The survey of the new releases that my colleagues and I have enjoyed most in 2025 differs in one significant respect from the lists of previous years. This year’s top ten contains no operas. There has been a profound change in record companies’ policies of how and what they record. The glitzy, studio-based opera recordings of the last century now seem impossible to contemplate, and even releasing audio-only recordings taken directly from live opera-house performances often seems less viable than issuing DVDs of the same productions.
Some specialist labels devoted to specific areas of the operatic repertoire continue sterling work: operas feature prominently in Bru Zane’s mission on behalf of neglected French composers, while Opera Rara continues to crusade for forgotten, mostly 19th century, mostly Italian, scores which this year included the original 1857 version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Other companies continue to find treasures in Europe’s apparently inexhaustible baroque archives, while, on its own label, the London Symphony Orchestra has continued to release Simon Rattle’s Janáček series taken from his concert performances with the orchestra at the Barbican, the latest release being Jenůfa. If full-length operas are notably scarce in the schedules of the major companies, two exceptions this year were Decca’s release of the Oslo-sourced Flying Dutchman, with Lise Davidsen and Gerald Finley, and Deutsche Grammophon’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, part of Andris Nelson’s Boston-based Shostakovich series, both of which proved less than overwhelming.
