Hunger for opera, Venezuelan heat
Boston's classical music scene this year was buzzing with near-constant activity, home-grown and imported, just about everywhere you looked. But the new season was also shadowed by the loss of one of the musical community's anchoring figures, the conductor Craig Smith, who died last month at age 60. He had founded Emmanuel Music, the resident ensemble of Emmanuel Church, almost 40 years ago, and had transformed it through the decades into a bastion of enlightened music-making with the Bach cantatas at its core.
Composer John Harbison, a frequent guest conductor at Emmanuel, has now taken over as acting artistic director, providing some much-needed continuity while the search begins for a permanent successor to Smith. It's not easy when an institution's identity is so closely bound to a single charismatic figure; what becomes of Emmanuel Music will be one of the big local stories of 2008. In the meantime, a memorial service for Smith will be held at Emmanuel Church on Jan. 31.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra this year consolidated its impressive gains under music director James Levine and showed them off on a successful tour in Europe, culminating in a high-octane Proms concert in front of nearly 6,000 people at London's Royal Albert Hall. Two early highlights of 2007 - Schoenberg's "Erwartung" and Beethoven's "Fidelio" - came thanks to Levine's ambitious Beethoven-Schoenberg project, which paired the works of these two revolutionary composers in fresh and provocative ways.
Without any grand organizing ideas comparable to the Beethoven-Schoenberg pairing, the current BSO season paints on a smaller canvas. It is also a slightly more conservative one, with fewer works likely to frustrate old-guard subscribers who never warmed to Schoenberg's music. Still, this fall, new pieces by Elliott Carter and Henri Dutilleux showed just how much the old masters still have to say, and just how focused and refined their respective musical languages have become. Levine also led a luminous reading of Mahler's Ninth Symphony paired with violinist Christian Tetzlaff's unnervingly beautiful performance of the Berg Violin Concerto.
As is always the case, local schools played a large role in the city's concert ecosystem. Both New England Conservatory and the Longy School of Music made promising appointments of new presidents: Tony Woodcock and Karen Zorn, respectively. Woodcock comes most recently from the Minnesota Orchestra, where his tenure as president included a bid to make the ensemble's home more visible to residents of Minneapolis by wrapping Orchestra Hall in an enormous photo-collage of smiling musicians. A similar coup de theatre may be called for to raise NEC's local visibility, but alas the school's makeover campaign began inauspiciously this fall with the mounting of a tacky sign that now shouts its name in capital letters on the otherwise elegant stage of Jordan Hall, projecting an image of institutional insecurity more than confidence. Moreover, audiences sitting in the hall presumably know where they are; it's those outside who need to learn more about the school's existence and its rich public programming.
In that vein, NEC had accomplishments to be duly proud of this year, including its presenting of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, which came to town with its mop-topped dynamo conductor Gustavo Dudamel and electrified Symphony Hall. NEC also deserves credit for its Steve Reich mini-festival this fall, one that I regretfully had to miss. Longy meanwhile deepened its relationship with the fine young players of the Pacifica String Quartet, who gave a warm-toned and beautifully strange account of Ligeti's First Quartet. Later in the year, the Zehetmair Quartet came to town and dazzled a crowd in MIT's Killian Hall with the labyrinthine wonders of Hindemith's Quartet No. 4.
Kurt Weill's music made its presence felt in town this year, starting with Opera Boston's edgy production of "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." Then the Cantata Singers kicked off a Weill-themed season with an enthralling performance of the composer's radio cantata "The Lindbergh Flight," a souvenir of 1920s Berlin that has aged very well. Yet even with Opera Boston's strong year (which also included Osvaldo Golijov's impassioned "Ainadamar") and the Boston Early Music Festival's vivid production of Lully's "Psyché," there is no doubt that the city's opera scene is in flux. Boston Lyric Opera general director Janice Mancini Del Sesto announced she will be stepping down in 2009, and BLO music director Stephen Lord will be leaving next June. Meanwhile, the local demand for the genre continues unabated. In 2007, the Metropolitan Opera's HD simulcasts became a hot ticket; at Framingham's AMC there wasn't a single unsold seat for the first five broadcasts of the year.
In the new-music department, good news came recently from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. This adventurous group announced the launch of its own in-house record label, which will release a first batch of recordings next month, including discs devoted to the music of Lee Hyla, Harbison, and Charles Fussell. Meanwhile, older music became new this April, when in a long overdue premiere, Leon Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of Franz Schreker's "Der Ferne Klang," the first US performance of any opera by this unjustly neglected composer. Schreker was one of the leading lights of German opera in the teens and '20s, but the era's politics, both musical and fascistic, conspired to erase him from the history books. (Or at least the older breed of history books. New Yorker critic Alex Ross's coolly magisterial "The Rest Is Noise" also came out this year, and it tells the story of 20th-century music in completely fresh and unblinkered ways.)
The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag lived through some dark moments of that history, and you can hear it in his music. When Simon Rattle brought the Berlin Philharmonic and two eminent singers to Symphony Hall in November, Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" was surely the main draw on the program. But it was Kurtag's funereal masterpiece "Stele" that sent a chill through this listener, and lingered long afterward in the mind.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com. 