Best Opening Night
New York Philharmonic
Musicians in the Phil have said they feel like they’re playing behind a scrim in Avery Fisher Hall—that the public never gets to hear the real orchestra. But that night in September, playing Beethoven and Richard Strauss, they were on fire, fully keeping up with the young pianist Evgeny Kissin, who delivered his usual stellar performance. And at 75, Lorin Maazel led the group with the energy of a 25-year-old.

Theo Bleckmann   (Photo: Jorg Grosse Gelderman/Next)

Best Meredith Monk Tribute
Theo Bleckmann at the BAM Café
In honor of her 40th-anniversary season, 2005 was studded with celebrations devoted to the avant-garde singer-composer-choreographer-filmmaker. But few were like the evening at the bam Café conducted by Bleckmann, a vocalist in Monk’s ensemble and an odd and brilliant new-music and cabaret singer. His rendition of Monk’s 1975 “Gotham Lullaby” was so beautiful it hurt. And his version of “Chewing Gum,” a forties commercial jingle made famous by Monk’s mother (“My mom gave me a nickel / to buy a pickle”), was adorable—and stuck in our heads for months.

Best Freebie
Dance Theater Workshop’s 40th-Birthday House Party
DTW has ferociously fostered choreographic creativity and experiment since 1965. This year, the company marked its birthday with 40 performers scattered throughout its building—circus dancers somersaulting down an office hallway, drag queens in office cubicles, and free wine in an upstairs rehearsal studio—and all of it open to a squeezing-room-only public.

Best American Composer Over 85
Elliott Carter
Milton Babbitt is a youngster next to Carter, who turns 97 this month and just won’t stop writing. His new Three Illusions recently got its New York premiere with the Boston Symphony, and plans are well advanced for the 2008 centenary celebrations.

Best Night at the Ballet
“Watching Ligeti Move”
Christopher Wheeldon’s three ballets set to György Ligeti’s music premiered over four years in different cities. Putting them all on one program (at the Miller Theatre, co-produced with Works and Process at the Guggenheim) meant a rare chance to watch dancers from the New York City and San Francisco ballets up close. Backed by the excellent pianists Michael McGraw and Cameron Grant as well as the Flux Quartet, the program was a perfect way to break in the theater’s new dance-friendly stage floor. In fact, three shows weren’t enough to handle the crowds. How about a reprise?

Best Science-Art Crossover
Laurie Anderson’s latest extravaganza at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The End of the Moon, was the result of her year as NASA’s first artist-in-residence. Nothing this post-punk counterculture sibyl has dreamed up has been more whimsically lyrical, friendly, or wise. We’re still pondering her observations on the nesting habits of gay penguins.

(Photo: Peter Foley)

Best Adaptation of an Extremely Unlikely Source
Nico Muhly’s ‘The Elements of Style’
Composers drew inspiration from French storybooks and the Manhattan Project this year, but a grammar guide? Muhly, a 24-year-old Juilliard graduate, brought a soprano, a tenor, an amateur percussion ensemble, and a few professional musicians into the New York Public Library for the first-ever music performance (scheduled, at least) in the building’s grand main reading room, introducing a work that was not only whimsical but at times even romantic. Maira Kalman, who illustrated the book’s new edition, accompanied them on eggbeater and sugar bowl.
—Peter G. Davis and Alicia Zuckerman

The Year that Opera Went Pop

(Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Writing operas based on popular successes in other genres isn’t exactly new—Verdi and Puccini, among others, did it rather well—but composers seem more eager than ever to take high-profile novels, plays, or films and try to make them sing. In New York alone, the City Opera recently offered The Little Prince, Rachel Portman’s adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much-read children’s tale; and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, based on the Theodore Dreiser novel, is currently on view at the Metropolitan. Other heavily promoted new operas with instantly recognizable names include A Streetcar Named Desire, Sophie’s Choice, The Great Gatsby, and A View From the Bridge. More are surely on the way.

Although few of these ambitious works seem destined for immortality, it would be risky to write them all off. Many of today’s favorite repertory operas were flops when new, and it sometimes takes years before an opera really catches on. Still, great literature from the past often sits uncomfortably with modern compositional styles that discourage passionate flights of song. The struggle to transform a novel or play is tougher now than it was in Verdi’s day, when operatic forms were more defined and composers seemed far less inhibited about radically adapting existing texts to suit their musical requirements.

That may be one reason why John Adams’s Doctor Atomic was the most anticipated, heatedly discussed, and lavishly praised new opera of 2005. This meditation on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atom bomb, which premiered in San Francisco this fall (and is presumably headed for New York, though nobody will say anything concrete), is quite literally torn from recent American history rather than borrowed from a famous work of fiction—the libretto, in fact, consists mainly of contemporary documents, leaving Adams all the room he needs to weave fantasias and build musical climaxes according to his own sense of operatic proportion and drama. It takes a bold spirit to create an entirely original opera these days, and by doing so, perhaps Adams will reverse a trend and point opera in exciting new directions.
—P.G.D.