As Eras Come and Go, They Also Mix By ALLAN KOZINN

December 20, 2009
As Eras Come and Go, They Also Mix By ALLAN KOZINN

LINCOLN CENTER is undertaking a grand renovation, with Alice Tully Hall as the first building to be refurbished. When the revamped hall opened in February, the priorities became clear: Now it has a beautiful public space (mostly a restaurant) and a rich new veneer. But what had been Lincoln Center’s most comfortable hall, and the least problematic acoustically (it had been a little dry), was transformed into a space that feels cramped and industrial, and has virtually no acoustical resonance.

For fans of early music the Boston Early Music Festival, held every other year in June, is something like heaven. Not only is there a week of performances — starting before noon and, some days, running past midnight — that draw on both well-traveled areas and obscure corners of the medieval-through-early-Classical repertory, but there is also an exhibition (really a trade show) at which instrument builders, publishers and record companies show their wares.

Gilbert Blin’s exquisitely staged, deeply moving production of Monteverdi’s “Incoronazione di Poppea,” was the main draw this year, but other highlights were plentiful: among them, a superb Beethoven recital by the cellist Pieter Wispelwey and the fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout; the American debut of the vocal ensemble Stile Antico; and a Baroque opera double bill of Blow’s “Venus and Adonis” and Charpentier’s “Actéon,” also directed by Mr. Blin.

The worlds of experimental pop and classical music continued to draw closer, with each side raiding the other’s turf. The inventive composer Jefferson Friedman closed a Composer Portraits concert at the Miller Theater in February with “On in Love,” a punchy song cycle for a rock singer and an amplified ensemble. From the other direction Trey Anastasio, the guitarist from the rock band Phish, joined the New York Philharmonic in September to play his guitar concerto, “Time Turns Elastic.” And in between, the iconoclastic Alarm Will Sound played a concert of its orchestral transcriptions of pop electronica (the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” and music by Preshish Moments, Mochipet, Aphex Twin and Autechre) at Le Poisson Rouge in July, while the pianist Christopher O’Riley offered arrangements of songs by Tori Amos, Portishead, Pink Floyd, Nirvana and Nick Drake, among others, at the Highline Ballroom in August.

Much as rock and the trendier end of contemporary composition are finding common ground, new-music ensembles and early-music performers have been doing some heavy flirting as well, with composers as their go-betweens. A highlight of the Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center in May was a collaboration between the medieval music specialists Lionheart, and Ethel, the amplified new-music string quartet, on movements from Phil Kline’s “John the Revelator.”

Julia Wolfe scored her “Steel Hammer,” a meditation on the folk ballad “John Henry,” for the Trio Mediaeval and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who performed it at Zankel Hall in November. And though an illness prevented the early-music-leaning Hilliard Ensemble from joining forces with the ultramodernist Arditti Quartet in Wolfgang Rihm’s “Et Lux” at Zankel in December, the groups performed the score in London a few days earlier.

Just before Lorin Maazel conducted Mahler’s Eighth Symphony to close his chapter of the New York Philharmonic’s history in June, he spoke briefly about his tenure in New York, saying that “seven years ago, seven years seemed like an eternity.” He could not have put it better: his seven years on the Philharmonic podium seemed like an eternity from this end too.

When Mr. Maazel was on — in works by Sibelius, Strauss (sometimes) and Wagner, and even, surprisingly, Mozart — he made the orchestra sound trim and vigorous. But much of the time his micromanagement of familiar works yielded fussy readings in which the Philharmonic sound turned garish and coarse. And his programming could not have been more conventional and staid, a peculiar approach for someone who thinks of himself as a composer. For the nostalgic, he was back soon enough, leading the Boston Symphony in a Beethoven concert at Carnegie Hall in November.