First, the bad news. The brave tone of the press releases didn’t hide the hard facts: the two flagships of the classical musical establishment in Dallas, the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Opera, made substantial, noticeable cuts in their core product. The 2012-13 classical subscription series of the Dallas Symphony will feature five fewer classical subscription concert weekends than in recent years (down from twenty-one to sixteen), and Dallas Opera subscribers were faced, for 2011-12, with a season that was down from five previously announced main stage performances to four.

Are we in danger, one might ask, of becoming a slightly more humid version of Lubbock?

We’ve unfortunately become accustomed to bad economic news on the performing arts scene, having gone from expecting constant growth a few decades back to a posture of cautious wait-and-see to, finally, resigned acceptance of a shrinking classical music agenda. Unavoidable and financially reasonable as these decisions may be, the long term dangers to our cultural life should not be underestimated and should, now that the financial vaccination has been taken, be at the forefront of planning and philosophy for our regional opera companies, orchestras, and chamber music societies.

Simply put, a certain level of availability is necessary to maintain an educated and sophisticated audience, and to instill a respect and love for music (and other arts) in upcoming generations. Let us hope that we do not turn into a community in which operatic and symphonic warhorses represent the bulk of the repertoire, or that we neglect the education of new audiences and talented young performers.

Now, the good news. We can, in these hard times, take some comfort that a broadened sense of economic reality and artistic responsibility is clearly entrenched in our major classical music institutions. The “too big to fail” mentality that caught the Philadelphia Orchestra off guard was not contagious to the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Although musicians have accepted pay cuts and wage freezes, support staff has been trimmed, and seasons shortened, the institutions in question have prioritized fiscal stability when the times have called for it. It was not so many years ago that our major institutions in both Dallas and Fort Worth teetered frequently on the edge of extinction and performed and rehearsed in substandard conditions. Barring a deepening of the current crisis, that will not happen again.

As for the best single events of the year, as a former fulltime but currently avocational music critic, I can’t claim to have seen and heard everything. But of what I saw and heard in these parts during 2011, the finest moments were the result of imaginative thinking and skillful channeling of resources.

In May and June, area opera goers witnessed stage director John de los Santos’ brilliant twenty-first-century reimagining of Sullivan’s Mikado, as well as the hard-hitting, transcendent distillation of American culture (as embodied in Ginsberg’s poetry) in Glass’ Hydrogen Jukebox. Both of these amazing productions were part of the annual Fort Worth Opera festival, the brainchild of Fort Worth Opera’s visionary and admirably pragmatic general director Darren Woods.

Just a few weeks earlier, in April, Dallas Opera had set a new high standard for main stage, traditional repertoire with a production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov that was both gripping and majestic. Though a superb cast and conductor, an amazing (and decades-old) production, and, of course, an inspired score were out in front, it was behind-the-scenes skill, experience, and hard work—on a level that money can’t buy—on the part of management that made it happen.

On the concert stage, meanwhile, the still young Soundings series at the Nasher Sculpture Center, under the leadership of Seth Knopp, again demonstrated that programming and presentation of concert music can be dramatic without being gimmicky.  In Soundings concerts in September and November, the interaction of old and new constantly created a hair-raising energy. Although the combination of site, personnel, and expectation are unique for that particular series, Knopp and his colleagues set an example for all of our classical music community in their extraordinary blend of intellectual concept and creativity.