CONCERTS OF THE YEAR 2005: Reviewers reflect on concerts and opera during last year.

MARC BRIDLE, EDITOR

2005 was a largely disappointing year for concerts and opera, but my concert of the year is the first one I attended: Riccardo Muti's magnificent Schubert 9 and Vadim Repin’s even more extraordinary performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Muti’s greatness as a conductor was self-evidenced by the orchestra’s superb response, and Repin, unlike so many violinists today who take the Beethoven concerto at such a steady pace, gave the kind of mesmerizing performance to equal the stature of this great work.

Eschenbach’s Bruckner 8 (see Alex Russell’s Concert of the Year below) from this year’s Proms runs the Muti concert a close second. Apart from the beauty of the playing, the great surprise was Eschenbach himself. This was the kind of performance that surprised constantly; the sign of a conductor who constantly rethinks the music he is conducting.

BILL KENNY, REGIONAL EDITOR

Opera provided most of the best experiences last year, but one surprise concert, local to where I live, rounded everything off nicely.  In chronological order, my favourites were:

Alban Berg, Wozzeck (new production premiere) Soloists, Welsh National Opera, Vladimir Jurowski, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 19th February 2005.

WNO's first new production in the Wales Millennium Centre. A fine start to the company's latest phase of the development which ranked as world class opera without a doubt.

 

R. Wagner, Parsifal (new production) Finnish National Opera, 4th April 2005.

Harry Kupfer's latest Parsifal magnificently staged by Finnish National Opera. Probably not the last word on the work, but close enough for the time being.

 

Einojuhani Rautavaara, 'Rasputin' soloists, Finnish National Opera orchestra and chorus, Mikko Franck 23rd May 2005.

Another winning performance from FNO with Salminen at his absolute best and Rautavaara's score handled expertly by the company's Music Director Designate, Mikko Franck.

 

Wagner, 'The 24 Hour Ring' Tiroler Festspiele, Erl, Austria - Soloists, Tiroler Festspiele Orchestra and Chorus, Gustav Kuhn, 22nd to 24th July 2005.

A ludicrous idea in prospect, but in fact a compelling Wagner experience. Only Gustav Kuhn would think of it in the first place and very few others could pull it off so well.

 

Christmas Is Come: Eighteenth Century Dance and West Gallery Music from The Mellstock Band  Chittlehampton Parish Church, Devon, 2.12.2005,

Four men  in period costume providing an evening of no-nonsense entertainment and expert musicianship. For joyful, good-hearted pleasure this was hard to beat.

COLIN CLARKE

It was wonderful to see and hear Alfred Brendel on top form. This was an excellent way to bring temporary closure to the Festival Hall's activities as it undergoes a major facelift, and a reminder as to what this pianist really can do when he rises to the occasion.

EVAN DICKERSON

Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Proms was notable for excellence and intelligence in every department: soloists’ contributions (particularly Alice Coote’s heart-wrenching singing of the Angel – the finest that I have heard), the Halle orchestra and chorus on truly inspired form led by Mark Elder - together they go from strength to strength.

MELANIE ESKENAZI

Billy Budd at ENO. Not a 'concert' of course, but unquestionably my musical event of the year: in the midst of all the sniping, all the sensationalism with its mean, so-predictable subtext (why should London have two opera houses?) the ENO stages a hugely ambitious production of one of the greatest of all 20th century operas, by a great British composer, casts it from tremendous strength with a mostly British cast, and pulls off a notable triumph. London needs the ENO, and this production shows why.

GÖRAN FORSLING

I have mainly reviewed opera this year and been fortunate to see very good productions, but top honours must go to Das Rhinegold in Stockholm for presenting the gods as down to earth humans and setting the action in more or less a fairy-tale milieu. And, of course, for singing out of the top drawer.

BRUCE HODGES

In a year that was notable for thought-provoking programming, the brilliant Jonathan Nott led the Bamberger Philharmoniker in two wildly assembled concerts combining Beethoven, Ligeti and Mahler, and James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra offered an impeccably conceived evening of Ives, Foss, Carter and Gershwin.  Franz-Welser Möst, pianist Radu Lupu and the Cleveland Orchestra blazed through all five of Beethoven’s Piano Concerti, with Berg, Birtwistle, Dutilleux, Harrison, Schubert and Shostakovich as intelligent companions.  The New York Philharmonic gave some of its best nights I’ve heard in many years, such as Kent Nagano in Messiaen’s sweeping late masterpiece, Éclairs sur l’au-delà...(Illuminations of the Beyond…), and Lorin Maazel in a rocking opening to the fall season with pianist Lang Lang in Chopin, followed by a sumptuously detailed Mahler First Symphony.  The intrepid Ensemble 21 scored a huge, exhausting hit with Ferneyhough’s complete Carceri d’Invenzione, and the FLUX Quartet cannot be thanked loudly enough for delving into the five string quartets of Giacinto Scelsi.

But for “Best of 2005” I’m offering a tie: the esteemed Reinbert de Leeuw and the Juilliard Symphony closed down this year’s Focus! Festival with a stark Shostakovich Symphony No. 15, prefacing an even more striking Stimmen…verstuffen by Sofia Gubaidulina.  The haunting Shostakovich made an eerie preface for Gubaidulina’s vast and rarely performed canvas, vibrating with bone-chilling commitment from de Leeuw and the young Juilliard players.

And as Ligeti’s Piano Etudes are gradually assimilated into the repertory by master pianists who can cope with their taxing challenges, virtuoso Christopher Taylor can only be held in awe for surmounting all eighteen of them in one astonishing sitting.  Miller Theater’s piano is probably still sweating.

BERNARD JACOBSON

Because, as I remarked in my original review, “forgetting is too easy,” one event must take precedence for my choice of memorable performances in 2005. Other occasions offered a characteristically profound and incisive recital for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society by Ivan Moravec; a Philadelphia Orchestra Shostakovich Sixth Symphony conducted by Yakov Kreizberg that threw new light on Russian humor in the face of political insanity; Christoph Eschenbach’s presentation, in the shape of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Insomnia, of the finest new orchestral work I have encountered in years; and some thrilling Beethoven, including Daniel Barenboim’s masterful reading of the Seventh Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on tour, Marta Argerich’s of the First Piano Concerto with Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and an account of the Triple Concerto, by the Eroica Trio with Ignat Solzhenitsyn and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, that beguiled a delighted audience with the obvious delight the performers themselves obviously took in a work that is too often denigrated. But the story of the year has to be Riccardo Muti's return on 13 February to the Philadelphia Orchestra podium.

I style this an “event” rather than just a “performance” for some weighty reasons. To be sure, the performance itself was vividly rewarding, from the brilliant opening with Rossini’s Guillaume Tell overture, by way of Barbara Frittoli’s spine-tingling recreation of all the drama and pathos of a group of Verdi and Puccini arias, to Muti’s authoritative realization of every facet to be found in the Brahms Second Symphony. But the former music director’s return was significant in several ways. It was, to begin with, his first appearance in the hall for whose construction his advocacy in the 1980s and ’90s laid much of the groundwork. Then, it marked a moment of healing in his relationship with the orchestra, a relationship that suffered some deterioration in the years after his resignation–it was the players themselves who had extended the invitation for this benefit concert, at which they, as well as the conductor and soloist, appeared without fee. With a sizeable segment of the Philadelphia public, Muti’s standing has never been in doubt. It was evidenced by the extraordinary warmth of feeling to be felt throughout the evening, which culminated–after a graceful speech in which he proclaimed his affection for the orchestra and the city–in a typically zestful and passionate performance of the Forza del destino overture by way of encore. And all this was to seem the more gratifying, indeed consoling, a mere few weeks later, when Muti’s distinguished leadership of La Scala, Milan, came to an untimely end, sabotaged by an unbelievably barbarian and politically motivated campaign of denigration, exacerbated, it must be said, by no less unbelievably scurrilous contributions from certain elements of the musical press. For now, the New York Philharmonic’s ongoing love-fest with Muti, as well as the renewed cordiality of his ties with Philadelphia, should serve to keep his American audiences supplied with musical experiences of a quality that the Milanese will surely be kicking themselves for throwing away.

ALEX RUSSELL

 

It is always an invidious task to try and select the single best concert of the year and 2005 was no exception so I have selected three great performances that were truly outstanding from three world class orchestras: the Wiener Philharmoniker, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

 

I begin with the VPO playing at Prom 72 that I actually did not either attend or review but watched at home on a BBC TV broadcast: ironically maybe the best front row seat at the Royal Albert Hall! The concert was conducted by Christoph Eschenbach who gave a paradigm performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (ed. Nowak). The VPO played with both power and sensitivity and were always ever watchful of their conductor’s elegant and economic gestures. Eschenbach had a total grip of the vast structure of the score treating all four movements as an integrated whole and making the music flow organically. My colleague Marc Bridle wrote of the adagio: “The Adagio, so often the point at which this Bruckner symphony encounters paralysis, was almost over-emphatically articulated in its single arc stretch. Eschenbach secured a wonderfully expressive tonal response from the strings, but there was also a throbbing pulse to the tremolo phrasing that, quite eerily, gave a life force to this movement one rarely encounters.”

 

And of the finale, he wrote: “As the final notes crashed down one felt that Bruckner’s glory was utterly complete. The Wiener Philharmoniker’s and Christoph Eschenbach’s achievement had been to realize that glory in a performance of rare distinction.” This was a truly a majestic and mesmerising experience even viewing from the virtual space of the television screen: being there must have been overwhelming: a great performance.

André Previn  conducted a colossal performance of William Walton’s First Symphony in B flat minor (1932-35) with the London Symphony Orchestra (‘Previn at 75’ Concert 3, Barbican Hall, 22nd June). I wrote of this performance: “This ‘mature’ reading was weighty, brooding, broadly measured and extraordinarily Brucknerian in the spacing of the gaps between brass interjections and silences - notably in the first and last movements… An ecstatic audience rewarded this great performance with rapturous applause and kept recalling the frail conductor back to the stage.” Previn has had a long personal association with this score and this magnificent performance brought all this experience and understanding to bear: a performance of his life time of a work he obviously knows and loves inside out.

 

And finally Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra in a sublime performance of Elgar’s Symphony No.2 in E flat Major, Op.63,  (Royal Festival Hall: 16th June). Mackerras made the score sound fresh and newly minted and I wrote: “His performance of Elgar's Symphony No.2 in E flat Major, Op.63 was very close to the late Giuseppe Sinopoli's radical conception, stripping the score of the inflated grandiose pomposity so often heard in Barbirolli's grunting accounts. From beginning to end this was a beautifully prepared and played performance with incredible orchestral details shining through even in climaxes…This was an extraordinarily fresh, radical interpretation of a work which is all too often wrongly seen as a backward-looking work of the Edwardian era. This concert was dedicated to Carlo Maria Giulini: born 9 May 1914; died 14 June 2005.” Mackerras and the Philharmonia also dedicated this performance to reviving Elgar stripping and eschewing him of the customary cliché ‘pomp and circumstance’.

HARVEY STEIMAN

 

Without question, San Francisco Opera's world premiere in October of Doctor Atomic, the new John Adams opera about the first nuclear bomb test, rates as the most significant musical event of 2005. Despite its shortcomings, which are not trivial, this is a landmark work, and it carries a powerful musical wallop. Adams' writing for the orchestra evokes all kinds of emotions, from tenderness to terror. It runs the gamut from simple moments of delicate beauty to immensely complex structures. It disappoints in Adams' parlando style of vocal writing and in writer-director Peter Sellars' over-reliance on quoted texts. The out-with-a-whisper ending comes as anti-climax, but the musical riches are legion, magnificently drawn by conductor Donald Runnicles. No one leaves this work with a shrug. It practically demands that you have a point or view, a gut reaction.

For sheer musical beauty, however, Lyric Opera of Chicago's pairing of Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson in Massenet's Thaïs was a musical triumph of the highest order in February. On the orchestral side, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony blazed through two sprawling Mahler symphonies in September in revelatory performances of the 5th and 7th. The latter was recorded for the orchestra's current Mahler cycle.

One more concert sticks in the memory, if for no other reason than to cement the virtuosity and sheer musical sensitivity of the violinist Christian Tetzlaff in my mind. He played a ravishing Berg violin concerto at the Aspen Music Festival in July with Michael Stern conducting. Every time I hear Teztlaff I am convinced that there is no more complete soloist of any kind today. Every performance I have heard of his is deeply musical, soulful and thought-provoking on so many levels.

 

 

 

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