Grand Changes for Orchestras and Halls By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

December 20, 2009
Grand Changes for Orchestras and Halls By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

WHEN it comes to the future of classical music in America, the most significant and promising concerts of 2009 were the inaugural programs of the new music directors at major orchestras on opposite coasts. In September, Alan Gilbert took the helm of the New York Philharmonic, a couple of weeks before Gustavo Dudamel began his directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The great but stodgy New York Philharmonic put its trust in a 42-year-old native New Yorker with the potential to energize the institution and connect with new audiences. Though serious and not flashy, Mr. Gilbert is an adventurous musician with strong ties to living composers. Avoiding the typical gala fare of opening night, he began with the premiere of a bracing new piece by Magnus Lindberg, followed by a major Messiaen work, “Poèmes Pour Mi,” featuring an emboldened Renée Fleming, and ended with an inexorable performance of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.”

A natural communicator, Mr. Gilbert excels at giving pep talks to audiences about knotty contemporary pieces. At a later concert he offered lucid comments, with illustrations from the orchestra, before conducting a lustrous account of Schoenberg’s symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande.”

The Philharmonic is playing splendidly for Mr. Gilbert so far. Let the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have Riccardo Muti.

In Los Angeles communities from South Central to Beverly Hills everyone seems to be going wild over Mr. Dudamel, the 28-year-old Venezuelan dynamo. That he exudes charisma might be worrisome were he not such a solid musician. His opening-night program at Walt Disney Concert Hall offered an electrifying account of a breathless new John Adams work and an inspired if somewhat scrappy performance of Mahler’s First Symphony.

The reopening of Alice Tully Hall in February was a milestone in the nearly $1 billion redevelopment project at Lincoln Center, 50 years after its groundbreaking. A lobby that used to look like a carpeted bunker now has the airiest and most inviting public space of any New York concert hall. The acoustics of the renovated auditorium are impressively clear and vibrant. The stunningly fresh performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor by the conductor Philippe Herreweghe with the Collegium Vocale Gent Choir and Orchestra in early March showed the hall to best advantage.

Another highlight, in November, was the return of the New York City Opera, which had nearly collapsed because of crippling debt and a leadership vacuum. George Steel, an innovative concert presenter but a neophyte at running an opera house, rallied the company and presided over the final stages of an extensive renovation of the renamed David H. Koch Theater.

Mr. Steel opened the subscription season with a major statement: Hugo Weisgall’s atonal biblical opera “Esther,” given its premiere by the City Opera in 1993. Yet Christopher Alden’s eerily modern and sexy new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” best signaled the renewed vision of the “people’s opera.” Though uncertainty lingers, things look good for now.

Mr. Alden’s “Don Giovanni” succeeded because he took a bold conceptual approach and followed it consistently. In contrast, Luc Bondy’s sorry new production of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season in September, was conceptually muddled: essentially a traditional staging marred by gratuitous invented nonsense.

After “Tosca” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, needed a compensating success. That came — and how — with the Met premiere of Janacek’s final opera, “From the House of the Dead.” This audacious, bleak, yet moving staging was by the acclaimed director Patrice Chéreau in his American debut. Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his overdue Met debut, conducted a crackling account of Janacek’s searing score.

Carnegie Hall deserves much credit for presenting Ancient Paths, Modern Voices, an ambitious three-week celebration of Chinese culture and its worldwide impact. It brought Chinese artists, ensembles and orchestras to New York, often paired in intriguing programs with American artists.

The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, a personal favorite, experimented with “Pictures Reframed,” an earnest attempt to integrate two art forms, courtesy of Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in November. Mr. Andsnes’s performances of a formidable new piece by Thomas Larcher and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” among other works, were accompanied by videos created by Robin Rhode. Or was it the other way around? The videos, though somewhat interesting, were often a distraction from Mr. Andsnes’s magnificent performances.

New Visions triumphed, however, with “Four Quartets” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in December. The remarkable English actor Stephen Dillane gave a dramatic recitation of T. S. Eliot’s seminal “Four Quartets,” a mesmerizing 75-minute solo performance, done from memory. Then the young Miró Quartet offered an urgent account of the work that probably inspired Eliot’s poems: Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor (Op. 132).

Countless New York performers are good musical citizens who do valuable work without complaint. Let me salute one of them: the brilliant violinist Jennifer Koh, who in September played the first three (of what will be six) free lunchtime concerts at Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall, devoted to a survey of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Grateful music lovers on lunch breaks packed the intimate room to hear this fine young musician speak about and perform Bach’s remarkable works, just one per program. The opening concert made me proud to be a New Yorker.