Silver lining gleams

IF you insist on thinking 2006 a bad year, you are, I suppose, entitled. Tower Records closed. Pop music profiteers took the wind out of the classical sails of the merged Sony and BMG, further diminishing the record business. We lost our greatest singer, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and most amazing experimental composer, James Tenney. Audiences in some places continued falling off.

But I say fill a glass half full. Classical downloading is booming. Who needs record companies when orchestras, opera companies, chamber groups, even soloists, can now produce their own live recordings and hawk them online? Audiences aren’t so much diminishing as becoming more discerning; the Los Angeles Philharmonic is doing very well, thank you. And tragic though their deaths are, absence has made the appreciation of the irreplaceable Hunt Lieberson and Tenney, whom CalArts remembered in an overdue festival last weekend, grow larger.

Below is mostly, but not exclusively, the good stuff.

Inexplicably, L.A. Opera managed to mount in six months a visually, dramatically and musically sophisticated, all-but-flawless production of Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea,” a ferocious “Don Carlo” and not one but two(!) trivial “Traviatas” (both directed by Marta Domingo). And, somehow, it turned a glitch-ridden “Grendel” into a box office bonanza.

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Thomas Ades, Great Britain’s impossibly gifted young composer/conductor/pianist, took Los Angeles by storm quite literally with excerpts from his recent opera, “The Tempest,” along with much else in his monthlong residencies with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in February and November.

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Vienna handed Peter Sellars $13 million to mount a Mozart festival at the end of the year in which Mozart’s 250 birthday was celebrated. With New Crowned Hope, Sellars shied away from Mozart, instead handing a grateful-seeming Vienna a jubilant new opera by John Adams, a deep, meditative staged oratorio by Kaija Saariaho, several feature films from points far, video by Bill Viola, a host of multicultural activities, myriad examples of art as social action, a visit from Toni Morrison and lessons on how to supply organic food in schools. Mozart beamed, and Vienna felt, for a while at least, a blessed place.

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Henry Segerstrom named a hall for himself -- again. The opening of the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa was not without its miscalculations, pretensions or its overreaching (the Kirov festival included an undercooked production of Wagner’s “Ring” and unsold seats for Shostakovich symphonies). But one thing couldn’t have gone better: William Bolcom’s ingratiatingly lyrical “Lorca Songs,” a commission for Placido Domingo and the Pacific Symphony, made opening night a night to remember.

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“Lorca Songs” came on the heels of Peter Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs,” the last six songs this composer wrote for his wife, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic last year, they then went to the Boston Symphony. A Nonesuch recording taken from the Boston concerts comes out on Tuesday. It redefines radiance.

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Robert Wilson was at the top of his otherworldly, magically glowing, abstractly odd game in 2006. But you would hardly know that in L.A., where the Music Center indifferently mounted two decades-old productions -- “Madame Butterfly” and “The Black Rider.” In Paris, however, Wilson’s “Ring” was a stunning occasion. In New York, his “Peer Gynt” turned Ibsen on his ear with endless invention.

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The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s springtime “Minimalist Jukebox,” the first celebration of this 40-year phenomenon in American music (and now world music) by an American orchestra, was a wild, still relevant ride for which audiences were the demographically desirable young, large and enthusiastic. They probably came from all the hip ZIP Codes, as well.

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Michael Tilson Thomas, who many years ago conducted Mahler’s gargantuan “Symphony of a Thousand” in an underwhelming performance at the Hollywood Bowl, put it on in June with his San Francisco Symphony and this time the heavens opened up and glory gushed forth unstoppably.

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Last summer at Tanglewood, Elliott Carter, who turned 98 last week and is still going strong, finally saw his first (and thus far only) opera, “What Next,” be given its belated American premiere. A work from his youth -- he was a mere 88 when Daniel Barenboim premiered it in Berlin -- it bubbles with strange mystery, complex music, complex humanity and complex wit.

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Mounting the first ever festival devoted to James Tenney last weekend, CalArts proved what had been long suspected. This maverick’s maverick, an experimental composer in on the start of computer music, the founding of Fluxus and Minimalism, the Ives and ragtime revivals of the ‘60s and, most important of all, the rise of microtonal music, was, during his lifetime, the greatest neglected composer in America. It is sadly always thus, but six months after his death at 72, the word is out.

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The Worst

Festival del Sole promised big-time music to accompany Napa Valley’s big-time wine and food. The biggies showed up -- Renee Fleming, Sarah Chang, Joshua Bell, Alan Gilbert, the Russian National Orchestra. But the venue was an unsexy, acoustically dead hall on Veterans Home grounds. The repertory favored the hackneyed. Prices were astronomical. A music management mogul made his Russian wife, fashion model/bland cellist Nina Kotova, music director. The only thing that really sizzled was the weather -- an unprecedented, unrelenting heat wave kept the thermometer over 110 much of the time.

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