December
28, 2003, Sunday
ARTS AND LEISURE DESK
MUSIC: THE HIGHS; The Classical Moments of the Year
By ALLAN KOZINN (NYT)
1. FREE SPIRITS
-- The Music at the Anthology Festival, at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in
Chelsea, presented ensembles, players and composers from around the world
in new-music programs full of quirky, illuminating and often amusing
works. The performances revived the lively spirit that drove Bang on a Can
in its early years.
2. GONE WEST, YOUNG MAN -- Over the last 15
years, some of the most vital new music has been that of Chinese composers
who have relocated to the United States. Huang Ruo is still in his 20's,
but a program of his works at the Miller Theater in February showed him to
be an imaginative straddler of East and West.
3. NEW MUSIC IN OLD
CONTAINERS -- The violinist and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain is about
as omnivorous as a contemporary musician gets. At Merkin Concert Hall in
May, he presided over an enlivening program that included variations on
''Hatikva'' (the Israeli national anthem) as well as works with elements
of hip-hop, jazz and rock, all using standard chamber instrumentation.
4. LEADING LABEL -- The new series ''Nonesuch at Carnegie'' may
strike some as a glorified showcase for a record label, but it actually
represents a reconsideration of Carnegie Hall's programming for all three
of its auditoriums. The inclusion of world music and the artier forms of
jazz and pop in the Carnegie mix reflects the spirit of this enterprising
label.
5. HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS -- The cellist and conductor
Mstislav Rostropovich does everything in bold strokes, and during his
visit with the New York Philharmonic, closing out a year of 75th-birthday
celebrations in March, he sidestepped the temptation to lead
crowd-pleasers and focused on composers who wrote music for him:
Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Lutoslawski, Bernstein and Dutilleux.
6.
COOKING AT THE KITCHEN -- In concerts at the Kitchen, the Miller Theater
and Lincoln Center, the new-music string quartet Ethel expanded on the
Kronos model and showed that when composers (and performers) embrace the
amplification and sound-shaping technologies of rock, the results can be
sizzling and inventive.
7. DAZZLE WITH DEPTH -- Both in her latest
recordings of Schubert on Philips and in her Perspectives series at
Carnegie Hall, the pianist Mitsuko Uchida continues to dazzle, both
technically and in deeply considered interpretations.
8. GOOD, BAD
AND UGLY -- By presenting both great symphonies and propagandistic drivel,
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Czech Philharmonic painted a nuanced and often
fascinatingly blurry portrait of musical life under Stalin in concerts at
Carnegie Hall in February.
9. WIRED FOR SOUND (AND SIGHT) --
Zankel Hall's flexible seating may have been overemphasized, but this new
600-seat space is attractive, comfortable and equipped with the latest
high-tech audio and video gadgetry. It has already proved a boon to the
city's musical life.
10. VOICES FROM THE GRAVE -- Beginning a
three-year project, ''Recovering a Musical Heritage,'' in March, James
Conlon explored works by Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Erwin Schulhoff,
Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and others who were pursuing promising careers
before the Nazis banned their works and sent them to their deaths. Some of
the works are magnificent, others less so, but these concerts at least
offer them a chance to be heard.
Copyright 2003 The
New York Times Company
