The Best Classical Music of 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/arts/music/best-classical.html

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‘ELEKTRA’ The fearless French director Patrice Chéreau died at 68 in 2013, a few months after his searing production of Strauss’s “Elektra” had its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. The Metropolitan Opera, one of the co-producers of this seething and psychologically piercing staging, presented it in April with a matchless cast headed by the gleaming soprano Nina Stemme in the title role. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the score with a composer’s insight into its complexities and splendors. It was an immediate Met milestone. [Read the review]

SALONEN CONDUCTS MESSIAEN Speaking of Mr. Salonen, a month before “Elektra,” he led the New York Philharmonic in an ecstatic and mystical account of Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” with Yuja Wang playing the formidable solo piano part. Here was a hint of what Mr. Salonen, currently the Philharmonic’s composer in residence, might have done had he been chosen to succeed Alan Gilbert as the orchestra’s music director. (The job went to Jaap van Zweden instead.) [Read the review]

ALAN GILBERT AT THE NY PHIL BIENNIAL The vision and stamina Mr. Gilbert has brought to the Philharmonic were on display during the final two programs of the orchestra’s 2016 NY Phil Biennial. He led exciting performances of challenging new and recent works, including William Bolcom’s inventive Trombone Concerto; John Corigliano’s “Conjurer” for percussion, string orchestra and brass; and Steven Stucky’s restless Second Concerto for Orchestra, ending with the American premiere of Per Norgard’s Eighth Symphony — a penetrating reading of a complex, mysterious score. [Read the review]

SIMON RATTLE IN NEW YORK The conductor Simon Rattle had an all-but-official fall residency in New York this year, starting with opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, when he led a rapturous, lucid account of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with Ms. Stemme as Isolde. After a series of other events in the city, he concluded his working visit with the final two programs of his Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, where he was joined by his great Berlin Philharmonic. These formidable programs were highlighted by a revelatory account of Mahler’s teeming Seventh Symphony. I was especially fascinated by Mr. Rattle’s grouping together of three pathbreaking scores by Schoenberg, Webern and Berg — 14 individual pieces in all, played without break — almost like an imagined 11th Symphony by Mahler, as Mr. Rattle suggested to the audience. [Read the review]

‘THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ The most anticipated event of the international opera world this year was the premiere of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel,” adapted from the Luis Buñuel film, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. In his intense and surreal opera, Mr. Adès explores the terrifying undercurrents of Buñuel’s macabre comedy. (The opera is scheduled to arrive at the Met next fall.) [Read the review]

‘LET ME TELL YOU’ In another powerful premiere, Franz Welser-Möst led the glorious Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in the first New York performance of the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s song cycle “let me tell you.” Paul Griffiths adapted the text from his novel of the same name, which fashions an imagined narrative for Shakespeare’s Ophelia using only the specific words that the character speaks. The superb soprano Barbara Hannigan was the soloist in this eerie, intricate and ravishing 30-minute work. [Read the review]

‘DE MATERIE’ For a combination of theatrical novelty and musical variety, nothing I’ve heard in a long while surpassed the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s “De Materie” (“Matter”), a philosophical opera that resists categorization. The director Heiner Goebbels’s wildly original production, presented in the vast Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, dramatizes the overlapping themes of this work’s audaciously assembled libretto: It draws from documents of Dutch independence, 17th-century shipbuilding manuals, texts by mathematicians, Madame Curie’s diaries, and more. The staging involved everything from floating dirigibles to nearly 100 live sheep. Mr. Andriessen’s eclectic and ingenious music, performed here by the International Contemporary Ensemble, somehow made exhilarating sense of it all. [Read the review]

PROKOFIEV CONCERTO MARATHON The conductor Valery Gergiev loves thinking big. Why perform one or two of Prokofiev piano concertos when you can present all five at once? So in a marathon concert, “Folk, Form and Fire,” he led his Mariinsky Orchestra in these five works, in order, each with a different — and distinctively brilliant — pianist. It was great to hear the neglected Fourth Concerto for piano, left hand, played scintillatingly by Sergei Redkin, as well as the cryptic, neo-Classical, seldom-heard Fifth, dispatched handily by Sergei Babayan. The evening opened with young George Li’s crisp account of the exuberant First Concerto; Alexander Toradze brought weighty virtuosity to the daunting Second; and the amazing Daniil Trifonov won a predictably huge ovation for his dazzling account of the popular Third. [Read the review]

DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY Though great artists try to give their all in performance, the superb Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky took his to another level in his recital at Carnegie Hall in February, a program of songs by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. This charismatic baritone, who has been undergoing treatment for brain cancer, looked a little thin and sometimes seemed shaky. But accompanied by his longtime pianist, Ivari Ilja, Mr. Hvorostovsky sang with his trademark smoky colorings and affecting expressivity, including several bleakly poignant Russian songs that deal with death, grief and longing. There were tears all over the hall, but joyous cheers as well. [Read the review] — ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Struggling to winnow down highlights from a year of incredibly varied listening, I decided to focus on the vocal performances that most thrilled, calmed and inspired me. These 10 (O.K., technically 11) events confirmed the challenge and comfort, the stimulation and consolation that can be provided by the most basic of instruments: the human voice. — ZACHARY WOOLFE

‘THE LAST NOEL’ Just ahead of last Christmas, the ever-curious vocal quartet Anonymous 4 bid its loyal audience a tender yet restrained farewell before disbanding after nearly 30 years. In the soaring surroundings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval Sculpture Hall, the group charted a long history of holiday music, from 12th-century mysticism to early American fugues, with a subtly feminist tinge that emphasized hymns to Jesus’ mother. A radiantly sung, movingly modest goodbye. [Read the review]

‘QUICKSAND’ There is no singing, per se, in this work, the final experiment in opera created by the composer Robert Ashley before his death in 2014 and staged with surreal elegance at the Kitchen in January by the choreographer Steve Paxton. But in Ashley’s recorded narration of an enigmatic spy story — his voice mellow, weary and wry — he, as ever, directs us to the musical nature of speech: smooth and staccato rhythms, pitches quietly rising and falling, unexpected pockets of feeling. [Read the review]

‘FALSTAFF’ Riccardo Muti, the king of Verdi, reigned anew as he led his Chicago Symphony Orchestra in sublime concert performances of that composer’s great final comedy in April. It’s a soufflé score that can easily slump into heaviness, but Mr. Muti had the Chicagoans navigating its turns like a racecar and sounding as crisp and clean as a billowing linen sheet. The world’s leading Falstaff, Ambrogio Maestri, turned in a witty and agile performance, one matched by the rest of the exquisite ensemble cast. [Read the review]

‘PERSÉE ET ANDROMÈDE’ With this loving excavation of a largely forgotten 1921 one-act by Jacques Ibert in April, the Manhattan School of Music did just what a conservatory should — it used its relative freedom from financial pressures to give students and audiences an entirely fresh experience. In this case, that provided what was likely the American premiere of a glowing mini-masterpiece, fitted with a talented cast and a lithe, delicate orchestral performance led by Pierre Vallet. [Read the review]

DIAMANDA GALÁS AND MEREDITH MONK No, not together. (A guy can dream …) But these women, both of whom have expanded our notion of what vocal cords can do, made memorable appearances in New York in May, just days apart: Ms. Galás at a deconsecrated church in Harlem, part of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival, and Ms. Monk at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Their obvious differences — Ms. Galás, the gloomy siren; Ms. Monk, winsome and whimsical — belie similarities: a shared edge of anxiety, sly humor and an ultimately reassuring grounding in the body and its processes. [Read the reviews of Ms. Galás and Ms. Monk]

‘JOSEPHINE BAKER: A PORTRAIT’ Exploring the legacy of Baker, the great chanteuse and dancer — and classic American in Paris — in an era of Black Lives Matter, the luscious soprano Julia Bullock and searching avant-jazz composer Tyshawn Sorey refused to settle for easy nostalgia. Instead they stretched Baker’s songs into gorgeously desolate epics that echoed through an outdoor amphitheater at the premiere at the Ojai Festival in California in June. I look forward to following this portrait’s progress, as the work and its title — most recently “Perle Noir: Meditations for Joséphine Baker” — continue to evolve. [Read an interview with the creators]

‘BREAKING THE WAVES’ Kiera Duffy, a soprano of courageous focus, held her ground against inevitable comparisons with Emily Watson’s harrowing performance in the Lars von Trier film on which Missy Mazzoli’s darkly compelling new opera is based. Writing under a commission from Beth Morrison Projects and Opera Philadelphia, which gave the work’s premiere in September, Ms. Mazzoli gave her characters clear, passionate vocal lines and supported them with oceanic orchestral textures. It’s rare to encounter a new opera in which music and drama nudge each other forward; celebrate this one, which comes to the Prototype festival in New York in January. [Read the review]

TAYLOR MAC This fearless performance artist’s 24-hour journey remolding American history through sound, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” was many things: a queering of the canon, an insertion of racial diversity, a test of fortitude for artist and audience alike. But the glittery, unforgettable spectacle, from one noon to the next in October at St. Ann’s Warehouse, was also a vocal master class, as its star made it — and then some — through 246 songs, performed essentially without stopping, in a well nigh unbeatable feat of endurance. [Read the review]

‘GUILLAUME TELL’ Performed in October for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera in its original French, Rossini’s final opera was imposingly cast — and conducted, with his usual lucidity, by Fabio Luisi. There was a sense of both Rossini’s virtuosity and the emotions that fuel it from the platinum-tone tenor Bryan Hymel and the coolly sparkling soprano Marina Rebeka. Best was Gerald Finley, his dignity and warmth swelling the stick-figure title character into a three-dimensional being. [Read the review]

ANNA NETREBKO After finally making her New York recital debut with a lush program at the Met in February, opera’s star soprano returned to the company in November as Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. She wasn’t best as the girlish naïf of Act I, nor as the seductress of Act II — both somehow sketchy — but rather as the exiled, starkly suffering convict of Acts III and IV, death practically dripping from her sumptuous tone. [Read the review]

“Fellow Travelers,” by the composer Gregory Spears and the librettist Greg Pierce, is the most romantic new opera I have seen in years. It’s also one of the most successfully political. Its premiere in June at Cincinnati Opera proved uncannily timely, coming days after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. The opera’s story, adapted from Thomas Mallon’s novel, follows the love affair of two federal government workers in the 1950s, under the shadow of the “Lavender Scare,” the gay witch hunt whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy. As one character notes, going to the wrong bar back then could lose a gay man his job. Today, more than half a century of presumed progress later, going to the wrong club could cost him his life.

But what makes “Fellow Travelers” such a satisfying operatic experience is the old-fashioned combination of a swift-flowing and deft libretto and gorgeous music. Mr. Spears has the rare gift of artful plunder, knowing how to pluck stylistic elements from earlier centuries and weave them into a sleek and propulsive score that is accessible but unmistakably modern. With his light touch, Mr. Spears has created a tender study of innocence and the rewards and risks that lie on the other side of its destruction. [Read the review] — CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

This has been another year of labor unrest at major orchestras. With the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony all stopping work, at least for a time, it’s easy to take one’s eye away from buds of financial and artistic growth, as funding mechanisms and audiences change. Orchestras are troubled; they also rebound, even thrive.

Take the Minnesota Orchestra, now well beyond its recovery from a 16-month lockout that ended in 2014. Before the orchestra’s symbolic return to Carnegie Hall in March, I went to Minneapolis to report on how the orchestra had harnessed community support, added musicians to its management structures and retooled its sound under the reinvigorated musical direction of Osmo Vanska.

The tale is heartwarming, and the concert I heard there was searing. It was an enactment of Mr. Vanska’s familiar power and intensity in Sibelius — “Finlandia” and “Kullervo” in this case. But it was raised to still another level by the stunning commitment of his players. It’s easy to say, and barely mean, that musicians sometimes play as if their lives depend on it. In Minnesota, it’s viscerally clear that while lives might not, livelihoods do. The results have translated into sound, and spectacularly so. [Read the review] — DAVID ALLEN

It is no one’s idea of a party piece, surely; not anymore, at least not since the death of the great choral master Robert Shaw. But Brahms’s profoundly touching “A German Requiem” kept coming around this year in excellent performances, each an occasion unto itself.

Christoph von Dohnanyi, a veteran maestro of superb sensibility and an eminent Brahmsian, conducted it with the New York Philharmonic and the New York Choral Artists at David Geffen Hall in March. [Read the review]

Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus followed with a fine performance at Carnegie Hall in April, commemorating the centenary of Shaw himself, long the orchestra’s conductor, and the chorus’s founder. [Read the review]

Then came a twist, when the Berlin Radio Chorus and its conductor laureate, Simon Halsey, recast the work as a “human requiem,” using Brahms’s description of his pointedly nonliturgical creation, at the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in October. In this “concert installation,” as the director, Jochen Sandig, called it, choristers mingled throughout in close, sometimes direct, contact with listeners.

The production dispensed with orchestra, using Brahms’s four-hand-piano reduction of the score. It all brought the work home in a new way, with great immediacy and intimacy. [Read the review] — JAMES R. OESTREICH

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