Benvenuto Cellini - ENO
It takes one to know one: English National Opera staged a meeting between two of the wildest creative eccentrics when director Terry Gilliam made his version of Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini in London. Highlights? There were many, probably the greatest of which was Willard White’s papal coup de theatre, but there was also a gigantic puppet circus that took over the entire audience, and the final scene, in which only a fragment of Cellini’s gilded sculpture was visible - even if it still took up the entire stage. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done”, ENO’s Music Director Edward Gardner said. Maybe: but the musical and theatrical risks were worth it. Read the review
Norrington at the Proms
Roger Norrington’s Proms were outstanding in their unadulterated imagination: in Bach’s St John Passion, Norrington showed his radicalism undimmed, even now he’s 80; and he gave the most inspirational, enlightening, and coherently crazy performance of Beethoven’s 8th Symphony I’ve ever heard, as well as a revelatory Dvorak New World Symphony.
Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry - Birmingham Opera Company
The opera production of the year, for me. Director Graham Vick’s latest show with his Birmingham Opera Company made Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina a searingly relevant work about the state, the individual, contemporary politics and media corruption. Among much else: staged in a big top in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park, Vick’s cast of professional singers, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, but above all, amateur choirs from across the city’s communities, delivered the piece right into the teeth, eyes, and psyches of a perambulatory audience, an experience that no-one who was there will forget. Read the review
Die Frau ohne Schatten - Royal Opera
Strauss’s epic yet domestic operatic fairy-tale was magically staged at Covent Garden by director Claus Guth, magnificently cast, and magisterially conducted by Semyon Bychkov. One of the outstanding contributions to Strauss’s 150th birthday year celebrations. Read the review
Boulevard Solitude - Welsh National Opera
Henze’s re-telling of the Manon story received a fascinating production in Cardiff: darkly, seedily, surreally passionate in Marcus Trelinski’s staging, conducted with lucid authority by Lothar Koenigs. Read the review
Thebans - English National Opera
Julian Anderson’s first opera was worth the wait: with his librettist Frank McGuinness, he conceived a compact, coherent, and moving distillation of Aeschylus’s Oedipus trilogy: music of expressive clarity and dramatic conviction that deserves to be seen and heard again soon. Read the review
Meld and Mozart - Aurora at the Proms
Benedict Mason’s Meld was the eye- and ear-bending climax of the Aurora Orchestra’s Prom, but the real premiere for me was their performance of Mozart’s 40th Symphony - entirely from memory: music-making of physical, visceral directness, and a first for the Proms, to have a whole orchestra playing without a single music-stand in the way of them and the Prommers. Read the review
Gawain - Barbican
Conducted by Martyn Brabbins, this performance of the original version of Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain was a musical revelation: the whole score glittered and groaned, and shimmered and shook with elemental force. Arguably the single highlight of Birtwistle’s 80th birthday year celebrations. Read the review
Rodelinda - English National Opera
The Handel show of 2014: director Richard Jones and conductor Christian Curnyn turned this story of love, jealousy, revenge, and power into a startling contemporary commentary; but it was the cast what won it, from countertenor Iestyn Davies’s plangent, tortured Bertarido to Rebecca Evans’s dignity, nobility, and virtuosity in the title role, with other stand-out performances from John Mark Ainsley, Sue Bickley and the cast’s other countertenor, Christopher Ainslie. Read the review
Quartet Lab, Wigmore Hall
A string quartet at Wigmore Hall in London - what could more conventional? Think again... This concert presented the string quartet deconstructed yet thrillingly remade in front of your ears, thanks to these four musicians who are all soloists in the rest of their careers: Beethoven, Crumb, Mozart, and Cage have never sounded like this before. Read the review
See also: Tim Ashley, Andrew Clements, Rian Evans and George Hall’s choices | Alfred Hickling, Erica Jeal, Martin Kettle and Kate Molleson’s choices
