It was a year of many endings and fewer beginnings. Mark Elder left the Hallé after 24 years as the Manchester orchestra’s music director, during which time he has taken the group to ever greater heights. Kirill Karabits ended his 15-year tenure as the principal conductor of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; Judith Weir’s decade as Master of Royal Music came to a close (Errollyn Wallen now wears that crown). Radio 3’s Sean Rafferty hung up his In Tune headphones after 28 years. Roger Wright curated his final Aldeburgh festival and David Pickard stepped away from his role as BBC Proms director.
Pickard had overseen one of the most enjoyable Proms seasons of recent years, even if starry international orchestras are noticeably fewer than a decade ago. Naysayers bemoaned the non-classical elements of the eight-week festival, but packed events that included a tribute to Nick Drake, late night desert-blues from Tinariwen and Florence + the Machine’s ecstatic performance of 2009 debut Lungs brought new audiences and found all concerned at the tops of their games.
But it was core classical events that offered the greatest thrills: Finland’s Klaus Mäkelä, 28, conducted an electrifying performance of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique which had the audience hanging on every note. Proms regulars the Aurora Orchestra produced magic yet again, with their imaginative and captivating dramatised exploration of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Drama also came in the shape of a semi-staging of Netia Jones’s sharply observed production for Garsington Opera of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Lucy Crowe as an imperious Titania.
Bruckner’s 200th birthday was marked at the Royal Albert Hall with performances that included Simon Rattle’s graceful account of the Fourth Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Glasshouse Centre for Music in Gateshead peaked early with March’s ambitious Big Bruckner Weekend – five concerts that included the three last symphonies plus his Great Mass and the string quintet, with the Hallé, the BBC Scottish and the Liverpool Philharmonic. Vladimir Jurowski’s fresh and unforced live recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony was one of the year’s top releases.
Mahler’s symphonies, too, were rarely far from concert platforms. In October, Michael Tilson Thomas, despite suffering brain cancer, conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a searing and uplifting account of the second “Resurrection” symphony. The following month, 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt also appeared to defy his doctors with a gripping performance of the composer’s ninth with the Philharmonia. Daniel Barenboim, too, was a very welcome but frail visitor to the Southbank Centre and at the Proms with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Also at the SBC, the London Philharmonic’s wide-ranging concerts under its principal conductor Edward Gardner showed that his predecessor Jurowski was not such a hard act to follow after all.
English National Opera’s own dramas were mercifully reserved for the stage this year. Their lively and warm revival of Simon McBurney’s staging of the Magic Flute enchanted opera newcomers and old-timers alike. In November the company revealed plans for their Manchester second home – Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and outreach work at the forefront – and under artistic director Annilese Miskimmon, brought two new stagings to the Coliseum: Britten’s Turn of the Screw and a larky land girls-style take on Donizetti’s Elixir of Love.
But it was a concert staging that most delighted our critics. Miskimmon relocated Suor Angelica, Puccini’s tragedy of faith and human cruelty, from a 17th-century Florentine convent to one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries in the 1960s, in a restrained yet devastating indictment of institutional abuse past and present. Sinéad Campbell-Wallace as Angelica and Christine Rice as her embittered, moralistic Aunt each gave performances of a lifetime.
At Covent Garden, Antonio Pappano ended his 22-year tenure as music director on a high with a thrilling Andrea Chénier. Jakub Hrůša will pick up his baton in September 2025. Ted Huffmann’s zeitgeisty and iconoclastic take on Eugene Onegin divided critics, but all agreed that Liparit Avetisyan’s Lensky was a standout. Puccini’s centenary was celebrated with productions of La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly; Pappano kept the party going in his new role at the London Symphony Orchestra, where he led his crack troops in a superb concert performance of the composer’s lesser known La Rondine.
New music has been less visible this year. Francisco Coll’s Cello Concerto, composed for Sol Gabetta, stood out among the Proms’ new commissions. It was a glittering achievement full of iridescent detail crammed into four concise movements. Elsewhere, Freya Waley-Cohen, with her wittily inventive song cycle Spellbook and her LPO commission Mother Tongue, as well as Anna Clyne with Atlas for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, produced some of the most distinctive and memorable new works.
Violinist Vilde Frang’s fabulously expressive playing meant that her concert with Arcangelo and soprano Julia Doyle at the Tetbury festival was one of this year’s live highlights. And her revelatory and authoritative reading of Elgar’s Violin Concerto made her recording (with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestre Berlin) our disc of the year. “From first note to last Frang never puts a foot wrong,” wrote Andrew Clements.
Also not putting a foot wrong was Welsh National Opera, whose collaboration with No Fit State Circus mixed breathtaking circus skills with Britten to create an extraordinary and unforgettable staging of Death in Venice. How sad, then, that WNO – its vital funding diminished – may no longer be in any fit state to sustain the kind of uncompromising work for which it has always been admired.
