained an unscintillating version of the classic American tale of sex, crime and social climbing.

Conductors now grow on trees.

Four young conductors -- Stephane Deneve from France, Vladimir Jurowski from Russia, Jonathan Nott from Britain and 24-year-old Gustavo Dudamel from Venezuela -- made sensational Los Angeles Philharmonic debuts.

Happy and not so happy birthdays.

The centenary of the magical British composer Michael Tippett’s birth might hardly have registered at all were it not for Andrew Davis’ marvelous performances of “The Rose Lake” with the Philharmonic and “The Midsummer Marriage” at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Toru Takemitsu would have turned 75 this year, but the Japanese are waiting until the 10th anniversary of his death, in 2006, to properly celebrate their most celebrated composer. DreamWorks’ idea of feting Stephen Sondheim at 75 was to pull the rights for “Sweeney Todd” out from under Los Angeles Opera. Terry Riley marked his 70th birthday by writing a wondrous new quintet for the Kronos Quartet and pipa player Wu Man.

Bring on the poets.

Intrepid poets are showing a new interest in libretto-writing. Charles Bernstein published “Shadowtime,” his arrestingly fanciful contribution to Brian Ferneyhough’s “thought opera” about the influential theorist Walter Benjamin. Anne Carson titled her new collection “Decreation” after a luminous feminist libretto she’s written as a stand-alone text. Don Davis turned to Los Angeles poet Kate Gale, whose text was translated into Spanish for “Rio de Sangre.” Weirdly, the Los Angeles Master Chorale translated her lines back into English for surtitles when it presented the opera-in-progress.

Orchestral excitement finally moves east.

After years of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony leading the way, the St. Louis Symphony has just leaped to the imaginative fore with a wildly inventive new music director, David Robertson, and the Boston Symphony has continued revitalizing itself in its second season under James Levine.

Los Angeles’ diminishing legacy.

The music-challenged Los Angeles County Museum of Art evicted the EAR Unit (moved to REDCAT) and Xtet (with no place to go) from its Leo S. Bing Theater while giving the venerable Monday Evening Concerts but one more season. The cuts grew all the more poignant with the death of LACMA’s respected music director, the composer Dorrance Stalvey. Los Angeles also lost two beloved conductors: former Philharmonic music director Carlo Maria Giulini and CalArts composer-conductor Stephen “Lucky” Mosko, whose luck sadly ran out the day before his 58th birthday.