YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: PERFORMING-ARTS: MUSIC

MUSIC: Der Ring des Nibelungen As the climax to its 41st season, in March 1996 the Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its first-ever production of Richard Wagner's four-part music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen. Staging The Ring cycle, with a total performance time of more than 15 hours, is a monumental task and one that tests the mettle of any opera company. But the sheer power and overwhelming popularity of The Ring make it an essential part of any opera repertory. The sold-out Lyric performances, which drew an audience from throughout the U.S. and from a number of other countries, received kudos from both opera lovers and critics. The Lyric's Ring cycle actually began in the 1992-93 season with the staging of the first of the works, Das Rheingold, which was followed, one per year, by Die Walkre, Siegfried, and Gtterdmmerung. After the close of the regular 1995-96 season, the company then gave three performances of the complete cycle in three consecutive weeks. The Lyric production, which was directed by August Everding, used clean, stylized but highly expressive sets that featured, among other things, neon lighting in various shapes and colours. The swimming Rhinemaidens were represented by jumpers on bungee cords, the galloping Valkyrie by acrobats on trampolines, and the giants by huge robotlike figures. Overall, the production focused on the mythic elements in Wagner's drama of gods, dwarfs, giants, and humans--of heroes and villains engaged in struggles for wealth and power and motivated by greed and love. Six months later, in September, the Royal Opera presented a controversial new Ring at Covent Garden in London that eschewed magic and fantasy in favour of the 20th-century Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed, director Richard Jones said, "There is a duty not to present the Ring in a romantic context, so that it can be honoured as the warning it is." The Royal Opera offered the Rhinemaidens in rubbery body suits that made them appear plumply, grotesquely naked and introduced automobiles, a cluttered urban landscape, and a bearded goddess Fricka onstage. Der Ring des Nibelungen was an enormous challenge from its inception. Wagner laboured on the tetralogy for more than 25 years, starting in 1848 when he began the verse on which he based the librettos for his epic story derived from Germanic myth. The music for Gtterdmmerung was finished in 1874, and the complete cycle was mounted for the first time two years later at the composer's purpose-built theatre in Bayreuth, Ger. The first U.S. production was in 1889 at New York City's Metropolitan Opera (the Met). By the 1990s most of the world's major opera companies had accepted The Ring as the ultimate test of commitment and endurance. Many Wagnerian fans experienced the tetralogy dozens of times with almost cultlike devotion: some were known to travel thousands of kilometres to see a new production. In more than a century of Ring performances, the varied interpretations included classical, modern dress, Freudian, neofascist, Marxist, and even science fiction. In the 1990s they ranged from the relatively traditional naturalism of the Met (in a production first staged in 1988-89 and scheduled to be revived in 1996-97) to the stark, witty modernism of the Lyric to the philosophically bleak avant-garde reinterpretation at Covent Garden. (ROBERT RAUCH) MUSIC: Jazz. In another year when no trends dominated in jazz, the remarkable reissue in 1996 of Lennie Tristano-Warne Marsh (Blue Note) spotlighted one of the sources of the cool jazz sensibility--pianist Tristano's 1948-49 sextet, including two of his notable students, saxophonists Marsh and Lee Konitz. Tristano's ideals included pure melody and total spontaneity in improvising, achieved with pure, uninflected instrumental sounds. While these players' refinement of emotion and sound had long been unfashionable, it continued to result in fine jazz in 1996. Altoist Konitz's Rhapsody II (Evidence) was notable for the leader's melodic creativity, gentle humour, and urge for adventure that led him from unaccompanied swing duets (with Gerry Mulligan) to experiments in free jazz. A happy further blossoming of the Tristano legacy was the work of the Australian Bernie McGann, an alto saxophonist who advanced the Marsh style, at times to harmonically liberated extremes, in a rare visit to North America (at the Vancouver Jazz Festival) and on the album McGann (Rufus and Reckless). A problematic extension of Konitz was the alto playing of Argentine-born Guillermo Gregorio amid his post-Webern settings on Approximately (hatART). Some questioned whether this was jazz. The same question could also be raised about Et on ne parle pas du temps (FMP) by clarinetist Louis Sclavis and cellist Ernst Reijseger, Tao-Njia (Tzadik) by trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith, or the virtuoso playing of bassist Jolle Landre's Canvas Trio, with accordionist-clarinetist Rdiger Carl and expressive violinist Carlos Zingaro. The antecedents for their music were clearly in the classical tradition, yet much of their music was improvised, with a freedom of form and feeling and a recurring, irreverent wit characteristic of jazz. Moreover, these musicians attracted the largely young audience that attended underground jazz events. Several of them were Europeans whose work was not widely known in the United States, partly because it was U.S. policy to subject concert promoters to a maze of red tape should they attempt to import the musicians. Canada had no such restrictions, with the result that the annual festivals in Victoriaville, Que., and in Vancouver were once again among the world's major venues for new music in 1996. In eight cities, from Montreal to Victoria, B.C., jazz festivals lasting a week or more were held across Canada between June 21 and July 7, with the timing easing the problems of travel arrangements and allowing some bands to appear at several festivals. In the U.S. the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City had serious competition across town. The What Is Jazz? Festival, held in Manhattan and Brooklyn, featured 200 concerts by the kind of mainstream musicians and young lions who played the JVC festival, sharing stages with free jazz artists who had seldom or never played the JVC event. The festival was initiated by the Knitting Factory nightclub, the noted avant-garde venue that also booked stages at three European festivals, operated a record company, and planned to present live jazz on the Internet. A possible sign of an improved U.S. economy was the jazz museum projects that were announced in 1996. Since 1952 the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame had existed only on paper, with musicians chosen in annual readers and critics polls in Down Beat magazine. The hall of fame was to become incarnate in 1998 as part of an entertainment complex next to Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. In New York City the Louis Armstrong archives were to be housed in a museum in the great trumpeter's three-story former home in Corona, Queens. In Chicago the Jazz Unites organization planned to build a jazz museum, while the Blues Heaven Foundation, headed by the widow of blues songwriter Willie Dixon, planned to house a blues museum in the former Chess Records studios, the source of many valuable blues and jazz recordings. A group of jazz notables including alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, composer Gunther Schuller, and author Albert Murray constituted the board of directors of a planned jazz museum in Kansas City, Mo. Meanwhile, in Robinsonville, Miss., the Horseshoe Casino and Hotel, which had brought a measure of prosperity to Tunica county, until recently one of the most impoverished counties in the U.S., announced a $60 million expansion that would include a blues museum and hall of fame. A major disappointment for filmgoers and music lovers alike was Robert Altman's Kansas City, in which the much-vaunted jazz proved to be bits and pieces played over a rhythm section that had difficulty swinging in two-beat metre. On the other hand, there were fine recordings, ranging from the African-influenced concepts of pianist Randy Weston (see BIOGRAPHIES) on Saga (Verve) to the hard bop and modal musings of pianist Mal Waldron on My Dear Family (Evidence) and the unclassifiable lyric trumpet of Tom Harrell (see BIOGRAPHIES) on Labyrinth (RCA Victor). Sonny Rollins + 3 (Milestone) was one of the few of the great tenor saxophonist's many post-1960s albums to capture his imagination and authority. Alto saxophone great Ornette Coleman abandoned his unique jazz-rock idiom to invent two Sound Museum CDs, Three Women and Hidden Man (Harmolodic/Verve), with a fiery jazz quartet; the CDs had alternate versions of 13 Coleman songs. The Galaxy label, while releasing a series of Art Pepper rediscoveries, presented the altoist with pianist Duke Jordan in the exceptional In Copenhagen 1981. Delmark Records climaxed a highly active year by reissuing Sound by the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, a landmark in the evolution of free jazz. A major reissue in boxed sets was The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of Miles Davis and Gil Evans (6 CDs from Columbia; 11 LPs from Mosaic). The year's largest reissue box had 20 Frank Sinatra CDs from 1960-88, The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings, by the label that he founded. Sue Mingus, angry at bootleg reissues of the music of her late husband, Charles Mingus, formed her own Revenge recordings label to release the music legally. Nearly 30 years after the death of Billy Strayhorn, David Hadju's biography Lush Life shed new light on the composer's life and prolific career. Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath by his widow, Maxine McGregor, was a biography of the South African bandleader. As it was published, the Ogun label issued The Blue Notes Legacy by the outlawed pioneering sextet from a 1964 concert in Durban and reissued the band's successor in exile, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath Live at Willisau, from 1973. Other notable books included Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz by Donald L. Maggin and Hot Jazz & Jazz Dance by critic-historian Roger Pryor Dodge. The year's deaths included singer Ella Fitzgerald, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, bluesman Brownie McGhee, and longtime Voice of America jazz disc jockey Willis Conover. (See OBITUARIES.) Bandleader Mercer Ellington, drummer Alan Dawson, clarinetist Herb Hall, and saxophonist Eddie Harris also died during the year. (JOHN LITWEILER) MUSIC: Popular. In Great Britain popular music in 1996 was dominated by Oasis, a five-piece guitar band from Manchester that became a national obsession, acquiring a following that rivaled even that enjoyed by their own heroes, the Beatles, in the 1960s. In August 1996 the group performed in front of a quarter of a million fans at Knebworth, outside London--the largest paying British audience for a single band in the history of British pop music. Five percent of the nation's population applied for tickets. The songs of Oasis, a mixture of old-fashioned 1960s-influenced melodies and 1990s anguish and aggression, appealed to a wide age group, and even the most conservative and serious newspapers gave them extensive coverage. In return, Oasis provided the press with a news story almost every day throughout the summer, involving, for the most part, the feuding between the band's songwriter, Noel Gallagher, and his younger brother, singer Liam. Soon after the Knebworth triumph, Liam failed to appear onstage for an important concert to be recorded by the television music channel MTV, choosing instead to watch the show from the audience. He then failed to join the rest of the band for the opening dates of a U.S. tour, and when he did finally arrive in the U.S., he caused controversy with his antics at the MTV video awards. A week later, the tour was abandoned, this time because Noel decided that he had had enough. He flew back to Britain, leaving fans and press alike speculating wildly as to the band's future. Their record company insisted that this was not the end--Oasis was still together, though the group wouldn't be touring "in the foreseeable future." U.S. fans--who had never been as impressed as their British counterparts--were left wondering what all the fuss had been about. The other celebrities of the continuing "Britpop" revival were the Sheffield band Pulp, which won the year's Mercury Music Prize for its album Different Class. Singer and songwriter Jarvis Cocker succeeded with witty, self-depreciating, bravely honest songs that dealt, for the most part, with sex and the pains of growing up. On a more experimental level, the Bristol-based producer and performer Tricky was greeted as "the black David Bowie" (and praised by Bowie himself) for his "trip hop" style, mixing snatches of hip-hop, blues, and anything else that took his fancy into drifting, unpredictable songs. Not one to follow conventional pop strategies, he followed up the much-praised Maxinquaye with Nearly God, an atmospheric set that he recorded in just two weeks, with guest vocalists ranging from Terry Hall to the quirky Icelandic star Bjrk. It was a good year too for Norma Waterson, best known for her interpretation of traditional songs, first as a member of the Watersons and then in Waterson: Carthy. At the age of 57 the veteran folksinger finally got around to recording her first-ever solo album, and she was runner-up for the Mercury Prize for her direct, personal treatment of songs by the likes of Jerry Garcia, Elvis Costello, and Richard Thompson. The backing band included her husband, the guitarist Martin Carthy, and their daughter, singer and fiddle player Eliza Carthy, who emerged as the most promising young folk newcomer of the year with her album Heat Light & Sound. Among the more established performers, Mark Knopfler finally embarked on a full-scale solo career away from the band Dire Straits. His album Golden Heart, which made use of musicians from Ireland, Louisiana, and Nashville, Tenn., showed his continued interest in anything from traditional Celtic styles to Cajun and country. From the 1960s era Pete Townshend of The Who found himself back in fashion, with highly successful stage productions of his rock opera Tommy running in New York City and London. He also revived another such opera, Quadrophenia, which received its first-ever live performance 23 years after being released as a record. The Who were reunited for the event, a fund-raising concert in a London park for a trust set up by Prince Charles to help young people. British royalty, including Queen Elizabeth II, were also present at another exceptional London pop concert, held to celebrate a visit by Pres. Nelson Mandela of South Africa. British performers included Phil Collins, who was backed for the first time by his new jazz-influenced big band, but the stars of the evening were South African musicians, including veterans Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Hugh Masekela and newcomers Bayete, who skillfully mixed township styles with soul and West African influences. Other strong African albums came from the Paris-based Ugandan singer Geoffrey Oryema, mixing African, French, and Cajun themes on his album Night to Night, and from Malian performer Oumou Sangare. Arguably the finest and most versatile female performer in West Africa, she was joined by James Brown's celebrated horn player Pee Wee Ellis on Worotan, an album that mixed traditional styles with echoes of Western funk. Also enjoying considerable popularity was Cape Verdean folksinger Cesaria Evora. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) MUSIC: Popular. As 1996 drew to a close, many U.S. record company ledgers reflected disappointing sales for the second year in a row. Introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s had created a business boom, but sales later slowed as consumers finished converting collections from vinyl records to CDs and began investing in computer-related software and services. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, annual revenue growth dropped from 20% in 1994 to 2% in 1995, with no signs of major recovery in 1996. Some business executives also blamed lagging sales on a lacklustre crop of new releases that failed to capture the imagination of the record-buying public. Some artists clearly had the touch, however. Jagged Little Pill, the album released in 1995 by the Canadian rock singer Alanis Morissette (see BIOGRAPHIES), had sold more than 14 million copies by year's end and was threatening to overtake Boston, by the rock group of the same name, with sales of some 15 million copies, as the top-selling debut album of all time. Morissette won four trophies at the 38th annual Grammy awards, including two--album of the year and best rock album--for Jagged Little Pill and two--best rock song and best female rock vocal--for the kiss-off rant "You Oughta Know." "Macarena," recorded by Los Del Rio--Spanish guitarists Antonio Romero and Rafael Ruiz--became a big dance hit, rising to number one on the Billboard pop chart, where it stayed for 14 weeks. First released in Spain in April 1993, the song caught on in the U.S. in a version remixed by Miami's Bayside Boys. An up-tempo rhythm-driven song with a contagious chorus, "Macarena" and its accompanying dance were performed everywhere. The Fugees managed to appeal to both urban and suburban audiences on their second album, The Score. Blending hip-hop, reggae, funk, and pop, the collection had sold more than five million copies by year's end and yielded the breakthrough hit "Killing Me Softly," a remake of Roberta Flack's chart-topping 1973 release. The Fugees included Haitian-born guitarist and rapper Wyclef Jean; his cousin Prakazrel Michel, whose parents had also emigrated from Haiti to the U.S.; and singer and rapper Lauryn Hill, who had grown up in East Orange, N.J., and met her partners in high school. The group joined Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Spearhead, and Ziggy Marley on the Smokin' Grooves Tour, one of the year's most successful concert draws. Rock acts Metallica, Soundgarden, the Ramones, Rancid, Screaming Trees, and Psychotica made up the sixth Lollapalooza festival of rock and alternative music, while acts popular in the 1970s such as Kiss, REO Speedwagon, Styx, the Sex Pistols, the Isley Brothers, and George Clinton's P-Funk All-Stars also mounted tours. Cable channel VH1 fueled the nostalgia for older acts by broadcasting vintage TV programs, movies, and archival concert footage from the 1970s. David Bowie, radio personality Tom Donahue, Jefferson Airplane, Little Willie John, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Pink Floyd, Pete Seeger, the Shirelles, and the Velvet Underground were enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Heroin use continued to be a serious problem for rock bands. The Stone Temple Pilots halted a tour when a judge ordered front man Scott Weiland to a drug-treatment facility, and Jonathan Melvoin, a touring keyboardist with Smashing Pumpkins, died of a heroin overdose, which prompted the band to replace drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who police said was using drugs with Melvoin at the time of his death. Writer, singer, and actor Tupac Shakur died in Las Vegas, Nev., of gunshot wounds received in a drive-by shooting following a boxing match. (See OBITUARIES.) Shakur's All Eyez on Me, the first double album in rap history, sold more than six million copies from the time of its release in February to the end of the year, and his The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, released posthumously under the pseudonym Makaveli, debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart. Country music singer Garth Brooks set ticket-sales records in concert halls throughout the United States in 1996, but sales of Fresh Horses, his late-1995 album release, totaled only four million, disappointing by Brooks's standards. Shania Twain's The Woman in Me surpassed the eight million mark in sales and became the best-selling album of all time for a female country singer. Newcomer LeAnn Rimes, a 13-year-old Texan, shook up the country music world with "Blue," a single featuring a vintage musical arrangement and a Patsy Cline-like vocal. Her album of the same name kept the young star at the top of Billboard's country album chart for nearly 20 weeks. Brooks & Dunn became the first duo ever to be named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association. Deaths in 1996 included Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music and a member of the Grand Ole Opry cast and the Country Music Hall of Fame; beloved comedienne Minnie Pearl, who also was a member of the Opry and the Hall of Fame; and Patsy Montana, known for her 1935 hit "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." (See OBITUARIES.) Montana, Buck Owens, and Ray Price were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. (ROBIN DENSELOW; JAY ORR) This article updates music, history of. SPECIAL REPORT Computer Animation BY BRUCE C. STEELE "Jurassic Park will turn me into a dinosaur!" predicted one 3-D animator upon seeing the computer-generated lizards in Steven Spielberg's 1993 summer blockbuster. Indeed, some two years later, that forecast may have been fulfilled. In the world of feature filmmaking, CGI (computer-generated images) have crushed the demand for the kind of 3-D, or "stop-motion," animation of scale model puppets that had held sway in Hollywood since even before the original King Kong (1933). The victorious CGI troop was not a herd of velociraptors but a menagerie of playthings in what reviewer Jack Mathews in 1996 quickly dubbed the "irrepressible, magical, 100 percent computer-animated" feature film Toy Story. Released by the Walt Disney Co., in November 1995, Toy Story drew audiences steadily into the early months of 1996, earned its computer-generated heroes a featured bit on the Academy Awards telecast in March, with a special Oscar for director John Lasseter, and may eventually earn more than half a billion dollars in theatres and on video in the United States alone. Bearing out every 3-D animator's worst fear, Toy Story's returns were 10 times that of Disney's April 1996 partly animated, partly stop-motion animated release James and the Giant Peach (based on Roald Dahl's 1961 children's book). Even the studio's traditional "cell-animated" (hand-drawn, or 2-D) The Hunchback of Notre Dame, released in June, and Warner Brothers' splashy, heavily promoted Space Jam (combining 2-D and CGI animation with live action), though hugely successful by most measures, could not compare. The first feature-length effort produced at the northern California company Pixar Animation Studios, Toy Story set the standard in a year that saw hit after hit build its success upon the magic of CGI, from top-grossing Independence Day and Twister to Disney's own year-end smash, the live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians (with computer-duplicated puppies). Animation expert Edwin Catmoll, in the industry magazine Millimeter, predicted before Toy Story's release that "like Snow White and Star Wars, it is going to affect the entire film industry." So it did. As studio after studio expanded its feature animation division--including Disney, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century-Fox, Universal Pictures, and Spielberg's two-year-old DreamWorks SKG--many 3-D animators left their poseable puppets in favour of well-paid CGI jobs. All 27 computer animators on Toy Story, Disney reported, had backgrounds in stop-motion, cell, or clay animation. With the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, the art of film animation in 1996 often stood in the shadow of the huge business of financing these projects. Some industry observers estimated the studio's expenses on Space Jam, for example, at more than $100 million (a figure Warner Brothers said was inflated). Marketing tie-ins became vital to offset the high production price tags. For Toy Story alone, Disney relied on an estimated $125 million worth of promotions through "advertising partners" such as Frito Lay, Minute Maid, and Burger King, the last of which also signed up for the Hunchback launch and the year's video rerelease of Disney's 1988 cartoon feature Oliver & Company. This figure did not include the studio's additional earnings from the sales of related toys, collectibles, and clothing. It was somehow appropriate, then, that Space Jam--in which basketball star Michael Jordan teamed up with the studio's classic Looney Tunes characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck--was inspired in part by a 1992 Nike footwear TV commercial pairing Jordan and Bugs. The director of that ad, Joe Pytka, also directed the Warner Brothers feature. Wall Street firm Smith Barney dubbed Space Jam a "totally integrated consumer product event." The fact that stop-motion could not compete in this new game was driven home during the production of another Warner Brothers release, director Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, a live-action film with animated Martians. English stop-motion animator Barry Purvis and a crew of 70 worked for eight months posing puppets, one frame at a time, in the fashion of James and the Giant Peach and the popular The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), both of which Burton had produced. With little warning, however, the studio shut down Purvis's Mars Attacks! unit. Their work was discarded and replaced by CGI. The only bright spot of the year for stop-motion's success in movie theatres came from the clay man-and-dog duo Wallace and Gromit, created by British animator Nick Park. A feature-length omnibus including the latest half-hour Wallace and Gromit adventure, A Close Shave, which won Park his third Oscar in March, was an art house hit and a favourite holiday gift on video. Park, however, works in short forms and relies on work in television commercials for income. Wallace and Gromit are not movie stars. The CGI revolution in feature animation, for all its sweeping implications, did not originate with brazen young independent filmmakers. It came from within the industry establishment itself. Lasseter and Peach director Henry Selick both studied animation (along with Burton) at the Disney-founded California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and both were Disney staff animators on 2-D projects such as The Fox and the Hound (1981) before turning to CGI and stop-motion. In truth, Toy Story's success owed as much to its adherence to movie traditions as to the novelty of its images. Early features with CGI such as Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984) hooked their effects to the popularity at the time of video arcade games. Toy Story tapped a richer vein by building its story around a classic "buddy picture" premise--rival toys Woody the pull-string cowboy and flashy plastic Buzz Lightyear must join forces to survive a difficult journey. In fact, Disney had been traveling quietly down the CGI highway for many years. In 1992 the studio shared with Pixar a special Oscar for development of a computer animation process called CAPS, used in Disney's 2-D feature Beauty and the Beast (1991). The most famous CAPS shot is part of that film's ballroom sequence, when the camera seems to fly in a circle from the ceiling to a close-up of the waltzing couple--a shot parodied by the antiheroes of the 1996 feature animation release by Paramount Pictures, Beavis and Butt-head Do America. The homage makes an unintended point: as divergent as each animated film may be, the winners inevitably return to the lessons of previous successes. Except for the word "computers," Lasseter's comments in the Toy Story production notes could easily have come from Walt Disney himself: "We're storytellers who happen to use computers. Story and character come first and that is what drives everything else. You can dazzle an audience with brand-new technology but in the end people walk away from a movie remembering the characters." Bruce C. Steele is the executive editor of Out magazine.