ZACHARY WOOLFE
Deathless Classics and Unmissable New Operas
The joy of a music critic’s job is how wide the purview is. From revivals of centuries-old pieces to the premieres of brand-new works, the field I cover is an ecosystem that takes pride in both the past and the future. My favorite performances this year, in chronological order, spanned eras, but all were marriages of imaginative spontaneity and meticulous craft.
Trinity Wall Street’s ‘Messiah’
Even after the departure of Trinity’s visionary arts director, Julian Wachner, in 2022, this has remained the most urgent, vivid version of Handel’s classic oratorio that I know of — alternately bracing and joyous. (Ryan James Brandau conducted last December.) Much credit is due to the church’s vibrant period-instrument orchestra. And rather than hosting the usual quartet of aria soloists, this performance has almost 20 soloists emerge from the exceptional in-house choir, making it more a communal rite than a stale holiday pageant. (Read our review.)
Yunchan Lim
Chopin’s 24 études are only an hour of music, but that hour is one of the most storied and difficult in the piano repertoire. Yunchan Lim was just 19 when he ran this old-school gantlet at Carnegie Hall in February, yet he has a thoughtfulness and maturity that belie his years. At Carnegie, as on the recording he released in April, he was unfazed by the études’ staggering technical demands as he balanced note-by-note clarity with sensitive lyricism. (Read our reviews of the concert and the recording.)
Lise Davidsen
One of the best singers of her generation, this Norwegian soprano has a huge, coolly powerful voice that sails easily through the long lines of Wagner and Strauss. Verdi tends to benefit from more vulnerability and velvety warmth, but Davidsen has become an artist you want to hear in everything. In February she lavished her generosity, finesse and visceral impact on the much-suffering Leonora in the Metropolitan Opera’s forcefully played new production of “La Forza del Destino,” stopping the show with her 11-o’clock number, “Pace, pace mio Dio.” (Read our review of “La Forza del Destino.”)
Cleveland Orchestra
In May, Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was cast with fresh, youthful voices and played with elegant transparency by one of the world’s great orchestras at Severance Hall. It was the 20th opera presentation of the conductor Franz Welser-Möst’s Cleveland tenure, which will end in 2027 after a quarter-century — astonishing longevity in today’s music world. The ensemble’s Carnegie Hall visit in January with Welser-Möst was also memorable, including lucid performances of Prokofiev’s second and fifth symphonies, which ingeniously sandwiched Webern’s experiment in that genre. (Read our reviews of “The Magic Flute” and the Carnegie concert.)
‘Natural History’
Michael Gordon’s “Natural History,” written to celebrate the 100th birthday of the National Park Service in 2016 and revived at the Cincinnati May Festival this spring, brings together a symphony orchestra and Steiger Butte Drum, a traditional percussion and vocal ensemble of the Klamath Tribes in the Pacific Northwest. Washes of sound from the orchestra build and recede in grand waves as the Klamath group beats its drums in fast, dramatic unison and makes a piercing, tangily pitch-bending, wordlessly wailing chant. Unsettled and unsettling, both celebratory and threatening, imposing and ultimately harmonious, it is the sound of a cultural conversation that is still, after centuries, in its nascent stages. (Read our review of “Natural History.”)
Gluck in Aix …
Gluck’s operas “Iphigénie en Aulide” and “Iphigénie en Tauride” were never intended to be performed together. But their plots, which tell the story of Iphigenia from Greek myth, flow together with uncanny ease. In July, the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, under the inspired leadership of Pierre Audi, paired the works in a rare marathon double bill, directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov as a brooding reflection on the numbness of endless conflict. The soprano Corinne Winters starred as both Iphigénies in a career-defining coup, and the period instrument ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée was conducted gracefully yet energetically by Emmanuelle Haïm. (Read our story about Gluck and this production.)
… and Rameau in Aix
Yes, another highlight of the year from Audi’s Aix Festival. Rameau and Voltaire, two giants of Enlightenment France, collaborated on a “Samson” opera. The original score was lost some 250 years ago, so this production — the work of the conductor Raphaël Pichon and the director Claus Guth — was a mesmerizing, quiltlike assemblage drawn from other Rameau pieces, with a largely new text inspired by the biblical Samson story. Performed with relish by Pygmalion, Pichon’s period-instrument orchestra and choir, this “Samson” captured the hypnotic continuity of Rameau’s complete operas, veering from festive to soulful, from raucous dances to hushed, hovering arias and radiant choruses. (Read our story about these collaborations, past and present.)
‘The Listeners’
The unmissable opera of the fall season wasn’t at the Met, but at Opera Philadelphia, where Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s “The Listeners” had its American premiere in September. A black comedy about cult membership, with an excellent cast, the piece showed off Mazzoli’s gift for inventive yet restrained orchestral textures that let clear, lyrical vocal lines speak plainly; Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production was alert to both the opera’s naturalism and its surreally sensual touches. It’s been particularly hard for me to shake the memory of the mezzo-soprano Rehanna Thelwell, whose character journeyed from over-the-top satire to something approaching tragedy. (Read our essay on the opera’s themes.)
Salvatore Sciarrino
The Venice Music Biennale is a fraction of the size of its visual-art sister, but it packs grand ambitions into its two weeks. The highlight this October was the premiere of the eminent composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s half-hour orchestral work “Nocturnes.” The sound world was characteristic Sciarrino: icy, parched, part desert, part tundra, beautiful and bare, intensely focused. But there were also surprisingly sensual quotations from earlier eras of music that offered oblique reflection on nostalgia and newness, on layers of history, on change through time. (Read our review of the Venice Music Biennale.)
Berlin Philharmonic
In three concerts at Carnegie Hall in November under Kirill Petrenko’s baton, this orchestra, playing with muscular force and kaleidoscopic colors, once again proved it’s the best in the business. The Philharmonic illuminated two deathless classics of the repertoire — Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and, in an unusually pastoral, playful performance, Bruckner’s Fifth — but also revealed unexpected depths in Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” and Korngold’s Violin Concerto, pieces I’ve taken less seriously. (Read our review of these concerts.)
JOSHUA BARONE
Fresh Approaches to Timeless Forms
In New York City, there’s blessedly far too much classical music and opera for any one critic to hear. The critic’s job becomes even more impossible when you consider how global these art forms are. So, it’s hard to say if the following performances are the “best,” but they are the ones that I treasured the most, in chronological order.
‘L’Autre Voyage’
Franz Schubert was a failed opera composer, despite having written some of the most beautiful and enduring vocal music in the repertoire. But some portions of his operatic works are worth saving. Raphaël Pichon, the brilliant maestro behind the ensemble Pygmalion, put that idea to the test with “L’Autre Voyage,” a Schubert pastiche that he masterminded and conducted at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Personal yet universal, as poetically alluring as “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise,” this show was not only a successful rescue mission, but also a perceptive tribute to Schubert’s artistic soul. (Read more about this production.)
Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy
Four hands piano playing is intimate enough; for Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners in life as well as music, it’s downright erotic. Few concerts this year captured the alchemy of chamber of music as intensely as their performance at Weill Recital Hall, which opened, or rather erupted, with Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” As their arms and hands overlapped, at extremes of sound, expression and physicality, they constructed an interpretation of ferocious sensuality that was also disciplined, clear and seemingly from one shared mind. (Read our profile of Kolesnikov and Tsoy.)
Karina Canellakis
In some ways it could have been a candidate for the year’s worst concert: Karina Canellakis led the New York Philharmonic shortly after a nearby earthquake started to set off the emergency alerts throughout David Geffen Hall. The alerts continued for the entire performance, but Canellakis, in her debut program with the orchestra, maintained remarkable cool, leading delicate Webern and indelicate Scriabin alike with mastery. I saw her a month later in better circumstances, leading the Vienna Symphony at the Musikverein, repeating her success with the Webern and ending with a wisely shaped account of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. As American orchestras search for their next music directors, she belongs on every short list. (Read our review of her Philharmonic appearance.)
‘The Exterminating Angel’
Thomas Adès and Tom Cairns’s extravagant adaptation of Luis Buñuel’s film “The Exterminating Angel” is one of the best operas of the 21st century. But because of its large principal cast and costs, it didn’t seem bound to join the repertoire after its premiere runs at the Salzburg Festival in 2016 and the Metropolitan Opera a year later. So it was extraordinary to see the Paris Opera commission a new production from Calixto Bieito. Adès conducted the score, which he revised, smoothing out what few flaws it had and streamlining the story for two headlong hours of exhilarating terror. (Read more about this production.)
‘Die Walküre’
We live in a moment with no shortage of opportunities to hear Wagner’s “Ring”; new productions are being rolled out in London, Munich, Milan, Brussels and Paris, with New York to follow in a few years. The freshest take on this four-opera epic, however, is the conductor Kent Nagano’s enormous project to research, rehearse, perform and record a version based on a historically informed approach. I caught the second installment, “Die Walküre,” at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the sound was often wonderfully shocking: There is less vibrato, singers declaim their lines, historical timbres shade the score anew, and, above all, the music has the clarity of spoken drama. (Read more about this project.)
Danish String Quartet
The Danish String Quartet loves a long-term project. Its latest, Doppelgänger, which pairs late works by Schubert with newly commissioned companions, concluded earlier this year, with a program of Schubert’s sublime String Quintet in C and Thomas Adès’s new “Wreath for Franz Schubert.” “Wreath” was a gorgeously meditative haze, like the Schubert easier and more pleasant to hear than it is to play; and it had the feeling of an emotional hangover as programmed to follow the Quintet, which at Zankel Hall could not have been performed with more profound beauty and intelligence. (Read our review.)
Asmik Grigorian
Asmik Grigorian, one of the fiercest sopranos on the European scene, gave a star-making performance in “Salome” at the Salzburg Festival in 2018. But, because of this industry’s long planning cycles, that didn’t translate to a Metropolitan Opera debut until this year. Even then, success in New York wasn’t certain. The nuances of her style, like her silent-film expressions and detailed gestures, read much better in smaller opera houses than in the cavernous Met. As Cio-Cio San in “Madama Butterfly,” though, her focused sound, while not the largest, radiated with ease, and she commanded the expansive stage with her every move. (Read our review.)
‘Anna di Resburgo’
The small New York opera company Teatro Nuovo does important work, bringing a historically informed style to bel canto repertoire that you don’t hear elsewhere in the city. This year, it went a step further and presented the first modern performances of an opera that was lost for nearly two centuries: Carolina Uccelli’s “Anna di Resburgo.” Quality, as this opera’s history shows, doesn’t guarantee an enduring legacy. Teatro Nuovo’s thoughtful, expert resurrection job is proof that “Anna,” while as imperfect as any composer’s early effort, deserves a place in the bel canto canon. (Read our review.)
‘The Listeners’
With the American premiere of “The Listeners” at Opera Philadelphia in September, Missy Mazzoli cemented her stature as one of today’s most skilled and ingenious opera composers. She and her longtime librettist, Royce Vavrek, working from a story by Jordan Tannahill, craft a clear yet layered, rivetingly theatrical tale about eco-anxiety, mysticism and cult dynamics that barrels toward an ending equal parts satisfying and scary. This is opera as it should be: thrilling on the level of drama, music and performance all at once, with Mazzoli’s lyrical melodies and unsettling harmonies at its core. (Read our notebook that includes a discussion of this opera.)
‘Dzonot’
Gabriela Ortiz’s season as the composer in residence at Carnegie Hall began with a performance by two of her most passionate and sensitive champions: Gustavo Dudamel and his orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who presented her immense new concerto, “Dzonot,” written for the cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Inspired by the concept of a cenote, or naturally occurring abyss, the piece behaves like an ecosystem, with the cello as a kind of shape-shifting protagonist. Moment by moment, it is as exciting as it is impressive; by the end, it is hauntingly elegiac, which his fitting for both the cello’s sound and the state of the natural world. (Read our review.)
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