YEAR IN REVIEW 1999: PERFORMING-ARTS


Meaning of YEAR IN REVIEW 1999: PERFORMING-ARTS in English

Classical. Throughout 1998 new operas were being composed and old ones were being revived at an accelerating pace. The new opera that attracted the most attention was A Streetcar Named Desire, commissioned and produced by the San Francisco Opera. The music was composed and conducted by Andr Previn, and Philip Little created a libretto based on the Tennessee Williams play. Rene Fleming sang the role of Blanche, and Rodney Gilfry played Stanley. Other notable premieres included Tan Dun's Marco Polo in New York City, Henry Mollicone's Coyote Tales in Kansas City, Mo., Mark Adamo's Little Women in Houston, Texas, Richard Wargo's Ballymore in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, Wis., and Eric Salzman's The True Last Words of Dutch Schultz in Amsterdam. Also premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City was Patience and Sarah, an opera by composer Paula Kimper and librettist Wende Parsons about a lesbian relationship between two women in Puritan New England. Perhaps the most talked-about revival was The Philosopher's Stone, an opera written by three obscure contemporaries of Mozart, who also contributed several pieces of music. The libretto was written by Emanuel Schikaneder, author of the libretto for Mozart's The Magic Flute. Its first performance in more than two centuries was given in Boston by the Boston Baroque ensemble. Other notable revivals included Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra by the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Kurt Weill's Die Burgschaft. The Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., was host to the first American production of Francesco Cavalli's 350-year-old opera Giasone. The festival also premiered the new multimedia work Hindenburg. Described as a "meditation on humanity's hubris," the piece was a collaboration between composer Steve Reich and his wife, video artist Beryl Korot. The effect of new technology was also evident. Some composers incorporated "created" sounds into their works, and several new productions employed various kinds of technology in their music. Magic Frequencies by Meredith Monk was a multimedia work dealing with folk art, outer space, and science fiction; the opera received its first performance in Munich, Ger. The Brooklyn (N.Y.) Academy of Music premiered Chaos, by the group Bang on a Can. The opera featured amplified singers, drum machines, synthesizers, and samplers. Matthew Maquire's libretto included elements of chaos theory in telling the story of two scientists who reach the "chaos zone" and encounter Pierre and Marie Curie. Puccini's Turandot received its first performance in China when it was staged in an open-air format in Beijing's Forbidden City. Under the direction of Zubin Mehta, Sharon Sweet sang the role of Turandot, and Calaf was performed by Kristjan Johannsson. The producers claimed that at $15 million it was the most expensive opera ever produced. New Yorkers were not so fortunate. The Lincoln Center Festival clashed with government officials in China when director Chen Shizheng attempted to stage a production of The Peony Pavillion. The classic Chinese opera runs for 20 hours and tells the story of a young woman who dies longing for the ideal love. Her ghost finds her soulmate, she is brought back to life, and the lovers marry. Written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu, the opera was considered a masterpiece of the venerated Kunqu Opera, a highly stylized, traditional form. Chen had revised the production to update and enliven the opera, but the Shanghai Bureau of Culture objected to his changes and refused to release the props, costumes, and sets. Intervention by high-level U.S. and French diplomats (the production was to travel later to France), and appeals by both Chen and Nigel Redden, the newly appointed director of the Lincoln Center Festival, proved futile. Under the direction of Kurt Masur, the New York Philharmonic opened its season with a cycle of Beethoven and was joined by Isaac Stern as violin soloist. The orchestra went on to perform all nine Beethoven symphonies during a 10-week span. The Cleveland (Ohio) Orchestra had the distinction of performing perhaps the last premiere of a work by American composer Charles Ives, who died in 1954. David G. Porter, an Ives scholar, reconstructed the composer's "Emerson" Piano Concerto, using the Second Piano Sonata (subtitled Concord, Mass., 1840-60) and the Fourth Symphony as resources. The pianist was Alan Feinberg, with Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting. At Carnegie Hall the Violin Concerto of violinist and composer Ellen Taafe Zwilich was also premiered. In observance of Israel's 50th anniversary, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta spent three weeks touring throughout the U.S. with a series of fund-raising concerts. The anniversaries of many composers and performers were observed in 1998. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was the earliest composer to be feted. Her Ordo Virtutum received a number of performances, including one for an audience of 5,000 in London's Royal Albert Hall. The Sequentia ensemble performed it in 1998 as part of its project to record all of her music on the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi label. The most lavishly celebrated anniversary--in classical, jazz, and popular circles--was George Gershwin's centennial. Also widely observed were the centennials of two close associates of Kurt Weill: Bertolt Brecht, librettist of Die Dreigoschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, and Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife and most noted interpreter. Luciano Pavarotti and Plcido Domingo both celebrated the 30th anniversaries of their debuts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The avant-garde Kronos Quartet and the British early music choral group the Tallis Scholars both commemorated their 25th anniversaries. The Vienna Boys' Choir celebrated its 500th anniversary in 1998 amid a maelstrom of controversy. Agnes Grossman, who was appointed in 1997 as the choir's first female artistic director, claimed that the young singers were overworked and announced plans to reduce the number of performances, which usually totaled 100 concerts a year. In addition, she wanted to establish a system of sponsorship for tours and concerts. Grossman was blocked by the governing board on both issues and resigned from her position in protest. Inspired by the success of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cincinnati, Ohio. The first inductees included the U.S. Marine Band (also celebrating its bicentennial) as well as many individuals, including Ives, Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Fritz Reiner, Aaron Copland, Arturo Toscanini, Duke Ellington, and Gershwin. Joanne Falletta, music director of the Richmond-based Virginia Symphony, was appointed music director of the Buffalo (N.Y.) Philharmonic. Masur announced his intention to take on the post of principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, starting in 2000. New York Metropolitan Opera director James Levine was appointed to succeed Sergiu Celibidache as music director of the Munich Philharmonic, beginning in the fall of 1999. Andrew Davis, music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in East Sussex, Eng., and chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, announced that he would leave those positions to become music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago in September 2000. Christoph Eschenbach announced that he would end his 10-year tenure as music director of the Houston Symphony when his contract expired in 1999. Christopher Hogwood renewed his contract with Boston's Handel and Haydn Society through the 1999-2000 season, after which he would become conductor laureate. Domingo announced that he would become the artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera in July 2000 in addition to his position as artistic director of the Washington Opera. Several venues found themselves in need of refurbishment. Two venerable European opera houses, Venice's La Fenice and Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, had both been devastated by fire several years ago and were being rebuilt. Work on the Liceu neared completion, but the management still had to find other halls for its productions. London's Royal Opera House continued to struggle with financial problems. It was also under renovation but was forced to close, only partly because of problems related to its physical accommodations. New administrators were appointed after a parliamentary report sharply criticized its financial management. An opera season was held, using the Royal Albert Hall and the Sadler's Wells Theatre. On the continent new concert halls were opened in Baden-Baden, Ger., and Lucerne, Switz. In the U.S. the Santa Fe (N.M.) Opera House was redesigned, with all seats now under a roof where part of its audience had previously sat in the open air. In September the Seattle (Wash.) Symphony opened its new facility, Benaroya Hall; the $188 million building had a 2,500-seat main auditorium and a 540-seat recital hall. The recently built New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark surpassed expectations and attracted half a million patrons. Despite the problems associated with expanding its season, the Washington (D.C.) Opera decided to remain in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after the cost of establishing its own opera house in the downtown area proved prohibitive. Among the notable musicians who died in 1998 were German baritone Hermann Prey, American baritone Todd Duncan, American conductor Margaret Hillis, Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, and British composer Sir Michael Tippett. Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki method of teaching the violin, now used throughout the world, also died in 1998. (See OBITUARIES.) JOSEPH MCLELLAN Europe. Many ballet companies throughout Europe faced administrative challenges in 1998. In England the Royal Ballet reached its lowest ebb ever--its condition linked to the continuing cliff-hanging saga of resignations, mismanagement, and near bankruptcies in the Royal Opera House organization. The new chairman, Sir Colin Southgate, decided on the desperate money-saving measure of suspending all the opera company's outside performances during the Royal Opera House's current redevelopment (to be completed in December 1999). For Bernard Haitink, the theatre's music director, this was the last straw, and he resigned. Southgate had not yet demonstrated a radical reforming hand, although he announced his intention to create the new post of an artistic leader for the Royal Opera House. He also appointed as executive director Michael Kaiser, an American who had earned a formidable reputation for effecting miracle cures on troubled ballet companies such as ABT. Never before had a company needed more help than the Royal Ballet. The company managed to maintain its performances at Sadler's Wells and elsewhere, yet morale and standards slumped. The recruitment of the Cuban Carlos Acosta (from Houston Ballet) promised to add pep to the male ranks, but the sudden departure of popular Japanese virtuoso Tetsuya Kumakawa created shock waves when it became clear that five other prominent male dancers would join him as the core of a new large British-based classical company with generous financial backing. This left the director Anthony Dowell with a yawning soloist gap to fill and the fear that others might jump ship. The good news in British dance was the opening of the rebuilt Sadler's Wells in London. The renovations included updated technology and a much larger stage. Companies such as William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet, which previously had been unable to arrange a suitable theatre, would now be able to perform in London. Other celebrations included the 100th birthday of Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet. The Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet devised birthday programs that included revivals of de Valois's own The Prospect Before Us. The ballet, which had not been seen since the 1940s, was performed by the Birmingham Royal Ballet. In addition, the Royal Ballet presented her The Rake's Progress. Germany's political reunification resulted in a surfeit of dance companies and theatres in Berlin. Gerhard Brunner, artistic director at Graz, was asked to streamline Berlin's three large ensembles--the Staatsoper Ballet, the Deutsche Oper Ballet, and the Komische Oper's modern Tanztheater--into the Berlin Ballet. The new company would consist of one classical and one modern ensemble. The appointment of Richard Wherlock as director and choreographer of the Komische Oper's Tanztheater, starting with the 1999-2000 season, suggested that the Tanztheater would become the modern half of the Berlin Ballet. Elsewhere in Germany former dancer Ivan Liska succeeded Konstanze Vernon as the head of the Bavarian Ballet, Daniela Kurtz became the director of the Nrnberg Ballet, and choreographer Rui Horta's Frankfurt-based SOAP closed in May because of budget cuts. The Frankfurt Ballet fared better, although Forsythe was engaged in tough contract-renewal negotiations. He secured agreement, however, that his company would henceforth be more autonomous and would manage its own budget. Forsythe also became artistic director of the TAT (Theater am Turm) in Frankfurt's Bockenheimer Depot, reopening in September 1999. He could use the TAT as an extra performing space for his own company and was now responsible for annual programming using outside artists. He also found time to create two masterful pieces: Small Void and op.31 (erste Fassungen). Premiered in Frankfurt, both works returned to a balletic austerity that mirrored the questing compositional techniques of their respective scores by Thom Willems and Arnold Schoenberg. John Neumeier celebrated 25 years with the Hamburg Ballet, as did Pina Bausch with the Tanztheater Wuppertal. The theatre was host to a festival with visitors such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and the Frankfurt Ballet, who donated their performances. There were also performances of Bausch's own work. Bausch created two new ballets; the first, Masurca Fogo, evoked the Portuguese fado tradition and themes of solitude and longing. The second work, Duke Bluebeard's Castle, was premiered at Aix-en-Provence, France, with Pierre Boulez conducting Bartok's score. This new ballet proved to be very different from Bausch's 1997 Bluebeard. The Royal Swedish Ballet, the fourth oldest company in the world, reached its 225th birthday, an occasion coinciding with Stockholm's tenure as the 1998 cultural capital of Europe. The ballet company organized a conference about its history and performances that included the Bolshoi Ballet in Raymonda, a ballet never before seen in Sweden. There was also a program devoted to Les Ballets Sudois, the Paris-based company founded by Rolf de Mar with Jean Brlin as its single choreographer and star dancer. Ivo Cramr reconstructed Brlin's El Greco (1920), and the team of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer re-created Derviches (1920), Skating Rink (1922), and Within the Quota (1923). The year also saw the 90th birthdays of Birgit Cullberg and Birgit Akesson, two grand ladies of Swedish dance. The Batsheva Dance Company encountered problems with its intended contribution to Israel's 50th anniversary showcase, held in Jerusalem and involving hundreds of artists and world-wide television coverage. Haim Miller, the ultra-Orthodox deputy mayor of Jerusalem, demanded the withdrawal of Batsheva's piece, Anaphase, because of his objections to the dancers' stripping down to their underclothes. This was intended to be a gesture of rebirth and continuity that the choreographer, Ohad Naharin, had set to a Jewish song normally sung at the Passover seder, or festive meal. The result was a full-blown scandal involving both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pres. Ezer Weizman, who suggested the dancers wear long underwear as a compromise. The dancers refused and withdrew from the festival. The headline news in France was Roland Petit's departure from the Marseille Ballet after 26 years. His successor was Marie-Claude Pietragalla of the Paris Opra Ballet, who intended to keep up her Paris performances. Petit, insulted that his own candidate was not chosen, withdrew all his ballets from the Marseille repertory. His last new ballet for Marseille in 1998 was a revisionist Swan Lake. Entitled Le Lac des cygnes et ses malefices, Petit's ballet, in which the character Siegfried was the swan, featured Altynai Asylmuratova as Odette. Asylmuratova had been dividing her time between the Mariinsky Ballet and Marseille. In anniversaries, Yvette Chauvir marked her 80th birthday with a celebratory gala from the Paris Opra Ballet. In Florence Davide Bombana replaced Karole Armitage as director and choreographer of the Teatro Communale. In Moscow Vladimir Vasilyev's new Giselle for the Bolshoi Ballet premiered at the end of 1997 and proved to be restrained compared with his controversially radical Swan Lake. The ballet provided more dancing for the characters Albrecht and Hilarion and boasted costumes created and donated by the retired French couturier Hubert de Givenchy. Unlike ballet, contemporary dance did not benefit from state subsidies in the states of the former Soviet Union, and the art form was still in its infancy. Vitebsk, Belarus (artist Mark Chagall's hometown and an avant-garde centre in the 1920s), was an appropriate location for the 10th International Festival of Contemporary Choreography. The festival included a competition, master classes given by teachers from France, Germany, and the U.S., and performances by groups from all over the former Soviet Union. There were also performances from Sasha Pepelyayev's Kinetic Theatre, which also won a prize at the annual Bagnolet competition in France and appeared at London's Dance Umbrella festival. Many celebrated dancers died, including Christopher Gable and perhaps the century's greatest ballerina, Galina Ulanova. Gable's death left Britain's Northern Ballet Theatre without a director. Other deaths included Svetlana Beriosova, Serge Golovine, William Louther, and Alexander Bogatyrev. (See OBITUARIES.) NADINE MEISNER Great Britain and Ireland. The dominance of the Royal National Theatre (RNT) and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), the highly subsidized theatrical monoliths born in the early 1960s, began to fade in 1998. The best of London theatre changed around them to form new, and extremely potent, alliances of talent. The ensemble ideal in British theatre seemed to be as good as dead as various factions of writers, directors, and actors made arrangements to work in one place for shorter lengths of time. Much of this activity took place in London, at the Almeida Theatre in Islington and the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. The American film star Kevin Spacey won the Evening Standard (ES) best actor of the year award for his performance as Hickey in a magnificent revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida. Nicole Kidman was the luminescent focus of attention at the Donmar in The Blue Room, Sir David Hare's brilliant rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler's famous fin de sicle comedy of sexual promiscuity, La Ronde. Former RSC director Howard Davies won the ES best director award for The Iceman Cometh and also during the year provided the RNT with a hit with his production in the Olivier Auditorium of Mikhail Bulgakov's radical classic Flight. Kidman's presence in The Blue Room highlighted the increasing prominence of director Sam Mendes at the Donmar as well as the important shift of Hare from his virtually in-house perch at the RNT to a commercially oriented father-figure position on the fashionable fringe. The Almeida during the year sent productions to the Malvern Festival and the West End, where Dame Diana Rigg led Jonathan Kent's company in two unexpectedly successful productions of baroque tragedies by Jean Racine. Phdre and Britannicus were translated, respectively, by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes (see OBITUARIES) and, in a much lighter vein, Robert David MacDonald. Both plays were performed in modern dress, and Rigg was memorably partnered by Toby Stephens as her incestuous object of desire in the first play and her flesh and blood son (as the embryonic tyrant emperor Nero) in the second. Financially bolstered by trend-spotting patrons and by Broadway interest, the Almeida also presented a bruised and brooding Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde in Hare's Judas Kiss at the Playhouse and a wonderfully funny co-production with the Right Size of Bertolt Brecht's Puntila and His Servant Matti at the Edinburgh Festival on national tour and then at home and the West End. On its home stage and subsequently at the Old Vic, the Almeida presented a beautifully heartbreaking Juliet Binoche as the troubled heroine of Pirandello's Naked. The Donmar restored James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's magically acid Into the Woods at the year's end. Motion picture stars enjoyed great popularity in London during the year. Whereas in the old days the likes of Lauren Bacall, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman, or Charlton Heston would come to fill big theatres in musicals or revivals, the new Hollywood generation was playing it safe and trendy in sold-out small houses. Even the homegrown film stars did the same; Ewan McGregor of Trainspotting fame led a fine revival at the tiny Hampstead Theatre of David Halliwell's 1965 student comedy Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. The RNT under Trevor Nunn tried to maintain its prominence with a spectacular and truly glorious revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (ES best musical) and dogged, if not uniformly successful, revivals of Jay Presson Allen's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Harold Pinter's Betrayal, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. In the latter Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren were framed in a production by Sean Mathias that received strongly mixed reviews. Nunn unearthed an early, previously unperformed Tennessee Williams prison play, Not About Nightingales, that was graced by a fine central performance by Corin Redgrave. Other RNT highlights included Michael Frayn's new play about atomic scientists, Copenhagen (ES best play), and Sinead Cusack (ES best actress) as a dying heroine in Sebastian Barry's lyrical if disastrously undramatic Our Lady of Sligo. Best of all was Terry Johnson's new comedy about the very British vaudevillian "Carry On" films, Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick. In the smaller RNT Cottesloe theatre, which was host to the Frayn, Barry, and Williams dramas, the National could also boast Kevin Elyot's The Day I Stood Still, a cleverly arranged time-jumping meditation on the well of loneliness; an ebullient adaptation of Salman Rushdie's adventure fable Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and Jonathan Harvey's fine Liverpudlian domestic epic Guiding Star. Only average Shakespeare was produced by the RSC at Stratford, but this was balanced by a stunning, low-key, and wondrously atmospheric revival by Katie Mitchell of Uncle Vanya in an RSC-Young Vic collaboration starring Stephen Dillane and Linus Roache as Vanya and Astrov. The future of the Royal Court, home of new British theatre writing since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 and of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville Barker 50 years earlier, remained precarious. The lease was sold back to the property owners, and the cost of the architectural adjustments to the Sloane Square headquarters outstripped the money available. At the year's end there was a tremendous row over whether the Jerwood Foundation, already a generous sponsor, could be allowed to include its name in that of the theatre itself--as in the Royal Jerwood Court--in exchange for a further donation of 3 million (about U.S. $5 million). The Court's work itself continued unabated, with notable plays during the year from Phyllis Nagy (Never Land), Sarah Kane (Cleansed), and Rebecca Prichard (Yard Gal), all of them highly theatrical and full of energy and promise. Another Court highlight was the ubiquitous Hare appearing in his own abrasive and funny monologue about a first-ever visit to Israel, Via Dolorosa. Dame Judi Dench (see BIOGRAPHIES) was engaged with Sir Peter Hall's company at the Picadilly, which completed a remarkable repertoire season of Shaw's Major Barbara, Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena (in which Dench played a reformed Neapolitan prostitute and broke all hearts), and a revival of Alan Bennett's Kafka's Dick. Sir Ian McKellen announced that he would abandon the RNT for Leeds and lead a newly formed ensemble--in the face of the national trend--at Jude Kelly's ever-adventurous West Yorkshire Playhouse. The result was instant excitement and proud stirrings as McKellan and Clare Higgins shone notably among a fine group of actors in The Seagull by Chekhov and Present Laughter by Sir Nol Coward. Another Yorkshire house, the Sheffield Crucible, scored a huge popular hit with the stage version of Brassed Off, the British movie about the demise of the brass band culture in a decimated mining community. Michael Grandage directed a well-received Twelfth Night on the same stage, and Shakespeare received another boost at the Birmingham Rep, where Richard McCabe, an RSC associate, was an immensely fast and scabrously funny Hamlet in Bill Alexander's notable revival. Later in the year Charles Dance also went to the Birmingham Rep to lead a handsome production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, directed by Bill Bryden. Chichester Festival Theatre recovered its dignity after financial mayhem in 1997 with a program that managed to be both sensible and refreshing: a sportive, non-Neapolitan revival of De Filippo's Saturday Sunday Monday starring David Suchet; a well-timed revival of Hare's Racing Demon, about crisis in the Church of England, with fine performances from Denis Quilley and Dinsdale Landen; Simon Callow and Keith Baxter in Orson Welles's version of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, Chimes at Midnight; and Katherine Howard, a fine new historical play from William Nicholson about the least known of Henry VIII's wives. Richard Griffiths played the monarch superbly as a fat man with his thin Renaissance former self trying to get out. The Edinburgh Festival was memorably devoted to an exploration of the links between Verdi and Schiller, and so the Glasgow Citizens produced Schiller's The Robbers (Verdi's basis for I Masnadieri), in which Benedick Bates, son of Alan, played both the good and bad brothers in a virtuoso performance. A visiting production from Germany by Peter Stein of Botho Strauss's Die Ahnlichen was a glorious occasion, and the ever-interesting Traverse Theatre presented several important new dramas, including Liz Lochhead's Perfect Days and David Greig's Kill the Old, Torture Their Young. There was a veritable riot of musical theatre in London throughout the year, with competent revivals of such Broadway favourites as Show Boat (Harold Prince's production), Sweet Charity, Annie, West Side Story (supervised by the librettist Arthur Laurents, who took a few swipes at Jerome Robbins's posthumous reputation), and--in Regent's Park--Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Rent, with at least eight superb songs, transferred from New York City to a mixed reception; something was lost in the passage of this new Hair-style phenomenon. Doctor Dolittle was a sumptuously designed translation of the Rex Harrison movie that attracted enthusiastic family audiences. Saturday Night Fever, directed and choreographed by Arlene Phillips at the Palladium, was a huge hit, catching a wave of nostalgia for disco dancing, flared trousers, John Travolta (superbly impersonated by Adam Garcia), and songs of the Bee Gees. As usual, Lord Lloyd-Webber provoked a mixed critical reception when Whistle Down the Wind, with lyrics by Jim Steinman, opened at the Aldwych in the summer. This was a fiercely impassioned piece of work about the need for faith in a secular age. The story of how three young children in the English countryside mistake a runaway convict for the Messiah was translated--as it was in the Washington, D.C., premiere directed by Harold Prince--to the Bible Belt in Louisiana. Gale Edwards's new production was, however, more minimally designed (by Peter J. Davison) under a great metaphoric freeway to nowhere, and the story had been honed and sharpened. The rock songs contained some of Lloyd Webber's best writing in years, and one of the sweetest numbers, "No Matter What," sung by the children to their mysterious saviour, became a chart-topping single for the pop group Boyzone. In Ireland, not to be outdone by the Hollywood star casting in London, the Gate Theatre in Dublin invited Oscar winner Frances McDormand--the pregnant police officer in Fargo--to play Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She packed a great punch and revealed a good voice but missed the key notes of psychological disintegration. Later in the year the Gate staged the highlight of the Dublin Festival, Niall Buggy's performance as Uncle Vanya in a new translation of the Chekhov play by Brian Friel. MICHAEL COVENEY Jazz. Zoot suits, double-breasted suits, wide neckties, fedora hats, and other attire from Grandpa's trunk became the fashion again in 1998 as the swing revival, or neoswing, took off in jazz. The fad had had its beginnings in small nightclubs, especially on the U.S. West Coast, in the early 1990s and had quietly spread across the country. Couples began taking swing dance lessons, learning to jitterbug and also to hold each other while dancing, much as their ancestors used to do. With appearances by the Squirrel Nut Zippers on late-night television shows and popular recordings and tours by the Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Cherry Poppin' Daddies, the new swing music gained increased popularity in 1998. The music had little to do with the classic big-band jazz of the swing era; instead, simple arrangements and shuffle rhythms dominated, and the most important influences were black 1940s jump-rhythm and blues bands, western swing, and 1950s Las Vegas lounge acts. More significant in strictly musical terms was the slowly but steadily increasing presence of gifted women jazz artists in the 1990s. College jazz programs and a gradual decline of sexist attitudes were contributing factors, and the three-day Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., held during Memorial Day weekend, was the most prominent gathering of jazz women yet, featuring performers such as vocalists Marlena Shaw and Nnena Freelon, violinist Regina Carter, the big band Maiden Voyage, and keyboard improvisers Renee Rosnes and Amina Claudine Myers. Williams had been an important arranger-pianist of the swing era; her fellow pioneer in breaking down gender barriers, Marian McPartland, was given an 80th-birthday tribute at New York City's Town Hall. Veterans such as pianist Barbara Carroll and trumpeter Harry ("Sweets") Edison and young pianists Rosnes and Benny Green were among those paying tribute and, as on her weekly radio program "Piano Jazz," pianist McPartland joined several of them in duets. In 1939 Jelly Roll Morton composed his only swing-band works, which he hoped to sell to Benny Goodman, who had already made a pop hit of Morton's "King Porter Stomp." Unlike all previous Morton music, the works featured modern swing-band harmonies and no solos, a far cry indeed from the New Orleans ensemble style of Morton's early jazz masterpieces. Goodman did not buy the scores, and the compositions were never performed until 1998, when, 57 years after Morton's death, four of them were introduced by Don Vappie's Creole Jazz Serenaders, a New Orleans-based repertory band. Unlike 1997, when New York City's two major jazz festivals were held simultaneously, in 1998 the upstart Texaco New York Jazz Festival, centred on late bop to free jazz, was held the first two weeks of June, and the long-standing JVC Jazz Festival, featuring more mainstream works, was held the following two weeks. Ornette Coleman brought a series of concerts titled Civilization '98 to the Umbria (Italy) Jazz Festival, including Coleman's jazz trio joined by fellow alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; Coleman performed with Indian and Sardinian musicians, and his jazz-rock Prime Time band was joined by dancers and a video display. The 10th National Black Arts Festival, in Atlanta, Ga., was highlighted by a particularly daring concert series featuring international free-jazz notables, including, from the U.S., trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, trombonist George Lewis, and saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Anderson, Oliver Lake, and Dwight Andrews (the festival's music curator) and, from Europe, saxophonists Evan Parker (U.K.) and Peter Brtzmann (Germany) and pianists Alex von Schlippenbach and Gunter ("Baby") Sommers (Germany). Tributes were prominent among the year's recordings. In the year of George Gershwin's 100th birthday, pianist Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World (Verve), with guests including Kathleen Battle, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, was notable. While Columbia/Legacy reissued Miles Davis's The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions as a four-compact disc (CD) set, Yo Miles!, by guitarist Henry Kaiser, Wadada Leo Smith, and guests that included the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and the World Saxophone Quartet's Selim Sivad appeared in tribute to Davis. The late-1997 reissue of Herbie Nichols's The Complete Blue Note Recordings (Blue Note, four CDs) was matched by, among others, the tribute CDs Spinning Song by guitarist Duck Baker and Love Is Proximity by the Herbie Nichols Project. Several significant saxophone-piano duet albums appeared, including Ornette Coleman-Joachim Kuhn Colors (Verve/Harmolodic), Ran Blake-Anthony Braxton A Memory of Vienna (hatOLOGY), and Lol Coxhill-Veryan Weston Boundless (Emanem). Branford Marsalis celebrated his appointment as creative consultant to Columbia Records by immediately signing tenor saxophonist David S. Ware; the first result was Ware's album Go See the World. Among the year's odd events, an asteroid was named for soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, and Woody Allen, an amateur clarinetist, released Wild Man Blues, a film centred on his Dixieland playing. The Bear Comes Home, Rafi Zabor's novel about a saxophone-playing bear, won the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The Playboy Guide to Jazz on CD by Neil Tesser and Jazz: The Rough Guide by Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley stood out among several new jazz CD guides. Other book highlights included The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia, a critical study; Visions of Jazz, a collection of essays by critic Gary Giddins; New Dutch Swing,a history of modern Dutch jazz by Kevin Whitehead; and Such Melodious Racket, a history of Canadian jazz by Mark Miller. The Canadian jazz magazine Coda celebrated its 40th year of continuous publication. For many jazz listeners, 1998 would be remembered as the year Frank Sinatra, the master craftsman of emotion and the most popular of swinging postwar singers, died. The year's other deaths included singer Betty Carter, guitarist Tal Farlow, drummer Dennis Charles, jazz pianist-classical composer Mel Powell, saxophonist Benny Waters, pianists Dorothy Donegan and Walter Bishop, Jr., drummer Barrett Deems, blues singer Junior Wells, drummer Roy Porter, Hungarian guitarist Attila Zoller, Japanese bassist Yoshizawa Motoharu, and saxophonists Davey Schildkraut, Glenn Spearman, and Thomas Chapin. (See OBITUARIES.) JOHN LITWEILER Motion Pictures (For Selected International Film Awards in 1998, see Table.) If a single overall phenomenon could be identified in a generally uneventful cinema year, it was a surge in the worldwide relaxation of sexual taboos. Filmmakers as far afield as Switzerland, Africa, and Peru recognized that audiences were ready to accept alternative erotic relationships, and a startling number of the year's films depicted unconventional and same-sex matches as normal and undisturbing. Nontheatrical Films. Austrian filmmaker Kurt Mundl (Power of the Earth Productions) in 1998 created an amazing film about butterflies and moths, The Messengers of the Gods--Butterflies. The 49-minute gem was made from 18,000 minutes of film patiently photographed using special lenses. New findings about behaviour were brought to life. It won many awards, including Best of Festival at Chicago's U.S. International Film and Video Festival. From Earth to the Moon reenacted the U.S.'s Apollo space program. Executive producer Tom Hanks and a team of talented associates relived key missions in 10 hours plus a special finale, a comparison with Georges Mlis's 1902 film Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon). Three Emmys and the Columbus Festival Presidents Award honoured the film. In the zany Writer's Block, two screenwriters write a short film in which the characters come alive and go after the writers. This student film, made by Ari Taub at New York University, won a CINE Golden Eagle award and top prizes in Hamburg, Ger.; Barcelona, Spain; and Prague. THOMAS W. HOPE North America. Throughout 1998 dance was challenged to be bigger on stage than it was in print. In March Oxford University Press published the International Encyclopedia of Dance, a six-volume, 4,000-page work that had been more than 20 years in the making. The publication was launched in New York City, still the world's unofficial dance capital despite a lessening of dance activities over the past few years. The city was still the place to be seen and reviewed. New York City Ballet (NYCB) began the year with a revival of George Balanchine's Jewels (1967), the world's first "multiact abstract ballet." In July NYCB lost the last of its long-standing bedrock artistic forces when dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins died. (See OBITUARIES.) American Ballet Theatre's (ABT's) first production of Le Corsaire proved to be very popular; the production was a reworking of the version created by Boston Ballet's Anna-Marie Holmes. ABT's staging of The Snow Maiden, however, was noted more for its shimmering, silvery costumes and settings than for its thin narrative and choreographic elements. ABT continued to draw sizable audiences throughout the fall at New York's more intimate City Center. Twyla Tharp's Known by Heart established itself as one of the company's most vivid and important new works. City Center also offered performances by various international companies. The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, performing only works by its artistic director, Boris Eifman, offered little more than a curious inversion of overwrought, old-style Soviet melodramatic ballet. The Universal Ballet of South Korea offered a remarkably good showing in a debut season for the young company. Both Argentina's Ballet Argentino and Ballet Ullate from Spain, however, had weak repertories and poorly attended performances. The National Ballet of Canada also drew sparse audiences and apparently lost a good deal of money, despite much more impressive dancing and repertory. The San Francisco Ballet drew respectably sized audiences and offered further evidence of well-schooled dancers as well as glimpses of Lucia Lacarra, its newest impressive ballerina. Lincoln Center's Festival '98, which coincided with a Dance Critics Association conference on popular culture, included seasons by both the Hamburg (Ger.) Ballet and Stuttgart (Ger.) Ballet. Eliot Feld's youthful Ballet Tech, the latest troupe to showcase his ballets, played in New York and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. At year's end Ballet Tech performed a season billed as "NotCRACKER," intended to buck the frequent all-Nutcracker tide found elsewhere. Alternative Nutcracker productions also included Donald Byrd's Harlem Nutcracker (1996), which returned to the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Academy of Music (BAM) for a two-week run. BAM's other offerings included an appearance by the pupils of the renowned Vaganova Academy of St. Petersburg. From France the Next Wave Festival presented Eclipse, Zingaro's newest production of equestrian theatre. Capping the same festival was the first appearance in 10 years by the Frankfurt (Ger.) Ballet under the artistic direction of American-born William Forsythe. Performances of Fosse: A Celebration in Song & Dance began in Toronto. The Broadway-bound production was co-directed by Ann Reinking and Richard Maltby, with assistance from Gwen Verdon. Matthew Bourne's (see BIOGRAPHIES) production of Swan Lake reached Broadway, where the debate of whether it was a show or ballet helped the production to gain attention and press coverage. Swan Lake was also fodder for a highly successful and zany seas

Britannica English vocabulary.      Английский словарь Британика.