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Year in review

BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

1. Biggest news. Have you heard? The Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine accepted the BSO’s offer to become its next music director. After 29 years of leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra (a record), Seiji Ozawa is leaving for Vienna to conduct opera and Strauss waltzes for New Year’s Eve galas. And though the BSO blew (or blew off) its most exciting possibility, Simon Rattle, who opted to take his cutting-edge programs to Berlin, Levine was hardly a consolation prize. Boston certainly did better than Philadelphia, Cleveland, or New York in finding a new musical leader. Levine’s one program with the BSO — Mahler’s monumental Third Symphony, with the electrifying Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as vocal soloist — was one of the best BSO concerts in years, and a promise of things to come.

Not all the news from the BSO was good. The September 11 attacks led to two controversial cancellations, so — on the grounds of insensitivity — we didn’t get to hear John Adams’s beautiful and challenging choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer or Schumann’s seldom performed masterpiece Scenes from Goethe’s " Faust, " with an all-star international cast. Ozawa didn’t want to bring to New York a work with the Devil in it — but it was his best shot at a truly memorable legacy from his last year in Boston.

2. Best concert. I didn’t have to scratch my head about this one — nothing had the power, the emotional intensity, or the sheer brilliance of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Beethoven program under the baton of its retiring music director, Claudio Abbado. How boring it looked on paper: Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth (Pastorale) Symphonies. How many times have we heard them before? But not like this. Abbado looked emaciated after his cancer treatments, but he conducted the World’s Greatest Orchestra with searing energy and insight. Both these warhorses felt like daring new works. People are still talking about the concert. Thanks to the FleetBoston Celebrity Series for this unforgettable gift.

3. Best staged and non-staged Bach cantatas. Peter Sellars has been absent from Boston too long, but he was back for a chilling, mesmerizing staging of two Bach cantatas with his old partners in crime: Craig Smith, leading the Emmanuel Music Orchestra and Chorus, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing the demanding solos and seeming to live through Bach’s tragic and sublime utterances about the body and the spirit.

It was fascinating to hear Sanford Sylvan sing one of the same cantatas, Ich habe genug, at a post–September 11 concert with Sarasa, an excellent group of rotating chamber players, performing in Cambridge’s acoustically heavenly Friends Meeting House. Their chamber concert in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was one of the most consoling musical experiences of the fall season. But their next concert, with Sylvan, went even deeper. Hunt Lieberson’s Bach was intimately personal, a plunge into the dark night of the individual soul. Sylvan, in this new social and political context, seemed to be a voice for all of us at once.

4. Best teamwork. What better than a superb string quartet teaming up with a superb pianist? It happened twice this year. Russell Sherman joined the Borromeo Quartet (or at least half of it — violinist Nicholas Kitchen and cellist Yeesun Kim) for a rapturous Brahms trio at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. And in a FleetBoston Celebrity Series Boston Marquee concert, the Borromeo’s partner in the Brahms Piano Quintet was no less than Leon Fleisher, now playing regularly again with both hands after his 20-year bout with repetitive stress syndrome.

The Borromeo has two new players this year, violinist William Fedkenheuer and violist Mai Motobuchi, and they fit the group’s gemütlich Mittel-European sound like a glove. With guest violist James Dunham (a former member of the Cleveland Quartet), the quartet foundered in an inexplicably glib performance of Mozart’s tragic G-minor Quintet, but its Mozart/Bartók series at the Gardner Museum continues to delight capacity audiences.

The year ended with the sad news that the Lydian String Quartet’s founding cellist, the extraordinary Rhonda Rider, has decided to leave the group after this season. The Lydians survived replacing their irreplaceable first violinist, Wilma Smith, with the now irreplaceable Daniel Stepner. Let’s hope lightning can strike again.

5. Best Verdi. There were ambitious operatic events in this centennial year of Verdi’s death. The Boston Lyric Opera — which also gave Boston its first hearing of Tod Machover’s 1999 Tolstoy opera, Resurrection — did Don Carlos. The Boston Academy of Music took us to Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (in its original setting: Boston!). Teatro Lirico d’Europa brought Verdi’s crude but exhilarating first hit, Nabucco. But the most satisfying Verdi performance of the year was the Chorus pro Musica’s Macbeth, the first of his three operas based on Shakespeare, with Jeffrey Rink again proving to be Boston’s best Verdi conductor, and with soprano Linda Roark-Strummer as a memorably ferocious Lady Macbeth.

6. Best piano. Are there just more good pianists around than other musicians? There were so many good piano concerts, it’s impossible to pick just one. Andreas Haefliger played sensitive Schumann for the Celebrity Series. Stephen Drury, with Yukiko Takagi, played phenomenal Ligeti études at the NEC’s Summer Institute of Contemporary Piano Performance. Russell Sherman played several stirring recitals and Beethoven’s C-minor Piano Concerto with Gunther Schuller conducting the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra; Katherine Chi, a student of his and Wha Kyung Byun, played an eloquent, exploratory, and extraordinarily difficult program at Harvard’s Houghton Library (ranging from Haydn and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Godowski). And Dubravka Tomsîc returned to the BSO for one of Ozawa’s farewell concerts. Her trancelike slow movement in Beethoven’s G-major Piano Concerto was one of the most cherishable keyboard events of the year.

7. Best Harbison premieres. Two new pieces by John (The Great Gatsby) Harbison had persuasive advocates. Oboist Peggy Pearson’s Winsor Music, at Lexington’s Follen Church, gave us the world premiere of his evocative Six American Painters, in the version for string trio and oboe. And in an impressive NEC faculty recital of (mostly) American music, mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove did full justice to his new Elizabeth Bishop cycle, North and South — its Boston premiere. I’ve heard recent out-of-town performances by Janice Felty with Craig Smith at the piano, and, in the even newer orchestration, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with the Chicago Chamber Players. Torgove had hard acts to follow, but she did herself and this mysterious, wrenching, and even comic new cycle proud. Andy Vores’s Six Songs on Poems by Margaret Atwood, getting its world premiere on this same program, wasn’t chopped liver either.

8. Best early music. The Boston Early Music Festival was back this year, and people seemed to either love or hate the Baroque staging for Lully’s opera Thésée. I was not one of its partisans. But there was no controversy about the enchanting concert by Italian gambist Paulo Pandolfo, a program of sublimely descriptive music by the great 17th-century French composer Marin Marais, one piece depicting a surgical operation, another the poignant death of Marais’s son after a battle.

The most dazzling early-music production was not part of the festival. William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants presented a double bill of late-17th-century operas: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Charpentier’s Actæon. The staging was minimalist but suggestive, and utterly captivating.

?. Best choral work. These last few months, music has been extremely important as a communal experience. So it wasn’t surprising that David Hoose’s powerful performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Cantata Singers was one of the year’s highlights. It had to be. Handel’s Samson, with its warring choruses of Middle Eastern adversaries and a freedom fighter who pulls down his enemy’s temple on top of himself, was a powerful and disturbing piece to hear in the wake of September 11. Donald Teeters and the Boston Cecilia made it work, with star turns by countertenor Jeffrey Gall and bass Robert Honeysucker. And the Handel & Haydn Society introduced its new music director, Grant Llewellyn, in a heartwarming performance of Haydn’s hymn to birth and rebirth, The Creation.

10. Nicest presents. The Boston Academy of Music’s bread-and-butter productions have been its annual Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. This year, it finally did one well. The Mikado was outrageously campy, full of anachronisms and un-PC ethnic stereotypes (the Gentlemen of Japan taking photos with disposable cameras and listening to portable CD players). But Ira Siff, artistic director of New York’s La Gran Scena Opera Co., delivered the most hilarious production of 2001. We needed a few belly laughs, and BAM needed to get it right. We all got what we needed.

Mezzo-soprano Jan Curtis has also gotten it right — before her stroke in 1995, she was one of the most popular and versatile singers around. Her full recovery has been slowed by aphasia, the incapacity to speak. But it turns out she can still sing — and as beautifully and expressively as ever. The Celebrity Series presented her first full-length concert since her stroke, and it was hands down the most humanly inspiring performance of the year.

And on record: Some of the best recordings of the year were made by some of Boston’s best performers: Russell Sherman’s Beethoven Concertos with James Bolle and the Monadnock Orchestra (GM); Emmanuel Music’s second installment of its Bach-cantata series (Koch); the Lydian Quartet’s new John Harbison recording, with soprano Dominique Labelle and including a 40-minute interview with Harbison (Musica Omnia); pianist Andrew Rangell’s new Bach-partita CD (Dorian); Benjamin Zander’s Mahler Fourth and Fifth Symphonies with the Philharmonia (Telarc); and the 12-CD box of " historic " BSO broadcasts.

Issue Date: December 27, 2001 - January 3, 2002

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