Classical gasses

Classical - The year in review

by Lloyd Schwartz

1. Birthday Boys (Part I). Elliott Carter, our greatest living American composer, turned 90 December 11, and he's still composing some of his shapeliest, most moving, exciting, and youthful works. Last summer Tanglewood offered up a Carter tribute, with Boston Symphony Orchestra clarinettist Thomas Martin playing Carter's 1996 Clarinet Concerto with Stefan Asbury and an orchestra of TMC fellows, and the Arditti Quartet playing the Fifth String Quartet (1995), both in performances worthy of the occasion.

2. Birthday Boys (Part II). John Harbison, our most distinguished "younger" composer, turned 60 on December 20, and we've been celebrating all year. The magnificent Lorraine Hunt's first recital for the Celebrity Series, accompanied by pianist Judith Gordon, included four songs from Harbison's Mottetti di Montale, his amazing settings of the Nobel laureate's brilliant, haunting poems of lost love. Hunt was in astoundingly rich and ample voice, and Gordon met her every inch of the way.

Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic gave a revelatory performance of Harbison's dense and exuberant First Symphony. For the first time in my experience, it really sounded more like Harbison than the composers he was drawing on for inspiration.

And let's not forget the Mark Morris Dance Group, which brought to Boston Morris's moving new ballet Medium. Morris set this to Harbison's elegy for Schubert, "November 19, 1828," for piano and string trio, which includes some music "composed by Schubert in his first life," and some of the best Schubert Schubert never wrote. Morris's musicians -- Ethan Iverson, Sarah Roth, Carol Benner, and Emmanuel Feldman -- reached the same exalted level on which the dancers danced.

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3. Follow the leaders. The orchestral event of the year was supposed to be Seiji Ozawa's Beethoven Ninth Symphony, either at the gala opening-night celebration of his 25th season as music director of the BSO, or in the free concert attended by 80,000 spectators on Boston Common. But Ozawa came down with an incapacitating flu, and Robert Shaw led the powerful performance at Symphony Hall. Ozawa managed to conduct the last two movements on the Common, with BSO assistant conductor Federico Cortese leading the first two movements, impressively, at nerve-racking short notice.

No question, then, that the orchestral Event-of-a-Lifetime was the assemblage of members of the BSO, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Cincinnati Symphony in pieces conducted by Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Masur, Christoph von Dohnányi, and the great Pierre Boulez. The concert helped shore up funds for the long-term health care of Kenneth Haas, the BSO's manager (who was also affiliated, at earlier points in his career, with these other orchestras). Haas had been stricken by cardiac arrest and had suffered serious brain damage. Money, of course, was raised, but art (especially in Boulez's ethereal Debussy) was also served.

4. Follow the lieder. The year's outstanding lieder recital was the devastating performance by mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai and her husband, pianist Hartmut Höll, last February at Harvard's Houghton Library of Schubert's most devastating song cycle, Winterreise ("Winter Journey"). These are the two finest performers of lieder in the world today, and with infinite subtlety they drained Schubert's cycle of any superficial beautifying, creating instead an existential, proto-Beckett landscape of desolation. Listeners were visibly shaken, which is how it's supposed to be.

5. Chamber-made. The best string-quartet performance last year was also the best one this year: the Borromeo Quartet playing Schoenberg's hour-long Quartet No. 1. In the warm acoustic of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival's quarters, the Schoenberg sounded even better this year, lovelier (!) and more delicate, as well as equally passionate and profound. Runner-up: the Lydian Quartet's performance at Brandeis, in its ambitious American Chamber Music Festival, of John Harbison's wonderful Rewaking, with soaring soprano Dominique Labelle in one of her two best performance of the year (the other was in the BSO Beethoven Ninth on Boston Common).

And at the Gardner Museum, two great solo players, pianist Russell Sherman and violinist Rolf Schulte, joined forces for inspired chamber playing in Beethoven's Spring and Kreutzer Sonatas.

6. Vox clamantis. The most inspired BSO subscription performances this year were three works for orchestra and voices. Simon Rattle, one of the BSO's most welcome guest conductors, launched the New Year with stirring performances of Karol Szymanowski's beautifully restrained Stabat Mater and the 73-year-old Leos Janácek's imposing Glagolitic Mass (1926), in the American premiere of the new edition of Janácek's original version, which John Oliver's marvelous Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang in Old Slavonic. The radiant Polish soprano Elzbieta Szmytka made a significant Boston debut.

Another BSO debutante was Thomas Quasthoff, the German bass-baritone whose gorgeous voice almost makes one forget his physical disability (he was a thalidomide baby). His sang the alto role in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with unforced outwardness and eloquent inwardness. Canadian tenor Ben Heppner was nothing to sneeze at either. Seiji Ozawa conducted a rather abstract but not unmusical performance that didn't make one forget James Levine's glorious version with the BSO four years ago.

And Levine was back to end the season with more glory in Haydn's The Creation. Three outstanding singers made their BSO debuts: promising young tenor Gregory Turay, German Wagnerian bass René Pape, and the extraordinary, lavishly gifted American soprano Renée Fleming. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus ended a year of superlative achievements on a very high note.

Special mention must also be made of Craig Smith's lively Schumann evening with the BU Symphonic Chorus and Symphony Orchestra. The neglected Requiem für Mignon turned out to be a treasure, and Smith's rhythmic, buoyant performance of the Spring Symphony made one want to hear Emmanuel Music's specialist in Mozart, Handel, and Schütz do more performances of standard orchestral repertoire.

7. Getting a Handel. Over the past decade or so, Boston has become a hotbed for Handel. This year David Hoose and the Cantata Singers presented Handel's last oratorio, the heartbreaking Jephtha, which many Handelians consider his greatest work. Handel was going blind when he composed it, and its pervasive melancholy may be unique in his output. Hoose emphasized the grimness of it, and his outstanding cast (William Hite, Janet Brown, Jeffrey Gall), chorus, and orchestra (which included oboist Peggy Pearson and flutist Christopher Krueger in some of the best solo playing of the year) rose to the occasion.

What is arguably Handel's first real oratorio, Deborah, is only rarely in the same league as Jephtha, yet Donald Teeters and the Boston Cecilia, doing their 16th major Handel oratorio, and soprano Sharon Baker in the title role brought it exhilaratingly to life.

8. Opera-rations. This year's Outstanding-Achievement-in-Opera Award goes to Richard Conrad and the Boston Academy of Music, for their surprisingly effective concert performance of Richard Strauss's difficult Arabella and their stylish production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which was staged by Tufts's Anthony Cornish with great wit and a remarkably unmannered and convincing sense of 18th-century language (and body language).

9. Hands down. There couldn't have been better piano playing this year than Dubravka Tomsic's electrifying performance of the Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto with the BSO under Federico Cortese. There's nothing showy about Tomsic's keyboard technique, though it's unbelievably brilliant and vibrant. And honest. As the notes go whizzing by, you can hear every single one. The Saint-Saëns is a good piece, assimilating Bach, Liszt, and Parisian music halls. Tomsic brought each of these to light and made them shine. And it was nice to hear her having fun.

10. Piercing tribute. No single person in recent years has provided us with more outstanding music than Walter Pierce, who has just retired as the director of the BankBoston Celebrity Series after 33 years. Many stars paid musical tribute, from such distinguished elders as Isaac Stern and Jean-Pierre Rampal to such relative newcomers as Yo-Yo Ma and Dubravka Tomsic. Celebrity Series favorites William Bolcom and Joan Morris led the shy impresario to the stage and serenaded him with the English music-hall song "When Are You Going To Lead Me to the Altar, Walter?" Later, they returned for the sentimental highlights of the evening, "Bill" and "Our Love Is Here To Stay." The outstanding classical performance was Dubravka Tomsic mopping the floor with Liszt's Mephisto Waltz. At the post-concert dinner, the grandest of our living divas, Leontyne Price, still thrilling after years of retirement, adapted her signature song to honor Pierce: "This little light of yours . . . Let it shine!"