Classical music critics and writers of The New York Times share their picks for the best of the year.
On Jan. 20, the day President Trump was inaugurated, the outspoken conductor Daniel Barenboim seized the moment to argue for the importance of culture and community at a time of bitter divisiveness. The occasion was the second of Mr. Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin’s sweeping survey of Bruckner’s nine symphonies at Carnegie Hall.
After leading a magnificent account of Bruckner’s Second, Mr. Barenboim spoke to the audience to defend classical music from charges of elitism. Concerts like this one, he said, can bring audiences and musicians from around the world together as “one community” in an act of “human communication.” Referring to the events that day in Washington, he emphasized that America, of all countries, has “the possibility” to “make the world great!” The audience applauded vigorously.
Here was a musician who has long channeled social ideals into artistic action, drawing explicit links between a Bruckner cycle and today’s roiling political issues. But I was struck all year by how many performances — challenging new works as well as repertory pieces we may take for granted — spoke to our fractious times. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
‘THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ Last year, I included the world premiere at the Salzburg Festival of Thomas Adès’s audacious opera, adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surreal 1962 film, on my list of favorite performances. I’m choosing it again this year, after the Metropolitan Opera presented the American premiere in October with an impressive cast and Mr. Adès conducting. The opera’s themes felt chillingly pertinent: In the plot, the guests at a fashionable dinner party find themselves psychologically trapped in the salon of their wealthy hosts. Some force — internal, imposed or both — seems to be sapping their will to act. There were eerie parallels between these panicked members of the ruling class and the elected officials in Washington who can sometimes seem frozen in deciding how, and even whether, to stand up to a norm-shattering administration.
‘DER ROSENKAVALIER’ The Met’s inventive new production of Strauss’s beloved opera was, on one level, a showcase for Renée Fleming, who sang her last performances of a signature role, the Marschallin. She and the cast were superb. The director, Robert Carsen, drew out this staple’s modern currents by moving its setting from the 18th century to the Vienna of 1911, the year of the opera’s premiere, a time when the aristocratic order that had endured for centuries was about to collapse under the horrors of World War I.
‘WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED’ Opera Philadelphia’s ambitious fall festival offered the premiere of the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain’s new music-theater work, with a libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. This raw, powerful opera tackles issues of race and inequality by looking back at an infamous 1985 incident in which Philadelphia police bombed a rowhouse occupied by a group of black separatists, causing a deadly conflagration. In an inspired twist, the opera revisits the tragedy indirectly, by depicting a crisis in the lives of five teenagers in 2017, runaways who take refuge in an abandoned house that turns out to be the separatists’ old home. Mr. Roumain deftly folded gospel, funk, jazz and classical styles into his arresting score.
CONRAD TAO As part of the Crypt Sessions series, this adventurous young American pianist presented a compelling program called “American Rage” in the intimate crypt of a Harlem church. He gave blazing performances of Copland’s flinty Piano Sonata and two fiendish works by the maverick composer Frederic Rzewski that incorporate labor movement songs and anthems.
‘BERNSTEIN’S PHILHARMONIC’ Though Leonard Bernstein’s centennial arrives next August, the New York Philharmonic got an early start this fall in honoring its legendary music director, with a series focused on Bernstein’s three overlooked symphonies. Leonard Slatkin led an intense account of the “Kaddish” (Symphony No. 3). In this unjustly criticized work, Bernstein’s poignant setting of the traditional Jewish mourner’s prayer alternates with episodes in which a narrator (a riveting Jeremy Irons), speaking a text by the composer, engages in a fierce argument with God, that “angry, wrinkled old majesty,” backed up by a feisty orchestra and frightened chorus. Bernstein composed this unabashedly theatrical symphony during the early 1960s, when the threat of nuclear war seemed all too real. That threat looms again.
Continue reading the main storyLOU HARRISON’S CENTENNIAL The centennial of another American maverick — the composer, pacifist, instrument maker, explorer of Asian music and gay pioneer Lou Harrison — was celebrated this year, including at an exhilarating concert at Trinity Wall Street featuring a chorus and percussion ensemble from Rutgers University. Their account of “La Koro Sutro,” a 1971 choral setting of a Buddhist scripture translated into Esperanto, the synthetic universal language, showed Harrison finding wondrous commonalities between Eastern and Western culture while speaking in a modest, authentic musical voice. The concert was a rallying cry for peace and tolerance.
DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY Finally, I must mention the great Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died on Nov. 22 at 55 after a long struggle with brain cancer. His courageous and unforgettable recital at Carnegie Hall in February, mostly devoted to Russian songs, may not have been overtly political. Yet Mr. Hvorostovsky addressed timeless human issues of impermanence, love and death through the songs he sang so beautifully.
The Best Opera and Vocal Performances of 2017
O.K., I cheated a little with the numbers. So call these, in chronological order, my 10-ish favorite opera and vocal performances of the year — the most joyful, moving, provoking. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘DUST’ It is so satisfying to see the enigmatic, wry and wistful works of Robert Ashley increasingly entering the repertory in the years after his death in 2014 — and even being done by young artists at conservatories, as “Dust” was in February at the Mannes School of Music. Embodying ragtag park denizens, Mannes students meticulously captured Ashley’s singsong, half-speaking style and his deadpan ruefulness. Another victory for contemporary music at Mannes: A few weeks later, the school announced that it would partner with John Zorn and house the latest iteration of his performance space, the Stone.
‘LA SERENISSIMA’ The too-little I heard at Carnegie Hall’s rich February festival, celebrating the Venetian Republic, was all superb, including Vivaldi’s “Juditha Triumphans,” in a performance of Technicolor vividness by Andrea Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and an elegantly restrained take on Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” from Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano. (John Eliot Gardiner’s “Poppea,” part of a splendid Monteverdi trio at Lincoln Center in October, was more lavish and just as memorable.)
THREE TENORS No, not together, alas. But nevertheless a trio of magnetic stars I relished over the course of the year: Vittorio Grigolo, singing so that you could practically hear him sweat at the Metropolitan Opera in “Werther” in February and “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” in September; Javier Camarena, his voice a golden smile through the long, slow lines of “I Puritani” at the Met in February; and Jonas Kaufmann, whose hooded, mahogany sound was uniformly secure throughout his first “Otello,” the pinnacle of the Italian repertory, at the Royal Opera House in London in June.
THE MET’S 50TH This was a party, plain and simple: a five-hour celebration of the company’s 50th anniversary at Lincoln Center at the end of the season in May, and I would have been happy to stay longer. Punctuated by witty and insightful archival and interview footage about the “New Met” were Stephanie Blythe and David Daniels in Handel, Susan Graham and Matthew Polenzani in Berlioz, Piotr Beczala in Verdi and Anna Netrebko in “Macbeth” and “Madama Butterfly,” among (many) others. And, of course, Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s surprise appearance in the midst of cancer treatment to sing (with gusto) an aria from “Rigoletto.” An evening of pleasure — and reflection on a beloved, if vexed, theater — more than the sum of its parts.
‘DAS RHEINGOLD’ Alan Gilbert intended to include Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” among the programs closing his tenure as the New York Philharmonic’s music director; stymied, he chose Wagner instead, and to mesmerizing effect. Without frills or fuss, he shaped a riveting family drama, a plausible potboiler worthy of Arthur Miller, with a cast including a world-wearily granitic Eric Owens, as Wotan, and Christopher Purves, eloquently and chillingly human as Alberich.
JOHN KELLY’S JONI MITCHELL When I had last seen Mr. Kelly’s uncanny evocation of Ms. Mitchell, in 2009, he was in full Joni costume, flowing blond wig and all. In June, at Joe’s Pub, he wore his own clothes and hair, but his voice — airy, languid, day-dreamy — still conjured her, in a homage sweeter and more poignant than ever.
A SALZBURG DUO My 10 days at the Salzburg Festival this summer were filled with music, but two opera productions stuck with me: William Kentridge’s teeming “Wozzeck,” a savage indictment of war’s ravages, and Peter Sellars’ spare, just-as-savage “La Clemenza di Tito,” a racially charged transmutation of Mozart to contemporary Africa. Within them were two star-making performances: Marianne Crebassa, artfully agonized as Sesto in “Clemenza,” partnering with an onstage clarinetist in a performance of the aria “Parto, parto” that made visible and audible the progression of a mind and heart; and Asmik Grigorian as a girlish, irresponsible, daringly unsympathetic Marie in “Wozzeck.”
‘THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ The event of the year: A work that wasn’t perfect but was dazzling and proud, impossibly grand and surprisingly subtle. Highest note in Met history and all, Thomas Adès’s score was a force of wild virtuosity and ever-mounting anxiety; diction and characterization did fall by the wayside, but neither so much as some critics would have had you think. Tom Cairns’s alert, savvy production, which opened in October, slyly formed a playing space both domestic and theatrical, making it clear that this is a piece that is messing with opera without quite parodying it. It indicts the art form for its stagnancy, then proceeds to show just what it can do when it’s operating on all cylinders.
‘ARABELLA’ This Strauss opera has never been among my favorites. Yet when I saw it in October at the excellent Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, with a committed cast led by Erin Wall, Tomasz Konieczny and Jane Archibald, I found it newly powerful. There’s such realism, clarity and compassion (to say nothing of beauty) in how the creators show Arabella’s maturation happening before your very eyes and ears; and vanishingly rare in opera is the formation of real, adult love.
‘THE MOTHER OF US ALL’ Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s surreal, endlessly evocative Americana fantasia about Susan B. Anthony and the struggle for women’s suffrage gets no less timely, nor painful. A community-sourced, chronology-crossing staging by R.B. Schlather brought the performers among the audience in November at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., an intimate setting for the unforgettable exhaustion of Michaela Martens, whose Susan B. had both near-mythical stature and soccer-mom immediacy.
A Musical Turn to the Environment
Two environmentally focused musical outings of moderate profile hardly establish a definitive trend. But it was fascinating this year to encounter such pieces by the American composers Seymour Bernstein and Sebastian Currier.
Mr. Bernstein’s “Song of Nature” (1996), based on an essay by Emerson, was presented by Musica Viva together with Brahms’s “A German Requiem” in May as part of a program called “An Elegy for All Humanity.” (What does seem to be a trend is the use of Brahms’s requiem as part of a larger concept, at least since Lincoln Center’s presentation of the English chorus master Simon Halsey’s program, “human requiem,” last October.)
Mr. Currier, writing on a commission from the Minnesota Orchestra to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, produced “Re-Formation,” a sort of choral symphony for performance in Minneapolis in November. The work begins by celebrating Martin Luther, through his use of Psalm 46 for his hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and Mendelssohn, through his use of that hymn in his “Reformation” Symphony.
Then it turns to the dire state of the planet, with a text by Sarah Manguso (“Black sky, …/Black sea, …/Black earth.”) “Re-Formation” turns the tables on the psalm’s notion of God protecting his creatures amid threatening elements to suggest that God’s subjects now have to protect his creation. JAMES R. OESTREICH
A Funky Updating of Minimalism
Jung Hee Choi has absorbed much from her years of study with the Minimalist composer and performer La Monte Young and the singer and visual artist Marian Zazeela. Some of the lessons are easy to spot — as in video pieces that hark back to the hallucinatory effects pioneered by Ms. Zazeela. But Ms. Choi has also been innovative.
In 2011, she brought a change into the musical lives of her gurus: a new composition to play at their Dream House space in Lower Manhattan. Its current title — “Tonecycle for Blues Base 30 Hz, 2:3:7 Ensemble Version with 4:3 and 7:6” — bears traces of Mr. Young’s obsession with the whole-number ratios of just-intonation tuning. But the approach to blues in Ms. Choi’s piece sounds unlike anything in Mr. Young’s catalog, even the more vernacular touches of his Forever Bad Blues Band, recorded in the 1990s.
Heard in its latest iteration, this October, the deep groove of the work’s slow-tempo “ektal vilampit” section had a unique majesty. Heaving funk progressions from a fretless bass mingled with tabla percussion and sustained vocal tones of pristine calm. Fans of Minimalism often speculate about the opening of a vault said to hold material recorded over the decades by Mr. Young and Ms. Zazeela. But they should also be hoping for a release or two from Ms. Choi’s recent exhibitions. SETH COLTER WALLS
An Opera That Resonated This Year
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Der Rosenkavalier” was a major event from the start: It was Renée Fleming’s farewell to one of her signature roles. But the staging, updated to the early 20th century by Robert Carsen, ended up particularly resonant with the biggest news stories at the bookends of 2017.
When Mr. Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” had its premiere at the Met in April, the Trump presidency was in its infancy and liberal America was searching its soul in the aftermath of the election. What the comedy series “Broad City” had described as the country’s “caramel and queer” future suddenly seemed newly fragile. This mood lent special punch to the opera’s ending, which depicts just how easily a way of life can vanish. After the soaring love duet, the set’s velvet walls came apart to reveal a bare stage with soldiers marching toward the audience (and presumably into World War I) before dropping dead, as if felled by gunfire.
Now the end of the year has brought a watershed of cads getting their comeuppance for sexual misbehavior. Harvey Weinstein and his ilk resemble Strauss’s Baron Ochs, whom the bass Günther Groissböck portrayed not as the usual buffoon but as a dangerous predator. Ochs brags that “some women like to be seized” by powerful men like him before being brought down in disgrace near the end. JOSHUA BARONE
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