Tops and flops of 2013
mainThe soaring comets and falling stars of a classical year that celebrated Wagner, Verdi and Britten.
The tops:
1 Jonas Kaufmann
The tenor for all tastes
2 Anna Netrebko
Every minigarch’s dream, she dumped an absentee husband and soared in Berlin’s Trovatore
3 Janine Jansen
The first classical soloist to sell strongly on download
4 Daniil Trifonov
A Tchaikovsky winner who prefers Schoenberg, he won a gilt-edged DG contract.
5 PatKop
The barefoot violinist goes boldly where others fear to tread.
And as for the flops:
1 Christoph Eschenbach
A conductor can get away with one bad night. This one had three massive flops.
2 Erwin Schrott
Beefcake baritone lost his diva ticket
3 The Bolshoi
Will the last conductor please turn out the light?
4 Steinway and Pleyel
One piano maker sold to asset strippers, the other went out of business
5 New York
…. which lost both City Opera and the Brooklyn Philharmonic with barely a public whimper.
Let’s hope for better performances in 2014.
I wouldn’t say that the City Opera went out without a public whimper. It was talked about daily for weeks, reported daily for weeks, argued about, memorialized, rumored…..there was much more than a public whimper, but not enough in the fundraising or management category to save it.
There are still public whimpers about it. And with year-end round-ups coming, there will be more.
As for the fundraising, I agree with the explanation that the donors who could have saved the company as it was concluded that it was doomed (City Opera had been on or near the brink financially off and on for at least 35 years) and that it was better to let it go and allow some new company to arise in its place.
The Brooklyn Phil disappeared with barely a public whimper because so much of the public had forgotten it was there. Its activities had been fading away for years; the glory days of Joseph Horowitz and Robert Spano, when the Brooklyn Phil was more consistently interesting than the New York Philharmonic, were long past.
Agree with you on the Brooklyn Phil. There wasn’t much of a to do about their closing, which is sad. One of my most cherished moments was playing with them when I was in HS, through a program they used to do with communities in NY and Long Island. That experience led me to want to be a professional musician. That outreach yielded great results over their many years. But, they barely had any concerts the last few years (yes, they “came back” but then stopped again). Just sad.
Management of the Malaysian Philharmonic and of the Minnesota orchestra top my list of flops.
As organizations you maybe right to mention MPO and Minnesota Orchestras as the top 2 flops of the year but the top flop of a singular artist without any doubt is Christopher Eschenbach. With the appointment of Deborah Card-Rutter as the new Kennedy Center President she will make the priority to get rid of Eschenbach from NSO when his contract expires in 2015!!
I truly don’t think that Erwin Schrott needs his ex to get bookings, as your comment seems to infer. Frankly, he’s more reliable when it comes to actually showing up and is a fine singer and delightful actor.
Completely agree with MarieTherese. He was absolutely wonderful as Procida in Les Vêpres Siciliennes at ROH, had never heard him sing Verdi before, and I was positively impressed, while I can’t say the same about Netrebko, for instance. Schrott seems to be very diligent when it comes to studying the roles he has to perform, while Netrebko has massive faults in pronunciation and expressivity. She gets away with it on stage because she is a good actress, but I often wonder if she actually knows what she is singing…
I would say that the 70th birthday events of Gardiner were like a top that countered the flop of the death of Sir Colin Davis.
I know that I’m still thinking about the flop of Warner handling the divested European divisions of EMI, including the classical labels. I sense this probably can’t last long.
However I am looking forward to the next Andsnes Beethoven concertos disc and even Jarvi’s new Chandos Nutcracker, due for release next year. But I am still hoping for Gardiner and the ORR to record Mendelssohn soon.
I am not surprised by your choices, although I would have added a few.
I live in Chicago and we have Eschenbach here this week. I am very close to two musicians in the CSO and they both told me that already in the rehearsal Eschenbach got many of the musicians extremely irritated and there was a general feeling of boredom and detachment in all that he did. I have decided not to attend the concert this weekend as a result of their strong condemnation of this seemingly uninteresting and failed conductor.