Domingo Spins Magic -- Crowning a triumphant season, Placido Domingo brought his interpretation of Verdi's Otello to the Metropolitan Opera in March. To paraphrase the Bard, there was magic in the web of it.
A Most Happy Figaro -- The second-act finale of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" at the Metropolitan Opera in October was a stupendous game of musical chairs; the performance raised the stakes with each turn of key. The singing of the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel (in his Met debut, as Figaro), Dawn Upshaw, Susanne Mentzer and Dwayne Croft made one wish the resolution would never come. When it did, when James Levine's conducting finally allowed the characters to touch ground, the audience rose to its feet in response.
Hallelujah to a Hall -- Perhaps the outside of Tanglewood's new Seiji Ozawa Hall was intentionally made clunky and stolid, for it allows the interior to seem all the more humane, the unvarnished woods giving natural warmth to the sound. On opening night, in July, when the audience joined in singing Randall Thompson's "Alleluia," the hall fulfilled the ambitions of its architect, William Rawn, to emulate a Quaker meetinghouse or a New England town hall. The music created a community.
Impersonating Gould -- Did Glenn Gould really do an ecstatic ballet as he listened to Bach's Second English Suite in a recording studio, his shirttails flying and his arms flailing about in midair? Did he really pull his Cadillac over to a pay phone in a torrential downpour to share his thrill at hearing his playing on the car radio? It doesn't matter. The images are now inseparable from the narcissism and unearthly pianism of a 20th-century master, thanks to Colm Feore's impersonation in Francois Girard's movie "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," which arrived in the spring.
