Whatever its other shortcomings, I can at least say my 2017 was packed with musical highlights. Here is my usual annual round-up of the live events (concerts and opera) I enjoyed the most. If you'd like to read about my CDs of the year, please take a look here.
In the meantime, on with the show(s)...
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English National Opera: 'The Day After', 'Marnie' and much, much more...
It's hard to overstate the pleasure this company has given me over the year, so much so that I can feel my step gain some extra buoyancy whenever I'm heading for the Coliseum. Whatever difficulties they have faced behind the scenes (and there have been plenty, well-documented), there is never any question that what we see on stage is full-on, 100% dedication and commitment. I'm not trying to make out that everything they ever do is 'perfection' - you can't say that about anyone or anything - more that their hit-rate for somehow nailing exactly what I love about going to the opera is astonishingly high.
I've heard some fantastic lead performances: the knockout trio of Sarah Tynan, Patricia Bardon and Rupert Charlesworth in 'Partenope', the great pairing of Rebecca Evans and Tim Mead in 'Rodelinda' and Latonia Moore's powerful 'Aida'. ENO has also presented two excellent premieres. Earlier in the year, Ryan Wigglesworth's 'The Winter's Tale' featured heartrending work from Iain Paterson and Sophie Bevan... and - in my opinion - the even more exceptional 'Marnie', Nico Muhly's latest opera, which gave the superb mezzo Sasha Cooke the opportunity to shine in a complex, compelling role.
More power to you all, ENO folk.
Leif Ove Andsnes, Marc-André Hamelin at Wigmore Hall
Simply seeing these two walk onstage together caused this piano fanboy to have a bit of a 'moment', but for all their individual star power, they played in the complete service of each other and the music. The centre pieces of the programme were Stravinsky works for two pianos - including a jaw-droppingly intense arrangement of 'The Rite of Spring'. Pleasingly, Hyperion is bringing out a CD - available in the next few weeks, I believe - documenting the collaboration.
BBC Symphony Orchestra performing 'Doctor Atomic' (Barbican) and 'Khovanshchina' (Proms, Royal Albert Hall)
Two very different - but equally brilliant - part-staged/concert performances of operas you don't get to see every day. As part of a variety of 70th birthday events, John Adams himself turned up to conduct his own work, featuring Gerald Finley (who created the Oppenheimer role), and - among a group of fine soloists, some favourite singers of mine - Marcus Farnsworth and Jennifer Johnston. The Proms performance of Mussorgsky's epic national opera simply blew me away - in particular the overwhelming power of the choral writing (performed here by four choirs!) and Elena Maximova's superb portrayal of Marfa.
One of THE great recitals at Wigmore Hall, probably in recent memory: a cherry-picked selection of many of Schubert's finest songs, brought to transcendent life by surely one of his most searching and passionate interpreters, Alice Coote. The intimacy of the venue allowed AC's abilities as an actor-singer to come across with maximum impact - from the tenderness of 'Du Bist die Ruh', through the lilt of 'An Silvia', to the horror of 'Erlkonig': all were brought to vivid, distinct life.
The musical chemistry the duo share was audible, with Julius Drake's accompaniment matching AC every step of the way. Their forthcoming Schubert CD will be an absolute must.
The December Quartets (The Harrison, London)
This was a modest, one-off event of improvised music featuring Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou of Greek band Daemonia Nymphe, cellist-composer Jo Quail from London, UK, and Belgian classical/jazz vocalist Lucie Dehli. While there is some history of collaboration - and heaps of mutual respect - between these acts, I believe this was the first time all four had shared a stage to create music together.
I only bring geography into it, because that was a key part of the evening's success. DN are an intriguing group who write music for ancient Greek instruments, and for many of the pieces they created the sound 'platform' so to speak, for the cello and vocal to dovetail and dance around. While tracks from both DN's catalogue and Jo Q's recordings provided some starting points, the feeling that anything could happen gave the concert real electricity, only made more intense in the 50-odd capacity miniature venue. It's easy to speak of 'merging or mixing genres' but for an hour or two here, it really was like catching a glimpse into music-making that managed to be classical/world/jazz all at once, with no audible joins. The warmth between the artists was visible as well as audible - and it's worth pointing out that LD could only make it to UK shores shortly before the gig... then came on and, basically, smashed it - a really vibrant, intoxicating performance that clearly wowed her onstage collaborators as well as the rest of us. Hopefully, lightning will strike twice and there'll be another December Quartets event in due course.
Based on the Luis Bunuel film of the same name, Thomas Adès's new opera presents the audience with the same enigma as the movie. An array of dinner party guests, once gathered in a single room, find they're inexplicably unable to leave. (They're not locked in, or incapacitated. The barrier is either invisible, psychological, or in some other way supernatural.) Days go by, and before one of the characters suddenly identifies a possibly way to break the spell, their veneer of society manners will have broken down completely. The work seemed to divide audiences and critics, but I recall it as a somewhat thrilling event - the score was a ruthless exercise in creating unease and mounting tension, and the need for an ensemble cast brought together a generation-spanning pantheon of dream singers, including Christine Rice, Anne Sofie von Otter, Sally Matthews, Sophie Bevan, Iestyn Davies, Thomas Allen, John Tomlinson... all operating well outside what you might call an ROH 'comfort zone'. Blackly funny, disturbing fare.
The 'Little Greats' Season (Opera North)
Such a brilliantly-realised achievement. A series of short operas, too rarely staged, each performed with massive enthusiasm, loving attention and innovative flair. Wildly varying in style/content but given an aesthetic unity through the clever, economic production design: the more of the six you were able to see, the more connections you could make. Highlights for me were the searing, almost post-modern 'Osud' (Janacek) and the unblinking, yet tender, domestic drama 'Trouble in Tahiti' (Bernstein). By a happy coincidence, these were the two picked up for broadcast by BBC Radio 3 - still on iPlayer at the time of writing, here.
As I previously touched on in my 'CDs of the year' post, the pianist Joseph Middleton is both a brilliant collaborator and master programmer. His art song 'supergroup' the Myrthen Ensemble performed a joyous entry in Wigmore Hall's 'Complete Schubert' series, and he also accompanied one of their number, mezzo Clara Mouriz, in a wonderful, wide-ranging lunchtime recital, 'Songs of the Antique'.
However, his ongoing partnership with Carolyn Sampson continues to deliver highlight after highlight. Their recital 'Reason in Madness' (also to become a CD in due course) presents a series of luckless heroines - Mignon, Bilitis, Ophelia - as immortalised in first German, then French art song. In a single evening, we moved from Schubert, Brahms and Wolf to Duparc, Debussy and Saint-Saens - and more besides. The climax of the evening arrived with a bravura performance of Poulenc's miniature one-woman opera, 'La dame de Monte Carlo'. The concert combined humour, tragedy, sensuality, violence, pathos - just outstanding in every respect.
'Passages' (Proms, Royal Albert Hall)
What the slightly surreal and hallucinatory Light Night Prom experience is all about - a chance to hear an atypical work in impossibly grand surroundings, and go back out into the night transported, even slightly changed. Here the collaborative album made by Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar was beautifully revived, pairing sitar genius Anoushka Shankar (R's daughter) and her team of Indian musicians with the spirited and perennially up-for-it Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Glass specialist Karen Kamensek. KK's brilliant mastery of the material enabled the musicians to move past any clichéd notions of 'minimalist' playing into a deeply-felt fusion of two distinct soundworlds.
'Pelléas et Mélisande' (Scottish Opera)
Everything about this production soared. The orchestra (under Stuart Stratford) captured the almost sinister shifting shimmer of Debussy's score, and the cast shone as much for their persuasive acting as their singing - especially Roland Wood's wracked Golaud and Alistair Miles's memorable, sympathetic Arkel. But - making her role debut as Mélisande, with a complex characterisation blending lithe playfulness with unknowable pathos - it was Carolyn Sampson's evening. Her brilliance in French song must have also contributed to her sounding as natural as air in the part. Add to this a superb David McVicar production that, in the staging itself, manages to move you at the same time as pulling you up short with its dramatic intelligence - you have the perfect night at the opera.
I wanted to mention one of the most powerful, heartfelt - yet unusual - 'Winterreise' renditions I've seen. Possessed of a profoundly emotive, resonant bass voice, MR is a subtle, even modest, performer to whom any notion of grandstanding seems completely alien. He sang the cycle in virtual darkness to the side of the stage, allowing us to focus on a projected sequence of beautiful images created by artist Victoria Crowe. In recognition that the 'reality' of this cycle is far removed from a besuited figure in a concert hall, this approach took us out of that space and - for all its visual allure - placed even greater emphasis on the songs themselves.
Trio Mediaeval with Nils Økland at Wigmore Hall
Trio Mediaeval's visits to Wigmore Hall tend to be red-letter evenings for me, those three pristine voices fitting that fine acoustic like a glove. Accompanied by violinist Økland, they gave a Yuletide-themed recital - ranging as ever from early music, to traditional Scandinavian folk tunes, right up to contemporary compositions: here represented by 'Lux', a new piece by Andrew Smith. Performing with no interval, a mood of immaculate beauty was maintained throughout - harmonies, sounding both familiar and alien, enveloping the audience in winter warmth.
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