A new-music party 100 years in the making

Elliott Carter (foreground) with BSO music director James Levine (second from right) and Daniel Barenboim (right). (Michael j. lutch)

It was a big year for new music in Boston. At the center of it was an improbable figure, a 100-year-old composer of bracing modern music named Elliott Carter, but there were many other events that showed just how much life was pulsing from this niche within a niche.

While Carter's big birthday year was acknowledged all over the world, it often felt like the centenary's de facto capital was right here in Boston, thanks in large part to the impassioned advocacy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and especially its music director, James Levine.

But other institutions and schools, including Longy, Boston Conservatory, and especially New England Conservatory, also threw their own parties, and there were weeks in which the city was positively awash in Carter's music. Some listeners slow to warm to its fractured, thorny surfaces were surely drawn in by the idea of the man himself, writing such inventive music straight through his 10th decade. (Memo to all composers hoping to witness an acceptance of their work wider than they could have possibly imagined: Try to stick around for a century.)

But at most, the broader human-interest story could serve only as a point of entry; the sheer vitality of Carter's music is what sustained the journey. It began in earnest this summer with a sprawling five-day, 10-concert, all-Carter Festival of Contemporary Music presented by the Tanglewood Music Center and directed by Levine. The highly charged atmosphere, the virtuosity of the performances, and the remarkable audience turnout seemed to exceed everyone's expectations. (Sadly, surgery to remove a kidney forced Levine to miss the event, and most of the Tanglewood season, but not before he led the BSO in a superb performance of Berlioz's epic opera "The Trojans" on opening weekend.)

The Carter festival displayed not only the fascinating evolution of the composer's style through the years but also, on a broader level, what can happen when a major cultural institution steps up to advocate for a composer it believes in. In this case, the festival planners did so unapologetically and with a sense of purpose. The expansiveness and the intensity of the programming made it feel like a real event, and there is something to be said for new-music concerts that do not try to lure reluctant audiences with the promise of standard repertoire. The large crowds of listeners had traveled, sometimes great distances, specifically to hear this Carter marathon, and even the week's monsoon-like rains could not dampen their excitement.

The celebrations culminated in town with the BSO's premiere of the composer's vital new work "Interventions," with Daniel Barenboim as pianist, at Symphony Hall earlier this month, just a few days shy of Carter's actual birthday. Then the BSO cruised down to New York to repeat the program in Carnegie Hall on the birthday itself. The new piece, written when he was 98, was part of a boldly conceived program that began with Schubert's Fantasy in F minor for piano four-hands and ended with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Thinking big paid off for the BSO, and in the broader classical music world, these concerts were events of national significance.

Even with the tough economic times this year, some local groups continued to expand their ambitions, with the Boston Early Music Festival adding chamber opera to its annual offerings, and Opera Boston announcing its first main-stage commission - an opera based on the ancient Chinese legend of the white snake, to be composed by Zhou Long, with a libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, a Brookline-based attorney and writer.

This September Gil Rose, the intrepid founder of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, curated the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music, an ambitious four-day event that, in a welcome and long overdue move, brought ensembles from across the city's new-music scene together under one roof at the Institute of Contemporary Art. BMOP also stepped confidently onto the national stage this year by launching its own record label - BMOP/sound - and rolling out a terrific slate of first releases devoted to music by a stylistically wide-ranging group of composers: John Harbison, Michael Gandolfi, Lee Hyla, Gunther Schuller, Charles Fussell, Eric Sawyer, and Lukas Foss. (This month the BSO also launched a digital downloading service from its website, with big plans to expand its offerings in 2009.)

As a visiting professor at Harvard this spring, the towering German experimentalist Helmut Lachenmann cast a spell over student composers and got new-music Boston buzzing about his arresting theater of noise. Also this spring, Boston Cecilia made a fine recording of Scott Wheeler's charming "The Construction of Boston," and cellist Alisa Weilerstein stunned a Jordan Hall audience with her rhapsodic performance of Kodaly's Solo Sonata. This fall, Boston Lyric Opera welcomed a new general and artistic director, Esther Nelson, who has high hopes for expanding the range of BLO's presentations. She will also preside over the company's continuing search for a music director.

In New York, those intrigued by modern opera had a rare opportunity to see a riveting production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's harrowing postwar work "Die Soldaten," imported from Germany by the Lincoln Center Festival and mounted in the vast drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory. City Opera and its incoming artistic director, Gerard Mortier, dramatically parted ways. And at the Metropolitan Opera, Britten's "Peter Grimes," Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," and John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" provided, for this listener, some of the year's most memorable moments in the opera house. They included, in Glass's serenely haunting score, the parting image of Richard Croft as Gandhi singing virtually alone on stage, levitating up a simple scale over and over and over again, as if floating on air.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.