Momentous Tone

What with the millennium bug affecting how we think about nearly everything these days, our musical year felt more about endings, beginnings and transitions than continuities.

All is in flux. Ernest Fleischmann resigned after nearly three decades of running the Los Angeles Philharmonic and was succeeded by Willem Wijnbergen of Amsterdam. L.A. Opera announced the retirement of its founding director, Peter Hemmings, and the appointment of Placido Domingo as artistic director, all to take place at the end of next season. New management took over in Orange County at the Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific. JoAnn Falletta will not re-up as music director of the Long Beach Symphony after next season. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra spent the year getting used to its new music director, Jeffrey Kahane. Royce Hall reopened after years of earthquake repair. And Disney Hall finally got a convincing go-ahead, with nearly all the money at last raised and a realistic opening slated for 2002.

Momentous, nervous, optimistic, troubling times, and the best music made--listed here in no particular order--reflected how we experienced them.

1. Mahler: What a year for Mahler, that composer whose ripe, powerful fin de siecle anxiety grips us more than ever now. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted an unforgettably expressive Fifth Symphony, alive and teeming with individuality, as part of a June Mahler festival with the San Francisco Symphony, and it’s my vote for the year’s best performance. Not far behind was Zubin Mehta’s stunning account of the Ninth Symphony with the Los Angeles Philharmonic early this month, which vividly revealed a fervor and substance that some of us had never before encountered in the famed conductor. Also of note: baritone Thomas Hampson’s commanding singing of the “Songs of a Wayfarer” with the Pacific Symphony in June.

2. Lorraine Hunt: There was more great Mahler when Lorraine Hunt joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for her staggering version of the “Songs of a Wayfarer.” Mezzos dominate opera now. Cecilia Bartoli, who was everywhere this year: in the Met’s “Marriage of Figaro”; with her own televised special raking in pledge dollars for PBS; the focus of Manuela Hoelterhoff’s irresistible book, “Cinderella & Company,” about the workings of the opera world. There was the opulent sound of Jennifer Larmore (who offered her first Carmen on stage, wonderfully sung but self-consciously acted, to open L.A. Opera’s season). And every opera fan has his or her favorite mezzo newcomer. But Hunt remains unique. No one matches her dramatic or musical intensity. Also this summer, she mesmerized San Francisco Opera audiences with a heart-rending, deeply empathetic portrayal of Nero’s spurned wife, Ottavia, in Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea.” Maybe, just maybe, the most compelling singer since Callas.

3. “The Peony Pavilion”: American opera is vibrant, but the year’s three big projects disappointed. Andre Previn’s “Streetcar Named Desire” in San Francisco and Tobias Picker’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” at L.A. Opera were theatrically flat and lacking strong musical character; the Robert Wilson-Philip Glass collaboration “Monsters of Grace,” which opened the renovated Royce, had fine music but was a technical failure in its efforts to create a new operatic landscape with 3-D digital imagery. But there was the collaboration between composer Tan Dun and director Peter Sellars in a postmodern version of the Chinese classic “The Peony Pavilion.” A novel and downright explosive meeting of traditional Chinese opera and rapturous, ecstatic new music, it had its premiere in Vienna in May and finally reaches America in March with three performances at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium.

4. Ligeti: When word got around a couple of years ago that Esa-Pekka Salonen was planning celebrations of Gyorgy Ligeti’s music in London and Paris, Lincoln Center also showed some interest. But the New York powers that be ultimately feared that one of the most celebrated composers of modern times was just too progressive for their audiences. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is bolder. Night after night last spring, Salonen dug into the fantastical sound world of this colorful composer; performances were brilliant, and audiences were large and attentive.

5. Revueltas: We hear plenty about exploring Mexico’s rich classical musical culture, but we don’t actually hear much music. Finally, the dark, sexy, rhythmically arresting music of Silvestre Revueltas, who was born with the century and died young, of drink, in 1940, has begun to get its due. Salonen conducted a dazzling performance of Revueltas’ extraordinary “La Noche de los Mayas,” in the spring, while, early in the year, Gisele Ben-Dor conducted and recorded the composer’s last work, the ballet “La Coronela,” with the Santa Barbara Symphony. Falletta then added “La Noche de los Mayas” to the Long Beach Symphony’s programs this fall.

6. Pianists A to V: Martha Argerich, the volatile Argentine pianist with a cult following, can easily sell out any hall anywhere. But in a rare L.A. performance in April, she appeared, with practically no advance publicity and no admission charge, at a 70th-birthday tribute to UCLA faculty pianist Vitaly Margulis. In the small, unglamorous Schoenberg Hall, Argerich played as if lit by fire. In La Jolla in September, young Russian Arcady Volodos made his West Coast debut demonstrating a confident mature musicality and virtuosity that would have made Horowitz jealous.

7. Carter: Music has never known a late bloomer like Elliott Carter, who turned 90 on Dec. 11. Long famed for the extraordinary difficulty of his music, Carter has lately cleaned up the textures a bit and become slightly more direct. Miraculously, he continues to turn out major pieces practically by the bushel, pieces big and small, luminous music bursting with color, cleverness, a playful spirit and deep, deep profundity. New York and London got the most lavish Carter celebrations this year, but L.A. paid attention with a Monday Evening Concerts performance of the witty Clarinet Concerto, Salonen’s magnificent performance of the “Allegro Scorrevole” and the Arditti Quartet, joined by Ursula Oppens, playing the brand-new Quintet for Piano and String Quartet at the opening 1998-1999 Coleman Concert at Caltech.

8. Kronos: A relative youngster next to Carter, but of venerable age for a string quartet, Kronos turned 25 and celebrated with new pieces, new arrangements of old pieces and some blasts from the past (which means nothing much older than the quartet). Fall concerts at Royce Hall and the Irvine Barclay Theatre, as well as a retrospective 10-CD box from Nonesuch, show that this remarkable ensemble has hardly run low on ideas, on new music, on imagination, on enthusiasm.

9. Old is new: The most inventive opera on the West Coast in 1998 was also the oldest. In June, the Early Music Festival in Berkeley imported from Scotland Mark Morris’ beguiling production of Rameau’s “Platee,” with jazzy, up-to-the-minute staging and dancing and Isaac Mizrahi’s to-die-for costumes. Around the same time, Long Beach Opera provoked with an over-the-top, radical, messy but exuberant production of the Dryden-Purcell “Indian Queen,” full of naughty nuttiness by performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pen~a.

10. Rattle’s “Eroica”: Beethoven symphonies are back after a period in which conductors shied away from these overexposed masterpieces. Suddenly, everyone is again programming them, but one performance stands out--the “Eroica” Simon Rattle offered on his farewell tour with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the Music Center in May. Vital, illuminating playing literally made the music sound new and fresh.

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Festivals: L.A. is not much of a festival town these days, but a couple of really interesting ones popped up out of nowhere this year. “Beyond the Pink,” a lively round of performance art, complemented the “Out of Actions” show at MOCA in February; one highlight was a wondrous, late-night, psychedelic organ-drone extravaganza from Charlemaigne Palestine. “Resistance/Fluctuations” appeared just as suddenly and surprisingly in June. Supported by the Austrian government and pairing new Austrian music with new L.A. music, it featured the outstanding Viennese ensemble Klangforum Wien, and it, too, had its own late-night event--Arthur Jarvinen’s 24-hour piece “Serious Immobilities,” a dreamy marathon for a team of intrepid pianists.