YEAR IN REVIEW 1998: PERFORMING-ARTS

Classical. Although the general atmosphere in the world of classical concerts and especially opera had been increasingly pessimistic in recent years, the approach of the millennium was bringing a sense of anticipation that could be described only as healthy. Although nothing specific had occurred to bring this about, there seemed to be a growing determination to make the 21st century an artistic success. One of the most encouraging aspects of the current situation was that during recent decades the leading educational faculties in music had found highly motivated and inspirational teachers, who had been able to release the inherent gifts within their students. For several years New York's Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Stanford University, the Indiana University School of Music, London's Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Eng., the Franz Liszt Hochschule fr Musik in Weimar, Ger., the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin, and the Conservatoire International de Musique de Paris had been among the schools producing first-class musicians. On a more discouraging note, as individual patrons were forced to tighten their purse strings and governments were unable to balance their books, the cash available for many orchestras, opera houses, and even some local festivals was depleted. The greatest survived, and those performers who became household names continued to flourish. Nevertheless, many talented artists were unable to find work. One country that defied the economic gloom in 1997 was Spain, where there was both government and private money for the arts. From the striking new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the Palace of Music in Valencia and the Festivals in the Canaries and the Jrez de la Frontera, music and opera were thriving at all levels. After having overcome many problems and having spent billions of pesetas, Madrid, as befitted the nation's capital, reopened the rebuilt Teatro Real, filling a void that had blighted the city's music life for more than seven decades. Tenor Plcido Domingo sang in the premiere of Antn Garca Abril's opera Divinas Palabras during the opening week. In Argentina the world-famous Teatro Coln in Buenos Aires was confronted with budgetary problems. Whereas other theatres were forced to cancel some new productions, the Coln's authorities decided to double the price of the standing-room-only tickets. In Brazil the uneasy economic climate seemed certain to affect the coming seasons at So Paulo's Teatro Municipal, which was suffering from public indifference to its new works. In Chile, by contrast, the Teatro Municipal in Santiago was enjoying both artistic and economic success. In London during the year, there was great controversy concerning the fate of the city's two opera companies. The Royal Opera closed on July 14 for expensive major redevelopment and planned to reopen with Verdi's Falstaff in 1999. In the meantime, the English National Opera, an old Victorian theatre with excellent acoustics, was being forced to make a decision involving the maintenance of the building. The cost of rebuilding and taking the theatre into the 21st century was astronomical, and the administration was considering finding another site on which it could build a new opera house, incorporating many innovations. Many of the opera's patrons, however, did not want to lose the old building. A much-needed new opera house overshadowed all other cultural subjects in Oslo. One problem that delayed construction was the rivalry between the eastern and western parts of the city, each of which was insisting that the new opera house be built in its area. In the meantime, the growing reputation of the Norwegian Opera was being stifled by having to operate in a small theatre with few facilities. During the year its repertoire included an imaginative production of My Fair Lady, and the company took its remarkably effective production of Wagner's complete Ring cycle--the first ever to be staged in Norway--to the innovative Theatre Royal in Norwich, Eng. Another great Norwegian institution was the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, which was invited to be orchestra in residence at the Musikverein in Vienna during the autumn. The Theatre Royal became an important operatic and ballet venue during 1997, thanks to the enterprising direction of Peter Wilson, who not only brought to it the Ring cycle but also helped produce the first staging of William Alwyn's operatic setting of August Strindberg's Miss Julie. The theatre's season was an example of the internationalism of the music world, which had become a constant feature in recent years. No concert season seemed complete without a visiting orchestra and artists, and audiences were often given a taste of new music. Anniversaries of four composers whose names were always in programs were celebrated in 1997. Brahms died on April 3, 1897; Mendelssohn died on Nov. 4, 1847; Schubert was born on Jan. 31, 1797; and Donizetti was born on Nov. 29, 1797. Needless to say, these anniversaries gave orchestras the opportunity to air those composers' music, including some works that were often neglected. Another centenary was that of the Czech-born Erich Korngold, who was born in Brno on May 29, 1897. Those who had thought of him only as a Hollywood film music composer had their ears opened during 1997, when a wealth of enthralling and often beautiful work emerged, including a violin concerto, a left-hand piano concerto, and operas, including Der Ring des Polycrates and Violanta. Korngold was probably the youngest composer to have had his music played at one of the famous Promenade Concerts in London; when Korngold was only 15, Sir Henry Wood conducted one of his works. Argentina celebrated the centenary of the tango by taking the Orquestra Mariano Mores to London's Royal Festival Hall on July 24, delighting an enthusiastic audience. In the United States the New York Philharmonic opened its season with a concert that celebrated both the centenary of Brahms's death and the 70th birthday of music director Kurt Masur. The New York City Opera opened its season with a successful modern-dress production of Verdi's Macbeth and later enjoyed acclaim for its production of Handel's Xerxes. The Metropolitan Opera won praise for its production of Wagner's Das Rheingold. A highlight at New York's Carnegie Hall was a performance by the Music Festival of India in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. In Chicago a $110 million renovation of Orchestra Hall was completed, and the new Symphony Center opened in October, in time for the beginning of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new season. A threatened strike by the orchestra's musicians was averted at the last minute when they reached agreement on a new three-year contract. Lyric Opera of Chicago presented the world premiere of Anthony Davis's Amistad, about a rebellion aboard a slave ship in the 19th century. Among the most interesting premieres during 1997 were two works by the German composer Hans Werner Henze. His opera Venus and Adonis was staged in Munich, Ger., at the National Theatre in January, and his long-awaited Ninth Symphony was premiered in Berlin in September. There seemed little doubt that both would be performed on the international circuit before the decade ended. Maria Bosse-Sparleder staged another of Henze's operas, The Bassarids, in a German version by Dresden's Semperoper on May Day. Helmut Lachenmann was not yet as well known as Henze, but his opera The Little Match Girl, which was first presented in Hamburg in January, seemed likely to find its way onto the world's stages. Also much debated was a full-length symphonic poem, Standing Stone, by Sir Paul McCartney, which received its premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra on October 14. The Festival of Perth in Western Australia was the setting for the first performance of Richard Barrett's Opening of the Mouth, a song cycle of four poems by Paul Celan. The intention of the 90-minute work was to address the atrocities of the Holocaust, which Celan had survived. It was scored for singers, instrumentalists, and electronics. The premiere was given in a huge abandoned railway workshop, which provided a sense of hell on Earth. Recent works by the veteran Greek composer Yannis Xenakis concentrated complex ideas into short time periods, and his Omega at the Huddersfield Festival in Great Britain was particularly impressive in that regard. Another important Huddersfield premiere was Pascal Dusapin's Romeo et Juliette. The Edinburgh Festival introduced James Dillon's Blitzschlag, a work for flute and orchestra, which the composer had begun some years earlier. Rossini's rarely seen opera Eduardo e Cristina was staged at the Wildbad Festival in Germany, one of several of the composer's works that had been resurrected following his bicentenary in 1992. Many operas were currently known only through concert performances of their overtures, and it was especially heartwarming to see them properly staged. During the year some German opera houses were delving into this repertoire with highly successful results. One of the most notable was the production on May 3 of Dmitry Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon in the Deutsch-Sorbisches Volkstheater of Bautzen, near Dresden. Violinist Nigel Kennedy made a welcome return to the concert platform, directing a Bach violin concerto and the Double Concerto, with Katherine Gowers, and also playing the Beethoven violin concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra. Kennedy and Gowers toured in Britain, opening in Birmingham's sumptuous Symphony Hall and also appearing in London's Barbican Hall. These concerts also brought the Japanese conductor Shuntaro Sato to a wide audience, as he had been appointed associate conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra. An exciting young conductor, he had an impact similar to that of the young Simon Rattle. Among the distinguished musical figures who died during 1997 were the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, the recorder virtuoso and teacher Carl Dolmetsch, the harpsichordist and Baroque specialist George Malcolm, the British composers Robert Simpson and Wilfred Josephs, and the conductor Georg Solti. (See OBITUARIES.) DENBY RICHARDS Europe. Classical ballet often exists on a precarious footing, and 1997 brought several reminders of this. After an international symposium, "What Future Is There for Classical Dance?," in Lausanne, Switz., aired concerns such as the scarcity of outstanding creative talent, ballet in Great Britain took several hard knocks. Scottish Ballet, the region's only classical ensemble, found itself threatened with closure. The Scottish Arts Council agreed to release funds for the company's 1997-98 season only on condition that a new board of directors be chosen and that the artistic director, Galina Samsova, resign with immediate effect. Because of cuts in their funding, the planned world premiere of Robert Cohan's The Magic Lamp had to be replaced by Ashton's La Fille mal garde, using sets and costumes generously lent by Birmingham Royal Ballet. Future funding would probably continue at a reduced level, and cuts in staffing and more changes in repertoire were feared. The Royal Ballet (along with the Royal Opera) slid into crisis in October, only three months after having vacated the Royal Opera House to allow costly and extensive rebuilding. As a result of mismanagement, the two companies were forced to shuttle between a variety of unsuitable theatres during the two years away from their home. Poor marketing and financial planning led to disastrous ticket sales for the Royal Ballet's first run of performances on the road. Faced with a combined ballet and opera deficit of 4.7 million, the Royal Opera House Board was expected to announce further staff cutbacks and possibly even a suspension of performances. All this came in the wake of highly publicized in-house disputes in which the chief executive, Genista McIntosh, left abruptly only a few months after her appointment. Other developments, however, counterbalanced this gloomy picture. In Britain the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which had previously operated as the Royal Ballet's smaller touring sister, became completely autonomous on the grounds that this would allow it to move forward more forcefully. The company's director, David Bintley, scored a big hit with his powerfully dramatic three-act Edward II, which he originally created for the Stuttgart (Ger.) Ballet in 1995. In Denmark Peter Schaufuss, the former director of the Royal Danish Ballet, launched the Peter Schaufuss Ballet, a touring troupe with funding and premises provided by the city of Holstebro. In France the fears that the Ballet du Rhin and the Nice Opera Ballet would be melted down into compact, less- costly modern dance ensembles proved largely unfounded, although budgets were cut. The new appointees--Bertrand d'At at the Ballet du Rhin and Marc Ribaud at the Nice Opera Ballet--indicated that their repertoires would give more emphasis to contemporary work but would remain in the realm of ballet. In Russia, despite economic turmoil, not a single state ballet company had closed since the demise of communism in 1991. The number of companies actually increased, although new ones survived on erratic sponsorship and ticket sales and often had trouble paying staff. The wrangles at the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) Ballet calmed down. Oleg Vinogradov, the target of much suspicion and hostility in his later years, retired as artistic director, and the celebrated conductor Valery Gergiyev, in overall charge of the Mariinsky Theatre's opera and ballet, seemed to keep a firm grasp on the reins of control. He did not, however, name a successor to Vinogradov. The Mariinsky Ballet enjoyed success on its foreign tours, including a long summer season in London, where its most popular evenings were two "Ballets Russes" programs of works by classical choreographer Michel Fokine. Fokine's granddaughter Isabelle was scheduled to stage new productions of Le Spectre de la rose, Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, and The Dying Swan, based on Fokine's notes and photographs. In the end, the Mariinsky Ballet rejected her Prince Igor and Dying Swan in favour of its own versions, which they considered superior and equally authentic, given that they were inherited from Fokine himself during his early years at the Mariinsky. At the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the ongoing turmoil was not completely stamped out. Vladimir Vasilyev, the former Bolshoi Ballet star who in 1995 assumed the same overarching post at the Bolshoi Theatre that Gergiyev held at the Mariinsky, received brickbats for his radical reworking of Swan Lake. This version dispensed with the evil Odile and featured instead a Black King and his son, the Prince, locked in rivalry for Odette's love. Rivalry also extended to relations inside the Bolshoi Theatre, and this, to general surprise, provoked Vasilyev into declaring on television that he would not renew the contract of the ballet's director, Vyacheslav Gordeyev, when it expired in July. A former dancer, Aleksandr Bogatyrev, was appointed as an interim replacement. Elsewhere other company directors were on the move. In Germany Valeriy Panov's contract with the Bonn Ballet was not renewed, and Cologne closed down its company, Tanz-Forum; Jochen Ulrich, its head since 1978, consequently lost his job. Once regarded as the most innovative company in Germany, the Tanz-Forum had entered a long artistic decline, and Ulrich's swan song, Citizen Kane, did nothing to suggest a belated reversal. In Italy Mauro Bigonzetti accepted the directorship of Aterballetto, based in Reggio Emilia. He replaced Amedeo Amodio, who resigned after 18 years because of artistic and financial problems and took the vacant directorial post at the Rome Opera Ballet. Elisabetta Terabust also resigned as director of the ballet of La Scala, Milan, after three conflict-ridden years--to be succeeded by no one, since the theatre decided to rely, at least temporarily, on a succession of ballet masters. Carla Fracci, who had retired as Italy's most famous ballerina, was accused of excessive expenditure as director of the Arena di Verona's company and was dismissed. Her replacement was Robert North, an American who had made his name in England and who was opting for a repertoire featuring modern rather than traditional ballets. Dance in Italy, however, was not only about directors coming and going. There were glimmers of hope in government plans to establish choreographic centres and to organize a more equitable division of government subsidies. Consequently, funds would be based on artistic merit rather than merely on the size, popularity, or age of a company, and a fairer share thus would be given to new or smaller ensembles. Among the highlights of the year were the Paris Opra Ballet's acquisition of Pina Bausch's much-admired modern dance The Rite of Spring (to the Igor Stravinsky score); this was the first time that Bausch had mounted a piece for a company other than her own Tanztheater Wuppertal. The Stuttgart Ballet organized a two-week Cranko Festival, a showcase of the ballets of John Cranko, the company's inspirational founder, who died in 1973. Maurice Bjart, the French choreographer who headed the Bjart Ballet Lausanne, was 70 on January 1. The occasion was marked by a gala in which Bjart himself made an ironic appearance as a hypochondriac in an armchair, confused by doctors and their masks; he then closed the evening by dancing a meditative solo. Roland Petit marked his 25th year at the head of the Ballet National de Marseille with performances in June on a 450-sq m (4,844-sq ft) floating stage in the city's Old Harbour. Important deaths included those of Danish dancer and choreographer Frank Schaufuss (father of Peter) at 75 and Peter van Dyk (age 67), the first German dancer made a principal at the Paris Opra Ballet. NADINE MEISNER This article updates dance, history of. Great Britain and Ireland. In 1997 the London stage was aglow with three great double acts. Dame Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins (Evening Standard best actress award) locked horns in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. Ute Lemper (see BIOGRAPHIES) and Ruthie Henshall set the town alight in the concert-form revival of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Bob Fosse's Chicago. Finally, and more unexpectedly, comedy favourite Richard Briers and the ever-glorious Geraldine McEwan scored a triumph as the nonagenarian suicidal married couple in a brilliantly reverberative and well-timed revival of Eugne Ionesco's The Chairs. Chicago proved the sort of galvanic musical hit London had not seen for a few years and became an instant hot ticket. The Walt Disney Co.'s Beauty and the Beast proved a popular fixture at the Dominion, a spectacular pantomime that arrived in the spring. Jerry Lewis led another well-liked import, the latest revival of Damn Yankees. The native British musical languished under the not ideally serious influence of Stephen Sondheim. Good new song and dance seemed to be in abeyance. Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Lord Lloyd-Webber offered, respectively, The Fix and Enter the Guardsman at the Donmar Warehouse. The first was a grim, depressing fable of the American presidency, and the second was a winsome adaptation of a Ferenc Molnar comedy. Neither really hit home, and neither was much fun. Even worse was the musical Maddie, which made only a brief appearance after a bizarre and unprecedented campaign by the Daily Telegraph critic to raise money for its production among his readers. Britain's new Labour Party government worked no instant new wonders for the arts. Although celebrities from sports and show business lined up for meetings with Prime Minister Tony Blair, the harsh realities indicated a collapse of morale and ambition among the nation's theatres. A major problem was the waste of lottery funds. To be fair, the arts world had only itself to blame. When then prime minister John Major's heritage secretary, Virginia Bottomley, asked what the money was needed for, she was told improved facilities. The lottery, consequently, generated 250 million for capital investment, whereas the Treasury offered only 186 million for revenue funding. The result was a building and refurbishment program that was likely to equip the nation with marvelous venues that had nothing to put on their stages. The prestigious, unsubsidized Chichester Festival Theatre announced big losses. Artistic director Duncan Weldon was forced to resign after a season that included successful revivals of J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton and Sandy Wilson's Divorce Me, Darling! (his sequel to The Boy Friend). Cuts in local funding in London threatened the futures of the Greenwich Theatre, the King's Head Theatre in Islington, and the remarkable Gate Theatre in Notting Hill--where the actors were unpaid but whose alumni include the departing artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, Stephen Daldry; the administrator of the Young Vic, Caroline Maude; and the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Simon Reade. Daldry, who masterminded the 22 million restoration and rebuilding of the Royal Court, was leaving to pursue a new career in motion pictures, though he was rumoured to be part of Trevor Nunn's plans at the National Theatre. His successor as the Court's artistic director was Ian Rickson, a close colleague of Daldry with a good track record in new plays. The new Globe Theatre played to enthusiastic audiences during its first full season in the summer, with Mark Rylance as Henry V scoring a particular success. The open-air re-creation of Shakespeare's theatre became an instant tourist attraction, and the cheap ticket prices ensured lively participation from students and foreign spectators. The Old Vic finally lost its patrons, Ed and David Mirvish of Toronto, after some 15 years of adventurous programming and mounting losses. The resident Peter Hall Company, incumbents for the last year under the Mirvishes, offered an ambitious repertoire of classics and modern plays, and critics and audiences responded enthusiastically. Highlights of the season included Alan Howard and Ben Kingsley in a wonderful revival by Hall of Waiting for Godot--some 40 years after he had made his reputation by directing the British premier of the play; Felicity Kendal and Michael Pennington in a new version by Sir Tom Stoppard (see BIOGRAPHIES) of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull; Alan Howard as a majestic, myopic King Lear; and a bouncy version of Sir John Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Wife. The Vic's new plays fared less well, but they built up a good following on Sunday and Monday nights. April de Angelis's Playhouse Creatures and Chris Hannan's Shining Souls were the best of the lot. On the other side of the Thames, the Royal National Theatre (RNT) completed a glorious decade of achievement under Sir Richard Eyre. Three of the best plays of the year were presented there, two of them directed by Eyre. Stoppard's The Invention of Love (ES best play) was a sumptuously intricate analysis of the parched love life of A.E. Housman, a Victorian poet best known for "A Shropshire Lad." He was played by John Wood, that most scintillating of Stoppard actors, as the older Housman and also by Paul Rhys as the younger man. Alongside this view of the past, Patrick Marber's Closer (ES best comedy) was a bristling comedy of manners for the 1990s, a sharp and savage sexual quadrille that contained the theatre's first sex-on-the-Internet scene. Finally, David Hare's Amy's View mounted an eloquent defense of the theatre in the portrayal of an actress finding her place there after years in the cultural wilderness. Dame Judi Dench as the actress gave one of her finest performances as she battled for professional survival and the love of her wayward daughter (Samantha Bond). Both Closer and Amy's View were slated for transfer to the commercial (West End) theatre in 1998. The West End itself had a good year. Art continued with its fourth first-class cast within a year of opening. Ben Elton's Popcorn was a thrilling having-it-both-ways Shavian debate about the new violence in cinema, with a Quentin Tarantino-type director held hostage by two natural-born killers. In Hugh Whitemore's cleverly crafted A Letter of Resignation, Edward Fox slipped comfortably into the role of former prime minister Harold Macmillan at the time of the security scandal involving Cabinet minister John Profumo. Michael Gambon and Alec McCowen also played real-life politicians--respectively, the disreputable socialist Tom Driberg and the prim Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee--in Stephen Churchett's Tom & Clem. Alan Bates was in characteristic self-lacerating form as a husband sitting at his wife's deathbed in Simon Gray's Life Support. The mania for the impersonation of real people onstage continued. In the West End, Sian Phillips was a superlative Marlene Dietrich in a backstage confession plus cabaret performance devised by Pam Gems. And Jean Fergusson appeared in She Knows You Know!, her tribute to the popular vaudeville and television star Hylda Baker. As Nunn took over the RNT reins from Eyre, he directed Mutabilitie by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, in which William Shakespeare (Anton Lesser) goes to Ireland--which he never did--and meets his fellow poet Edmund Spenser, who is working there--which he really was--as a civil servant in the aftermath of the Munster wars. The play was, however, not one of McGuinness's best, and Nunn made a more auspicious early impact with his revival of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, newly translated by Christopher Hampton, in which Sir Ian McKellen was a magnificent Doctor Stockmann, the principled doctor who undermines a spa town's prosperity by discovering contamination in the water and corruption in the works. Even Sir Ian was upstaged by Ian Holm in the title role of King Lear (ES best actor) at the National, again directed by Eyre. This was an outstanding Lear year, with four to record. Kathryn Hunter--(if Fiona Shaw can play Richard II, Hunter can certainly play Lear)--opened the account in Lear's home town of Leicester, and the production later moved to the Young Vic. Later, Hunter's former Thtre de Complicit colleague Tim Barlow, a totally deaf actor, had his moments of minor splendour in the role at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. In between, there was Alan Howard's version and, topping everyone else's, Holm's. He played the role with the most ferocious energy in a simple, uncluttered domestic setting oddly susceptible to the elements. Holm stripped down stark naked on the heath, as did Paul Rhys as the disguised Edgar, and their plaintive wailings achieved a crescendo of poignancy rare even in this great play. The Royal National Theatre's books were balanced by a triumphant return of Eyre's production of Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls, and other notable evenings included the belated London premiere of Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark (ES best musical), starring Maria Friedman; The Cripple of Inishmaan, a cracking new comedy by 1996's wunderkind Martin McDonagh; Lindsay Duncan peerless, dangerous, and sexy in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming; and Juliet Stevenson leading a spirited The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In contrast, the Royal Shakespeare Company reported poor houses in London and Stratford and an operating deficit of 1.6 million. The company's condition was not helped by a public confusion as to where and exactly when they were playing. Stratford seasons began in November, and the Newcastle tour was moved from February to October and supplemented by another residency in Plymouth. New plays and experimental productions were increasingly confined to small studio spaces, and there was no identifiable stream of work as had been characterized by the regimes of Sir Peter Hall, Nunn, and Terry Hands, or the careers of RSC associates John Barton and David Jones. Artistic director Adrian Noble's Stratford production of Twelfth Night was dismal, though many admired his main-stage Cymbeline and his Swan Theatre revival of Ibsen's Little Eyolf, both starring his wife, Joanne Pearce. There were sturdy RSC touring productions of Cyrano de Bergerac (with Antony Sher) and of Henry V (with rising new star Michael Sheen). The RSC's work so rarely seemed intellectually driven or radical that the new Hamlet, with Alex Jennings in the lead, directed by Matthew Warchus with great bite and energy, seemed aberrantly exceptional. The Royal Court's exile in the West End continued to be lively, with Martin McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy a highlight at the Duke of York's Theatre and good new work from Martin Crimp and Conor McPherson, whose The Weir (ES most promising new playwright), a haunting quartet of interconnecting monologues, confirmed an exciting new voice from Ireland. In Ireland itself the Dublin Theatre Festival focused on two disappointing new plays at the Abbey and Gate theatres: Thomas Kilroy's The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, which added little to the folklore about Oscar Wilde and did so in a monotonously arid production by Patrick Mason, and Joseph O'Connor's The Weeping of Angels, an enjoyably raucous compendium of Roman Catholic jokes stemming from the fact that the last three religious sisters in Ireland were having their roof fixed by workmen called Michael and Gabriel. Brenda Fricker returned to the Dublin stage in the latter. MICHAEL COVENEY Jazz. The Pulitzer Prize music jury in 1965 recommended awarding a special prize for lifetime achievement to Duke Ellington. The Pulitzer advisory board rejected the recommendation. Two of the three music jurists resigned in protest, and a storm of criticism appeared in the American press, whereas the 66-year-old Ellington only said, "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young." The incident was recalled in 1997 because that was the year an extended work by an Ellington enthusiast, Wynton Marsalis, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. Marsalis's award-winning composition was Blood on the Fields, a cantata about slavery, first performed in 1994. When the album was released in 1997, Blood on the Fields gained praise for the composer's ingenuity of orchestration and criticism for his melodic and libretto-writing weaknesses. Another composer in the jazz and classical music worlds experienced a replay of coincidence. Anthony Davis's opera Amistad, based on an 1839 slave rebellion, premiered at Lyric Opera of Chicago in November just weeks before the release of Steven Spielberg's major film of the same story. Five years earlier the recording of Davis's previous opera, X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, was released in the same year as Spike Lee's popular film on the same subject. The major composer-improviser Ornette Coleman received a mixed reception for what was billed as a historic four-day concert series titled ? civilization at New York City's Avery Fisher Hall. Few of his extended-form, large-scale works had been publicly performed, apart from Skies of America (1972), which reappeared in this series. As revised by Coleman, Skies alternated sections played by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Kurt Masur, with sections played by Coleman and his jazz-rock band Prime Time. A second ensemble reunited Coleman, on alto saxophone, with two colleagues, Charlie Haden (bass) and Billy Higgins (drums), who had joined him in inventing free jazz in 1958; this was a straightforward jazz concert, joined by trumpeter Wallace Roney and pianist Kenny Barron. Prime Time returned for the final concert, which consisted of Coleman's work Tone Dialing, featuring musicians, rappers, dancers, a sword-swallower, acrobats, and singers Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Probably Coleman's major work of the year was Colors (Harmolodic/Verve), his album of brilliantly lyrical improvised duets with pianist Joachim Khn. New York City became a jazz hotbed for two weeks in June when George Wein's venerable JVC Jazz Festival and the first annual Texaco New York Jazz Festival (formerly the What Is Jazz? Festival) were held simultaneously, each at a number of Manhattan venues. The JVC festival, as usual, concentrated on older jazz traditions and young bop-oriented players, including concert tributes to Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong, and used marginally jazz (an 80th-birthday Lena Horne concert) and nonjazz shows (Aretha Franklin's Gospel Crusade for AIDS) to attract crowds. The Texaco New York festival included longtime bop, pop, and Latin jazz masters but emphasized more modern idioms, especially free jazz, from big bands to solo concerts. The competition apparently was a healthy stimulus to both festivals--Wein claimed his gross was double that of the previous year, and the Knitting Factory nightclub, centre of the Texaco festival, reportedly sold out every night but one. Meanwhile, the Monterey (Calif.) Jazz Festival, one of the first important annual jazz events, was 40 years old in 1997. The International Association of Jazz Educators was the best-known jazz recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In 1947 the University of North Texas, then North Texas State University, introduced dance band as a major field of study for a bachelor's degree. Famed big bands, most notably those of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton, recruited its graduates, and in 1981 the school began offering master's degrees in jazz studies. In its 50th year, the school had nine laboratory bands, a jazz repertory band, and many small ensembles of student musicians. At JazzFest USA, held at Universal Studios, Orlando, Fla., the studios, Down Beat magazine, and the Thelonious Monk Institute played host to more than 300 student musicians from middle school to college age and offered more than $600,000 in scholarships. Rock elements dominated jazz in acid jazz, which continued to attract audiences and record buyers with mixtures of post-James Brown funk and hip-hop rhythms, bop-and-funk melodies, and rappers. The best-known performers included Liquid Soul, featuring tenor-sax soloist Mars Williams, and saxophonist Branford Marsalis's acid-jazz band Buckshot LeFonque, which toured and offered the Columbia compact disc Music Evolution. Jazz reissues began to appear on CD-ROMs with mixed results. N2K Encoded Music issued Gerry Mulligan Legacy, with eight tracks (35 minutes) of the arranger-saxophonist's recordings and three video snippets of him playing, two from the famed The Sound of Jazz video, and snatches of Mulligan and Patti Austin singing, Art Farmer and Wynton Marsalis talking, and a poem by Mulligan to his mother. The CD-ROM of John Coltrane's Blue Train (Blue Note) was considerably more successful, comprising the original 1957 album and alternate takes (59 minutes of music), extensive reminiscences of Coltrane by seven colleagues, a televised Coltrane tenor- saxophone solo, a rare interview with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and a series of photographs of Coltrane sessions by Frank Wolff. Evan Parker Chicago Solo (OkkaDisk) was the first unaccompanied tenor-saxophone album by British improviser Evan Parker, creator of several previous soprano- sax solo works. Pianist Horace Tapscott offered the sparkling Thoughts of Dar Es Salaam (Arabesque), and Australian alto saxophonist Bernie McGann made his U.S. debut at the Chicago Jazz Festival and also led his band in the CD Playground (Terra Nova). Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson led a freely improvising trio in Fred (Southport) and then sparred with fellow tenorist Ken Vandermark in Fred Anderson/DKV Trio (OkkaDisk). Roscoe Mitchell created unaccompanied solos on woodwinds and percussion in Sound Songs (Delmark), and then orchestrated some of those solo works for his nine-piece band at the Texaco New York festival. Guitarists Pat Metheny and Derek Bailey, joined by drummers Gregg Bendian and Paul Wertico, created the three-CD set The Sign of 4 (Knitting Factory Works), and Metheny and bassist Charlie Haden duetted in Beyond the Missouri Sky (Verve). The year's deaths included big-band blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, violinist Stphane Grappelli, trumpeter Doc Cheatham, blues guitarist Jimmy Rogers, drummer Tony Williams (see OBITUARIES), drummer Charles Moffett, critic Robert Palmer, British swing trombonist George Chisholm, and arranger George Handy. Two noteworthy biographies, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life by Laurence Bergreen and Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John Szwed, the latter a remarkable job of research, were published. JOHN LITWEILER Motion Pictures (For Selected Film Awards in 1997, see Table.) Diminished surprises and excitement in the programs of the great international film festivals in 1997 seemed to reflect widespread stagnation in the international cinema, no doubt the eventual and inevitable effect of years of domination of world markets by imported Hollywood productions. Many countries with previously rich and inventive small cinemas had little to show during the year. Outside Hollywood, with its well-established commercial patterns, the most vital areas of production were Great Britain, enjoying a sense of renascence, and the Far East, with cinema activity burgeoning economically and artistically in a period of impending political change. Nontheatrical Films. Ken Burns continued in 1997 to earn accolades as he brought history alive. His latest historical documentary, Lewis and Clark, again displayed his skill in digging up historical nuggets and then weaving them into a fascinating tale. Jessica Yu's Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien captured prizes throughout the world. This sensitive story of the poet-journalist confined for life in an iron lung won the 1997 Oscar for best documentary short subject and the grand prize at Vila do Conde, Port. Two educational subjects from the National Geographic Society, Survivors from the Past: Living Fossils and What We Learn About Earth from Space, garnered several honours, including a silver certificate at Parma, Italy (Prix Leonardo Scientific Film Festival). Survivors tells about dinosaurs' succumbing to geologic changes while the nautilus, cockroach, horseshoe crab, and other animals living at that time survived. What We Learn revealed the perspective on the Earth gained by looking down on it from space and seeing it as a geologic unit without political boundaries.THOMAS W. HOPE See also Art, Antiques, and Collections: Photography; Media and Publishing: Radio; Television. This article updates motion picture. North America. No singular force or theme dominated Terpsichore's realm in North America in 1997. American Ballet Theatre (ABT) ambitiously commissioned its first original multiact ballet, Othello. Conceived in partnership with San Francisco Ballet, the production was scheduled to enter that repertory in the spring of 1998. Called a "Dance in Three Acts," Othello featured choreography by modern-dance practitioner Lar Lubovitch based on Shakespearean source material, but the result was thin ballet fare. The welcome presence of former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) dancer Desmond Richardson as the first-cast Othello counted for too little, given the choreography's lack of individuality. ABT's new presentations of Ronald Hynd's old-world production of The Merry Widow and of Frederic Franklin's old-fashioned Copplia fared mildly better as ballet and as theatre. The company's eight-week season at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House was specifically planned as a "big ballet" season, with mostly multiact ballets making up the repertory. Mixed programs were generally reserved for a second New York season in the fall at City Center. In both instances it was individual dancers who stood out as most newsworthy. Notable among these was the company debut of former New York City Ballet (NYCB) virtuoso Ethan Stiefel, who captured attention with his clean yet impetuous dancing and noticeably thoughtful acting. Other especially remarkable performances came from semi-newcomers Vladimir Malakhov and Angel Corella and from principal dancer Julie Kent. NYCB's winter season was distinguished by the premiere of Jerome Robbins's Brandenburg, a marvelous dance suite of aptly playful and baroque dancing that showed the past master of ballet in top form. The troupe's spring season opened with a run of Peter Martins's staging of The Sleeping Beauty and added six new ballets to its repertory with another of its Diamond Project presentations. Although none had the gravity of Robbins's work, efforts by Miriam Mahdaviani, Christopher Wheeldon, and Robe