YEAR IN REVIEW 2001: PERFORMING-ARTS

Europe. Although many European dance companies created new works for the new millennium, others looked to the past with revivals and reworkings of some of the staple works of the 20th century. Particularly favoured were the ballets created for Sergey Diaghilev's company. The works, though over 70 years old, still held a fascination for modern choreographers and audiences. In London the Royal Ballet settled into the newly rebuilt Royal Opera House, which proved a major attraction. Highlights of the repertory were a Diaghilev program, including the company's first performances of reconstructions of Vaslav Nijinsky's L'Aprs-midi d'un fauneand Jeux and a controversial revival of Sir Frederick Ashton's ballet Marguerite and Armand, in which French guests Sylvie Guillem and Nicholas Le Riche starred in the roles created by Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev; hitherto the parts never had been danced by anyone else. The new opera house included a small studio theatre, which allowed the company to stage a short season of new works during the summer. Ross Stretton, director of the Australian Ballet, was appointed to succeed Sir Anthony Dowell as artistic director beginning in the 2000-01 season, and music director Andrea Quinn resigned to take an equivalent post with New York City Ballet. The Birmingham Royal Ballet-which remained homeless while its base theatre, the Hippodrome, was refurbished-moved to another Birmingham venue for a short Ashton festival, which featured an important revival of Dante Sonata, not seen since 1950. English National Ballet's third in-the-round production, a version of The Sleeping Beauty with choreography by director Derek Deane, was less well received than its predecessors. The company, which had severe financial problems, canceled plans for another new work by Deane and lost leading dancer Tamara Rojo, who joined the Royal Ballet. Scottish Ballet, under its new director, Robert North, gave the first performance of the full-length Aladdin, with choreography by Robert Cohan. Stefano Giannetti, appointed director of Northern Ballet Theatre in 1999, resigned to return to Italy after staging his full-length Great Expectations for the company. On the modern dance scene, Adventures in Motion Pictures (AMP) premiered director Matthew Bourne's latest work, The Car Man. Based on Georges Bizet's score for Carmen but with a very different story, the piece was greatly admired by AMP's growing audience, although several critics found its dance content rather thin. The company had found a permanent home at London's Old Vic Theatre, once the cradle of the infant Royal Ballet. DV8 took its new work, Can We Afford This, to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London after its first performances at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia; Siobhan Davies's most recent piece, Of Oil and Water, was seen at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. Companies visiting Great Britain included the Mark Morris Dance Group, which gave the world premiere of Morris's production of Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and the Mariinsky Ballet (touring under its former name, Kirov), which gave five weeks of performances at the Royal Opera House. Good reviews and continuing interest in the new theatre resulted in sold-out houses; as a result, several performances were added to the original schedule. The Bjart Ballet Lausanne gave its first London performance in several years at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, and the Universal Ballet of Korea was seen there during its first-ever visit to the U.K. The Opra Garnier, principal home of the Paris Opra Ballet, also completed a refurbishment. The company revived Rudolf Nureyev's productions of Raymonda and Cinderella; additions to the repertoire were a new work, Appartement by Mats Ek, and the company's first performances of George Balanchine's Jewels. Meanwhile, in The Netherlands Jiri Kylian celebrated his 25th anniversary with Nederlands Dans Theater by creating Arcimboldo 2000, a show for all three of the NDT companies. A highlight of the year was the Royal Danish Ballet's Bournonville Week, held in January and featuring five of the surviving masterpieces of its great choreographer August Bournonville. Most controversial was a revival of The Kermesse in Bruges with a reorchestrated score and a completely new interpolated divertissement, neither of which pleased the critics. Peter Schaufuss also mounted a new production of Kermesse for his own company in Holstebro, Den. Copenhagen hosted the first Chinese staging of a complete Bournonville ballet when the National Ballet of China danced La Sylphide in the Tivoli Gardens; the company's artistic director, Zhao Rubeng, intended to add more works from the international classical repertory. Elisabetta Terabust was appointed artistic director of the MaggioDanza in Florence, and English former dancer Patricia Ruanne was given a two-year contract as director of the ballet company of La Scala in Milan. The Milanese group had earlier become the first outside the Royal Ballet to produce Ashton's Ondine, with frequent guest dancer Alessandra Ferri in the title role, partnered by Adam Cooper. The ballet troupe in Naples appropriately revived Bournonville's Napoli, with Copenhagen-trained guest dancer Johan Kobborg in the lead; meanwhile, in Rome, Amedeo Amodio produced a new version of Copplia. The Zrich Opera Ballet in Switzerland showed a new version of Sergey Prokofiev's Cinderella by director Heinz Spoerli. German companies toured in the East. The Bavarian State Ballet completed a visit to India; at home it had produced rechoreographed versions of two of Diaghilev's most famous ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; later in the year Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Manon entered the repertory. Prior to a tour of China, the Stuttgart Ballet gave its first performances of Ashton's La Fille mal garde, featuring leading dancers chosen from among those in the younger ranks of the company. The revival was so successful that two extra performances were scheduled to meet public demand. The Hamburg Ballet showed a new piece by director John Neumeier that was based on the life of Nijinsky, and in Dsseldorf the Deutsche Oper Ballet performed Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, which was updated to a 1930s setting by Yuri Vamos. Plans for the amalgamation of the three ballet companies in Berlin were still under discussion. The Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg also put on a new production of Petrushka, modeled after the version by Leonid Leontyev; some claimed that Leontyev's version was a more-accurate representation of Michel Fokine's original than was the version known in the West. It also gave its first performances of Jewels, which was much acclaimed by critics and audiences in London during the summer. The company's leading ballerina, Altynay Asylmuratova, was elected artistic director of the Vaganova Academy, and many expected that she would greatly cut down on her stage appearances. The most important news from Moscow was the summary dismissal of Bolshoi Theatre chief Vladimir Vasilyev, former star dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, on the order of Pres. Vladimir Putin; ballet director Aleksey Fadeyechev was also dismissed. Vasilyev was replaced by conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Fadeyechev by another dancer, Boris Akimov. The ballet company made a successful tour in the United States and during the spring gave the first performance of Pierre Lacotte's reconstruction of Marius Petipa's first successful ballet, Pharaoh's Daughter. Several productions planned for the 2000-01 season were canceled on Rozhdestvensky's orders. Deaths during the year included those of June Brae, a dancer with the Sadler's Wells Ballet in the 1930s and '40s; Jeremy James, a choreographer just beginning to make a name for himself; and Russian migr Tatiana Riabouchinska, one of the "baby ballerinas" of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1930s. (See Obituaries.) Jane Simpson Theatre Great Britain and Ireland. Headlines about Lord Lloyd-Webber dominated British theatre news stories during 2000. His Really Useful Group acquired the group of Stoll Moss Theatres-a third of all the West End houses-for 87.5 million (about $126.9 million), in partnership with a venture-capitalist city firm, NatWest Equity Partners. The acquisition meant that Lord Lloyd-Webber was, in effect, the new landlord of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where The Witches of Eastwick, the new musical production of his great rival, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, was being presented. The musical was a witty version of both John Updike's novel and the subsequent film, with Ian McShane in the satanic Jack Nicholson role and Lucie Arnaz, Joanna Riding, and Maria Friedman playing the three bored housewives. The book, lyrics, and music by young American authors John Dempsey and Dana P. Rowe were serviceable and enjoyable without being terribly exciting. The first act ended with the three witches flying high into the roof of the theatre above the main floor and almost into the upper level. Otherwise, the musical's content was distinctly earthbound, though the prospects for commercial success seemed stronger than for Martin Guerre, Sir Cameron's last major production. Lord Lloyd-Webber himself refurbished one of his newly acquired theatres, the Cambridge, and unveiled his latest show, The Beautiful Game, with book and lyrics by the popular comedy writer Ben Elton. The show followed the fortunes of a soccer team in Northern Ireland at the start of the recent Troubles in 1969. In the end the Cup Final hero was an Irish Republican Army murderer. Lord Lloyd-Webber could scarcely have dreamed up a more unlikely subject; he took his audience where they almost certainly did not want to go. His score, however, was acclaimed as one of his best by most critics, with its chants, anthems, simple love songs, and a rousing showstopping ballad, "Our Kind of Love," which was a reworking of a Puccinian aria he had originally composed for a possible sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. The musical was given a bleak, hard-hitting production by Robert Carsen, who usually worked in opera houses, and some brilliant soccer-style choreography by Meryl Tankard, formerly a star of the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal. It was a busy year all around for new musicals, though none matched the former two. Lautrec was a dismal retelling of the life story of diminutive French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Hard Times was a jolly, not unskilled version of Charles Dickens's least enjoyable novel; and La Cava was a strange medieval pageant, starring Oliver Tobias, in which listening to the music was the aural equivalent of chewing cardboard. Notre-Dame de Paris was not really a musical but a Gallic rock concert with some striking designs and muscular choreography. The King and I settled happily into the Palladium with Elaine Paige at the top of her form as the governess amid sumptuous designs that looked as though the king of Siam lived in a luxuriously appointed scarlet Indian restaurant. The other musical highlights were provided by Matthew Bourne and his company Adventures in Motion Pictures, which started the year by reprising its gorgeous Swan Lake at the Dominion and ended it by opening a rather less-successful but still steamily impressive version of Georges Bizet's Carmen, The Car Man, at the Old Vic. The Car Man, described as an autoerotic experience, was relocated to a garage in the American Midwest and owed much to both film versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice as well as to Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock. Elsewhere in the West End, film stars took to the stage. Kathleen Turner gave a blistering, moving performance as the alcoholic Mrs. Robinson in Terry Johnson's new stage version of The Graduate. She was succeeded in the role, however, by model Jerry Hall, famous for her marriage to and divorce from rock star Mick Jagger. Although Hall looked great, she failed to muster any inner life for her character. Donald Sutherland, hardly bothering to act, dropped by in a poor mystery play, Enigmatic Variations, and then London braced itself for Darryl Hannah in The Seven Year Itch, Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey into Night, and Macaulay Culkin in Madame Melville, a new play by Richard Nelson. The surprise hit was Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones, in which two unknown Irish actors, Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, played two extras on a film set in rural Ireland as well as performing the roles of the leading lady, the director, and the rest of the cast. It has been said that theatre, in the end, is about two bare boards and a passion. So it proved here, in an evening of hilarity and delight that they played to packed audiences all year. The success of the play renewed confidence not just in the discernment of West End audiences but also in the art of theatre itself. Equally encouraging was the Almeida Theatre's presentation in the West End of Nicholas Wright's Cressida, in which Sir Michael Gambon gave a glorious performance as a manager of boy actors on the Elizabethan stage. Sir Michael returned triumphantly later in the year in The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, part of the playwright's 70th birthday celebrations. The Almeida also colonized a large warehouse in Shoreditch, nearer the East End, for its Shakespearean double whammy: Ralph Fiennes in the title roles of Richard II and Coriolanus. They were fairly conventional productions made exciting by their setting, and the whole venture had a pleasing European feel about it, with patrons trekking into unknown territory by car and then wandering around a huge welcoming bar and coffee counter area before entering the Gainsborough Studios themselves, the site of the making of many famous British movies, notably Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Fiennes was in fine vocal form as Shakespeare's contrasting titans. In its Islington, North London, headquarters, the Almeida also offered a riveting production of Neil LaBute's Bash; Celebration, a short new piece by Pinter that was set in a swish London restaurant and produced on the same bill as his first play, The Room; a persuasive revival by Sir Richard Eyre of Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains sales called The Novice; a less-persuasive British premiere of Arthur Miller's Mr. Peters' Connections; and a poetic British premiere of Yasmina Reza's inconsequential first play, Conversations After a Burial, starring Claire Bloom. The other small London powerhouse, the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, maintained its standards with Matthew Warchus's exemplary revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo with William H. Macy; a searing production by Michael Grandage of Peter Nichols's brilliant comedy of adultery, Passion Play; a beautiful new look at Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending with Helen Mirren and newcomer Stuart Townsend and directed by Nicholas Hytner; and To the Green Fields Beyond, a new play by Nick Whitby about a World War I tank division in the French woods, directed by Oscar-winning Sam Mendes (see Biographies), who was still at the helm of the Donmar despite the lure of Hollywood. Overall, the Royal National Theatre (RNT) had a slightly less-successful year. Its new work record under Trevor Nunn had been patchy but was partly redeemed by the ingenious Sir Alan Ayckbourn's House and Garden, two plays in one, performed simultaneously by the same cast in two separate venues. Actors played a scene and then dashed next door to join another one. In a usual scenario, marriages were falling apart on the day of the local village fete. The RNT also aimed high with David Edgar's Albert Speer, based on Gitta Sereny's magisterial book about Adolf Hitler's architect. Alex Jennings played the title role, and Roger Allam was an unforgettable Hitler. Nunn's production was panoramic without being as memorable as his more Dickensian spectacles. Nunn hit his stride once more with an elegiac, beautifully acted Anton Chekhov play, The Cherry Orchard. In the small Cottesloe the audience was ringed on three sides of the acting area around Vanessa Redgrave as Ranevskaya, her own brother Corin as her stage brother Gayev, and Allam, who again caught the eye as the upstart estate manager Lopakhin. Simon Russell Beale played a tubby Hamlet for the National and made of him a lonely mama's boy with a quick and racing mind. John Caird's production expunged the Fortinbras scenes and set the action, gloomily, in a dark castle littered with luggage trunks and strewn with candles. The other notable RNT revival was Howard Davies's production of Arthur Miller's first Broadway success, All My Sons, in which Julie Walters returned triumphantly to the stage after a nine-year absence and James Hazeldine played the guilty airplane-engine manufacturer. The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon embarked on a program that featured all of Shakespeare's history plays-from Richard II to Richard III-for the third time in its own history. Owing to either a lack of coherent vision or a fashionably Postmodern eclecticism, the plays were presented in different styles and on different scales by different directors. An all-white modern-dress chamber production of Richard II (with Samuel West as the poet king) was followed by the teeming Henry IV plays in traditional costume in the Swan Theatre. Desmond Barrit was a tumultuous Falstaff, and William Houston emerged as a genuine new star, taking his humorous, energetic Prince Hal forward to the main Stratford stage as the most exciting King Henry V since Kenneth Branagh. The Royal Court reopened its refurbished theatre in February with Conor McPherson's Dublin Carol, a gloomy play about an Irish alcoholic. There followed equally gloomy and not very good plays by Jim Cartwright (Hard Fruit) and Martin Crimp (The Country, with Juliet Stevenson) before Sir David Hare came to the rescue with My Zinc Bed, a scintillating comedy about addiction and dependency. A triangular relationship developed between an Internet entrepreneur, his young wife, and a poet who had come to interview the entrepreneur for a newspaper. Sir David's own brilliant production drew compelling performances from Tom Wilkinson, Julia Ormond, and Steven Mackintosh. The Globe at Southwark had another good year, with Vanessa Redgrave eccentrically playing Prospero in The Tempest and Mark Rylance thrilling the open-air spectators as Hamlet. Across town the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park enjoyed the most critically successful season in its recent history with beautiful productions of Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. In the regional theatre the places to watch were the Sheffield Crucible, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Newcastle Playhouse, the Glasgow Citizens, and, after a fallow period, the Bristol Old Vic. The medieval mystery plays were presented for the first time inside the York Minster. Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides, based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, gave the rumbustious premiere of Alcestis, a version of the Euripides play by Ted Hughes, Great Britain's late poet laureate. The Chichester Festival Theatre revived George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House with Joss Ackland as Captain Shotover and Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business, a brilliant family farce that slid into malpractice and criminality. The Edinburgh Festival mounted a wonderful dance program alongside a sexy version of Molire's Don Juan from Ingmar Bergman's Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm and a controversial four-hour translation by Frank McGuinness of Ramn Mara del Valle-Incln's Barbaric Comedies. This rollicking, crude tale of pillage and rape-and a lot worse-was co-presented by the Dublin Theatre Festival, which did not flinch from shocking the locals with it at the Abbey Theatre. Outside the festival the Abbey also presented a lovely new Tom Murphy play, The House. At the Gaiety Theatre indomitable Dublin impresario Noel Pearson gave actor Stephen Rea his head with a daringly modernized production of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. The audience hated it, just as they had the first time it appeared in 1926. Jazz. In January 2000, 84-year-old composer Oleg Lundstrem assumed the podium at a concert in Moscow to direct what was believed to be the world's longest-surviving jazz band. Lundstrem's group, formed in 1934 in Harbin, Manchuria, survived a decade in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of World War II and another in Kazan, U.S.S.R., at a time when Soviet policy condemned jazz as "decadent music." Jazz was adapted to local music and took root in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Musicians such as Hugh Masekela, Bheki Mseleku, and Zim Ngqwana continued to fuse jazz and the popular kwela music of South Africa. They were among the top musicians in a parade of Africans who on March 31 and April 1 joined American and European headliners, including Roy Hargrove, Herbie Hancock, Courtney Pine, and Johnny Griffin, at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town. Ngqwana, who led a sextet from South Africa and Madagascar on its first American tour, proved an especially potent free-jazz alto saxophonist. The North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague celebrated its 25th anniversary in July by again offering the world's largest weekend jazz blast-220 concerts featuring a worldwide contingent of jazz musicians performing on 16 stages. Though most of the best international varieties of jazz were heard at European festivals, two theatrical Dutch bands-the Willem Breuker Kollektief and the ICP Orchestra-made U.S. tours. Composer Breuker's antic crew mingled jazz, pop, classical music, Kurt Weill songs, and vaudeville in frantic, often satiric shows. The humour of the ICP Orchestra, though sometimes ripe, was subordinate to improvisation and thoughtful interpretation of the compositions of Misha Mengelberg. American saxophonist Ken Vandermark financed a coast-to-coast tour led by explosive tenor saxophonist Peter Brtzmann, who, together with his 12-member high-energy band of American, German, and Danish improvisers, personified German free-jazz expressionism. The Italian Instabile Orchestra also made its U.S. debut, alternating grand orchestrations and free improvisation at the Chicago Jazz Festival. Jazz and Latin music remained the most popular of international fusions. One American favourite was pianist Danilo Perez, who was named a cultural ambassador by his native Panama. The senior Latin jazz veteran was 79-year-old Chico O'Farrill, who composed for top bands and experienced a renewal; with his big band, which played every Monday at New York City's Birdland nightclub, he revived his noted early works "Aztec Suite" and "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite" in the album Carambola. Newer to American audiences was the band Cubanismo!, led by Jess Alemay, and jazz singer Claudia Acua, whose Wind from the South included standards and songs from her native Chile. These international jazz fusions underscored the paucity of organic developments in American jazz. The parade of young lions, youthful virtuosos who became famous by reviving bop and swing styles, slowed to a standstill. In their place appeared a few new youths, such as pianist Jason Moran. Moran stood out for his original sense of melodic line, as evidenced in his album Facing Left. Moran's frequent associates included young, ornate vibraphonist Stefon Harris and alto saxophonist Greg Osby, who invented a style with hip-hop flavouring but proved more effective as a straightforward lyric artist. New York composer Maria Schneider-who led her big band in an album of moody colours, Allegresse-conducted at Carnegie Hall the Gil Evans-Miles Davis orchestra scores of Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess at New York's JVC Festival. Trumpeter Dave Douglas, named Jazz Artist of the Year in Down Beat magazine's critics poll, toured steadily with his own groups, composed Rapture to Leon James for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and offered his first recording on a major label, Soul on Soul, a tribute to Mary Lou Williams. Tito Puente's final album was a collaboration with fellow bandleader Eddie Palmieri, Masterpiece/Obra Maestra. Among other important recordings was the New York Art Quartet's fiery 35th Reunion, with vivid readings by poet Amiri Baraka. The quartet's trombonist Roswell Rudd went on to reunite with another old partner, soprano saxman Steve Lacy, in Monk's Dream. Composer Edward Wilkerson led his Eight Bold Souls in Last Option, and lyric tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson offered The Milwaukee Tapes. Milestone issued an eight-CD box set of pianist Bill Evans's last nightclub engagement, The Last Waltz. From the era when live recording was still new came three historic Carnegie Hall concerts: the Benny Goodman band At Carnegie Hall 1938, Complete; the Woody Herman band At Carnegie Hall, 1946; and From Spirituals to Swing, 1938-39 concerts with Count Basie's band, the Goodman sextet, James P. Johnson, and leading blues and gospel music performers. All three sets included performances previously unavailable on record. Other reissues included Ornette Coleman's Complete Science Fiction Sessions and boxed sets of The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis with John Coltrane, on both CD and LP. New books of 2000 included a profusely illustrated history, Jazz: The First Century, edited by John Edward Hasse; Nick Catalano's biography Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter; and a reference work, The Oxford Companion to Jazz. Among the year's deaths were cornetist Nat Adderley, bandleaders Tito Puente and Tex Beneke, trumpeter Jonah Jones, tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, Brazilian bossa nova guitarist Baden Powell (see Obituaries), Japanese saxophonist Sleepy Matsumoto, singers Jeanne Lee and Teri Thornton, trombonists Al Grey and Britt Woodman, trumpeter Willie Cook, and drummer Gus Johnson. John Litweiler Motion Pictures Generally, the dawn of the new century found world cinema at one of the most stagnant periods of its history. Almost no film of 2000 from any country dazzled viewers with its originality or seemed to herald a new era or proclaim a new talent. Film themes seemed narrow in range, universally and obsessively repetitive. Perhaps the artistic uncertainty reflected a fundamental economic revolution that had far-reaching implications for the relationship between filmmakers and their audience and ultimately, without doubt, for the future content and use of the moving image. More clearly than ever before, the motion picture was in transition from a public, theatrical medium to a private home entertainment. Huge increases in the video market, as the popularity of the digital versatile disc (DVD) soared, confirmed the changed economies of production and distribution in Hollywood and the rest of the world. In the United States, while video sales and rentals totaled close to $20 billion, gross domestic box-office revenues slipped to $7.5 billion. The top-grossing video film was Disney's Tarzan, which earned $268 million in this form-$96 million more than it had earned in theatres during its original release. Performing Arts Music Classical Music. A tidal wave of anniversary observances characterized classical music in 2000. The centennials of the births of composers Aaron Copland and Kurt Weill were celebrated with festivals, and the anniversaries of the deaths of two giants were commemorated: composer Johann Sebastian Bach's 250th anniversary and conductor Leonard Bernstein's 10th. The 50th observation of the birth of another composer, Gioacchino Rossini, born on Feb. 29, 1792, was made during the leap year. Though the centennial of the death of Giuseppe Verdi was not until 2001, many opera companies designed their 2000-01 season as a Verdi year. Two of the world's leading orchestras, the Vienna Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, celebrated their centennials at home and on tour. Boston's Symphony Hall marked its 100th anniversary with a festival. In Vermont the Marlboro Music Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary, and Sony Classical records issued a set of two compact discs (CDs) of archival recordings featuring pianist and festival founder Rudolf Serkin. Two of the most important events in the history of Western music were recognized with anniversaries-the 300th anniversary of the invention of the piano and the 400th anniversary of the invention of opera. Though both of these were developed over a period of years, the year 2000 was chosen to mark these milestones. The most spectacular CD celebration of the piano anniversary was the 200-disc collection Great Pianists of the 20th Century. A particularly notable festival was held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with an exhibit titled "Piano 300: Celebrating Three Centuries of People and Pianos." Highlighting the festivities were classical and jazz performances by recent winners of top piano competitions in the U.S., including Christopher Basso, winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs; Ning An, triumphant in both the Sixth American National Chopin Piano Competition and the 1999 Queen Elizabeth Music Competition; and Eric Lewis, winner of the 1999 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. In addition, a daylong piano film seminar featured films and discussions on Glenn Gould, Sviatoslav Richter, Serkin, and Arthur Rubinstein. Two notable productions were staged of Aida, the grandest of Verdi's grand operas. In Detroit, as a prelude to a yearlong Verdi festival, the Michigan Opera Theatre offered a minimalist production that omitted the usual expensive pageantry, including scenery and costumes. Aida in Concert starred Luciano Pavarotti in the leading role of Radames. In Shanghai, however, Aida received what was described as the most extravagant production ever given to it or any other opera. A cast of 2,116 in the triumphal scene featured not only 1,650 Egyptian legionnaires portrayed by People's Liberation Army soldiers but also elephants, camels, lions, tigers, a panther, and a boa constrictor. The famous Grand March was repeated three times to accompany the long marching line, and the libretto was modified to give the opera a happy ending. Large video screens were provided for the audience of some 50,000 in a sports stadium, and the performance was produced for television. In the summer of 2000, an opera staged essentially for TV reached American screens. La Traviata from Paris was filmed in such locations as the Hotel Boisgelin, the Petit-Palais, and Le Hameau de la Reine, a rustic retreat at Versailles, France, once used by Marie-Antoinette. Opera entered its fifth century with remarkable vigour. At least 27 world premieres were scheduled for the 2000-01 season. In Finland 16 new operas by Finnish composers had premieres in 2000. Premieres by American companies included Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, performed by the San Francisco Opera; Diedre Murray's Fangs and Randy Weiner's Swimming with Watermelons, both played by New York's Music-Theatre Group; and Minoru Miki's The Tale of Genji, performed by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (Mo.). Elsewhere, the most unusual debut was that of The Age of Dreams, a trilogy produced by Finland's Savonlinna Opera Festival. The three librettos, "Now and Forever," "Maria's Love," and "The Book of Secrets," were all written by Paavo Rintala, but the music was provided by three different composers-Herman Rechberger, Olli Kortekangas, and Kalevi Aho. Other notable new operas included Jos Luis Turina's Don Quijote in Barcelona at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, and Aulis Sallinen's King Lear at the Finnish National Opera. Tobias Picker's Thrse Raquin, based on mile Zola's novel of the same title, was scheduled for production in the 2001-02 season. Muhammad Ali-based on the life of the former world heavyweight boxing champion-was completed by John Duffy with a libretto by sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, but it was still awaiting a production company. Il Giocatore, composed by Joyce Whitelaw with a libretto by Eddie Orton, premiered in Berkeley, Calif., and featured an Italian golfer playing in Scotland; the action was a metaphor for the relationship of the British Isles to Europe's "new economy." Probably the year's most unusual operatic subject was that of Parthenogenesis-a 40-minute music-theatre piece based on a persistent but presumably mythic bit of urban folklore-about a young woman who asexually gives birth to a daughter in Germany during World War II. Rowan Williams, the Anglican archbishop of Wales, collaborated with composer James MacMillan and poet-librettist Michael Symmons Roberts on this opera. The Glyndebourne Touring Opera company, based in the U.K., enraged some of its older patrons and intrigued some of its younger ones with a modernized production of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohme; principal male characters Marcello and Rodolfo were shown using cocaine. The English National Opera implemented a new cost-cutting idea-use of the same basic set for all 10 of its Italian opera productions in the 2000-01 season-operas as varied as Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Verdi's Nabucco, Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, and Gioacchino Rossini's The Turk in Italy. The Houston (Texas) Grand Opera embarked on a program to produce digital audio and video recordings of new operas it had premiered. Houston had commissioned more new works than any other major American company and had been discouraged by the fact that record labels showed little interest in the material. After paying production costs, the company would offer the finished products to recording companies and possibly distribute them via the Internet. Though opera was dubbed the "hottest ticket" in an otherwise diminishing classical-music market, one perennial opera-related attraction seemed to be waning. The "Three Tenors" extravaganzas starring Jos Carreras, Plcido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti began to run into buyer resistance after having played to enormous audiences in arenas and football stadiums for a decade and having charged up to $600 for a ticket. One concert was canceled owing to insufficient ticket sales, and the future of such concerts seemed uncertain. For Domingo, however, the future looked bright. He became the first male opera singer to receive the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement since its inception 23 years earlier. Six women singers had received the award: Marian Anderson, Marilyn Horne, Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, and Ris Stevens. Domingo took on new administrative responsibilities as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera-a position that he already had and continued to hold at the Washington (D.C.) Opera. His conducting career also continued, notably with Il trovatore in Washington, and he sang critically acclaimed performances in some demanding Wagnerian roles-Parsifal in Washington and Siegmund in Bayreuth, Ger. In addition, he made his American debut as a song recitalist in Chicago, with Daniel Barenboim as his pianist. Gramophone Award winners included Antonio Pappanos, music director designate of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; sopranos Barbara Bonney and Angela Gheorghiu; tenor Carlo Bergonzi; composer Elliott Carter; and conductor Sir Simon Rattle. Rattle was honoured three times; his recording of Karol Szymanowski's King Roger took the Opera award, and his recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 10 won both the orchestral award and the Record of the Year citation. The persona of Leonard Bernstein seemed vigorously present, despite his demise a decade earlier. More than 50 Internet pages were devoted to him, including an official page, www.leonardbernstein.com, with links to many other pages, notably , the Library of Congress page. The Sony record label released The Bernstein Century, a massive reissue of his records; Deutsche Grammophon reissued recordings of his freelance conducting performances, most notably his extraordinary work with the Vienna Philharmonic, as well as its most recent memorial production- Lenny: The Legend Lives On,a wide-ranging and low-priced six-CD collection; and the New York Philharmonic issued Bernstein Live!, a limited-edition set of 10 CDs that contained the first commercial release of 33 performances taped between 1956 and 1981. Bach's work had a similar vitality. Several record companies issued complete or near-complete recordings of his surviving works, and an Internet site, the Bach Digital Project, was set up to provide a database with his manuscripts and other documents in a format easily accessible worldwide: . Michael Kaiser, who had successfully brought the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, through a series of financial and artistic crises, accepted the presidency of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Kent Nagano, a native of California who had been working largely in Europe, was appointed principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, beginning in July 2001. Nagano, former artistic director of the Opra National de Lyon, would remain the music director of the Deutsche Symphonie in Berlin. In other notable appointments, Vladimir Jurowski was chosen to succeed Andrew Davis as music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, East Sussex, Eng. After the post of royal harpist to the prince of Wales had gone unfilled for more than a century, Great Britain's Prince Charles appointed Catrin Finch, a 20-year-old native of Wales. Grant Llewellyn, another native of Wales, was appointed artistic director of the Handel & Haydn Society of Boston and was to begin July 1, 2001. He would succeed Christopher Hogwood, who had led the organization for 15 years and would continue his association as conductor laureate. Kurt Masur, music director of the New York Philharmonic since 1991, was to succeed Charles Dutoit as music director of the Orchestre National de France in the 2001-02 season. Masur had also served as the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 2000-01 season. Itzhak Perlman was appointed principal guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for three seasons. He would conduct (and occasionally play violin solos) in Detroit for three weeks each season. Yury Temirkanov began his tenure as music director of the Baltimore (Md.) Symphony Orchestra. Zarin Mehta, brother of conductor Zubin Mehta, was appointed executive director of the New York Philharmonic, which was finding it difficult to fill Masur's vacated post of music director. Riccardo Muti considered an offer but declined. The shortage of suitable candidates was exacerbated by the fact that both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra were also looking for new music directors. In addition, all three orchestras traditionally seemed to rule out women applicants or those native to the U.S. Among the most prominent deaths were those of French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal; American composer Alan Hovhaness; Canadian composers Violet Archer, Jean Papineau-Couture, and Barbara Pentland; Austrian bass-baritone Walter Berry; Canadian baritone Louis Quilico; Austrian pianist and composer Friedrich Gulda; American musicologist and educator William Stein Newman; and American violinist Oscar Shumsky. (See Obituaries.) Other notable losses included American critic and musicologist Henry Pleasants, American recorder virtuoso Bernard Krainis, Belgian soprano Suzanne Danco, Scottish composer Iain Hamilton, American conductor Richard Dufallo, Irish tenor Frank Patterson, Boston radio station WGBH-FM host and producer Robert J. Lurtsema, Italian tenor Cesare Valletti, Finnish bass-baritone Kim Borg, British baritone Roy Henderson, British trumpeter Philip Jones, and American conductor Margaret Harris, who had been the first black woman to conduct the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles, among other cities. Nontheatrical Films Makers of nontheatrical films continued to set a fast creative pace in 2000. A comedy by Florida State University students Kelsey Scott and Robert McCaffrey won eight first-place awards. The Buse (rhymes with muse) is a whimsical tale of two spirits. Another student production, The Letter, was an evocative, beautiful, yet gruesome film about the removal of a cancerous breast without anesthesia in France in 1811. Based on a letter from Fanny Burney to her sister, it was produced in Australia by Anne Delaney and was named best overall film at the Columbus (Ohio) International Film & Video Festival. Generations: The Story of Ketel One Vodka, an industrial film by Pieter-Rim de Kroon of The Netherlands, traced one fami