Classical music is burdened by its own canon, like an old pop star always asked to play the hits. But so far this year, there has been a joyous amount of new work to keep up with: symphonies, operas and more with something fresh to say about a dusty book like Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” or something feisty to say about the Trump era. Even familiar titles like “Tristan und Isolde” had an element of novelty, bringing a new generation of artists to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Here are five favorites, in chronological order.
‘Complications in Sue’
There are so many ways “Complications in Sue,” which premiered at Opera Philadelphia in early February, could have gone wrong: 10 composers writing in isolation from one another, an untested librettist making his debut with a conceptual gambit, a company still crawling back from financial catastrophe. But nothing this year has matched the pleasant surprise of this show. Michael R. Jackson’s libretto had an instant voice of its own, funny, filthy and unexpectedly poignant. (I hope he already has a second opera commission lined up.) Justin Vivian Bond’s cabaret personality was stitched seamlessly into opera under Zack Winokur and Raja Feather Kelly’s direction, while the more traditional singers (Kiera Duffy, Rehanna Thelwell, Nicky Spence and Nicholas Newton) impressively hopped from one composer’s style to the next. Speaking of composers: Andy Akiho and Cécile McLorin Salvant, please write more opera.
‘Innocence’
Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, which arrived at the Met in April, is a master class in music drama. Her score accomplishes a kind of magic trick. It may seem to fade into the background to keep the focus on Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière’s libretto. But the music is always guiding the story: an examination of a school shooting’s trauma 10 years on, from a perspective that is expansive, multifaceted and full of curious sympathy. There is a fearlessness to its grace and nuance in an age that tends to reward neither quality. As sound, all music is a kind of haunting, the memory of a fleeting sensation; “Innocence,” though, haunts on a more profound level. It belongs not just on a list like this one, but also among the best operas of the century so far.
Barbara Hannigan
Barbara Hannigan is already ambitious, branching out beyond her career as a soprano to conduct. But she can also do both at the same time. And in either role, she is never content with business as usual. When she came to the New York Philharmonic in April, for example, she starred in and conducted Poulenc’s operatic monodrama “La Voix Humaine,” but also conceived a proper production with live videos, of her face in close-up, that were as frightening as they were engrossing. In her role as principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, she also released a new album this spring, “An American Dream?,” consisting of arrangements that allow her to put her stamp on “Porgy and Bess” and more, along with a medley that sends listeners off with a cover of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” as delirious and deranged as “La Voix Humaine.”
‘Earth Between Oceans’
In a season when Gustavo Dudamel stretched himself from coast to coast, saying goodbye to the Los Angeles Philharmonic while soft-launching his tenure as music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, it was touching to see him connect the two ensembles with a new, choral symphony-like work that had been commissioned for both orchestras: Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” which had its New York premiere at the end of April.
Each movement corresponds to an element: earth, with an evocation of spring’s awakening; air, with a true sense of loftiness; fire, with rhythmic urgency and high drama; and water, with a wash of melody and texture. Reid has a marvelous ear for timbre, and in “Earth Between Oceans” there is a sense of entire worlds, teeming with surprising sounds, taking shape around the audience.
‘Vanessa’
I adore Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera “Vanessa,” a woefully overlooked American classic, and yet I’ve always felt that there’s a strange dreaminess to it, a sense that it’s always just out of reach. But R.B. Schlather’s radically minimal treatment, which opened at Heartbeat Opera in New York last month, had a clarifying focus I’ve never encountered. Streamlined to a single act of 100 minutes, with a new chamber arrangement by Dan Schlosberg, it leaned into the nightmarish purgatory and near-campy melodrama with expressionist shadow play, touches of noir and gripping immediacy. It was also physically immediate, with the performers, all as well-rehearsed as traditional actors, mere feet from audience members. So, in the mezzo-soprano Kelsey Lauritano’s astounding turn as Erika, you could watch in detail as the character’s tragedy took shape in her face and body, as much as you could hear it in her sound.
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