‘Salome’
Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss’s “Salome” could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Read our review of Heartbeat Opera’s “Salome.”
Takacs Quartet
Among the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum’s much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms’s Piano Quintet, the group’s electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFE
Read our overview of concerts at the Frick’s new concert hall.
Yunchan Lim
When Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach’s 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a “Goldbergs” of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFE
Read our review of Lim’s “Goldbergs.”
Sondra Radvanovsky
What makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini’s breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won’t soon forget the penetrating softness of her “Vissi d’arte” or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia’s corpse, she growled, “And before him all of Rome trembled.” JOSHUA BARONE
Read our review of Radvanovsky in “Tosca.”
‘Akhnaten’
Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass’s score. The company’s chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday’s sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONE
Read our survey of Kosky’s work.
‘Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus’
Kate Soper likes to write musical essays based on impossible-to-answer questions about, for example, the nature of art and reality. Her ambitions for “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” which she sang in and premiered with the New York Philharmonic in May, were no smaller, and here her subject was the orchestra itself. Using bits of classical repertoire, found text and original material both spoken and sung, she recounted the story of Orpheus and the development of the orchestra as a collective instrument. The result had her trademark whimsy and dead-serious craft, as well as the welcoming charm of “Fantasia” and Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” BARONE
Read our review of this Philharmonic program.
‘In a Grove’
Part murder mystery, part psychological séance, Christopher Cerrone’s opera adaptation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story became the highlight of this year’s Prototype Festival in January. Set in a fire-scorched American forest, the spellbinding chamber opera unfolds through shifting testimonies that are ostensibly about the deadly encounter between a married couple and a brigand, but leave the listener tangled in a dense web of conflicting passions. Mimi Lien’s ghostly sets and the Metropolis Ensemble’s shimmering performance contributed to the dreamlike unreality. Cerrone’s coolly caressing music, with its eerie haze of electronic and acoustic textures, deepens the mystery and leaves listeners suspended between ambiguity and wonder. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Read our overview of this year’s Prototype Festival.
Vienna Philharmonic
Tenderness is not a word often associated with the majestic cathedrals of sound erected by Bruckner. But a wistful sweetness clung to the performance of his Seventh Symphony when the Vienna Philharmonic brought it to Carnegie Hall in February under Riccardo Muti, in a concert that also featured a silken rendition of Schubert’s Fourth Symphony. Muti highlighted the affinities between Schubert and Bruckner, bringing classical restraint and more discreetly simmering tension to the late-Romantic composer’s music than is commonly heard. Bruckner’s climaxes still thundered and glowed, but they took on a different expressive power inside a symphony that appeared steeped in sepia melancholy. da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Read our review of the Vienna Philharmonic’s concerts.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Any performance by the firebrand violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja is likely to shred bow hairs and conventions alike. In the course of her feral rendition of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic in April, she didn’t just produce squeals, growls and scratchy tones to breathtakingly dramatic effect; with the galvanizing conductor Jakub Hrusa, she inspired the orchestra to some of its most exciting playing of the season. The program opened with a shimmering world premiere by Jessie Montgomery and concluded with a magisterial reading of Brahms’s First Symphony, but it was Kopatchinskaja’s untamed artistry — fierce, physical and utterly riveting — that made the concert so electric. da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Read our review of this Philharmonic program.
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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