Missing out on cultural turning points is a serious New York preoccupation. But to make msuch matters more interesting, I’m expanding my alt-best-of-the-year list to a global reach based on my own incessant curiously and willingness to follow it no matter what the venue, platform or technology. I’m often in small urban churches, having to show a QR code on my phone to gain entry to the Columbia University campus or – as of the early hours of 2025 – staying up until 3 am to catch the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Years video-streamed concert that originated in the waning hours of 2024.
These events aren’t necessarily the best – but am spotlighting the intriguing and unexpected. I don’t always claim to have gotten my arms around what happened in these events. But then, I quite like being in over my head.
Starting with…
Michael Tippett’s opera New Year (see above poster), has been seldom heard since its 1989 Houston premiere which I heard and loved and was told it exists on a still-unreleased film. It has resurfaced in Glasgow – huh? – and was heard on an April BBC concert performance conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The recklessly flaky plot (devised by Tippett, who wrote is own libretto) is centered around an agoraphobic woman who is visited by aliens, most prominent among them being the legendary Merlin the Magician. I know of no other opera score with such a density and variety of orchestral sound, often enabled here by electric guitars. Characters are given long solo set pieces, incredibly abrasive ensembles and a Caribbean element for a character originally played by Bill T Jones. Amazing, overwhelming, bewildering…New Year is a testament to the imaginative powers of the human mind. Look out for the Tippett revival with new recordings of his major symphonic and operatic works: Both philosophically and musically, these pieces challenge the subtle modern pressures to be typical – with smart phone anticipating (and dictating) your every step, your auto-correct finishing your sentences in typical ways and emojis that package your intentions in small, even more typical icons.
The Berlin Philharmonic added more credibility to its world’s-greatest-orchestra reputation during its U.S. tour under Kirill Petrenko, who may not be a camera-commanding presence but is maybe the single greatest conductor out there. The New Years Eve concert, as seen in a live stream, had star pianist Daniel Trifonov on a new artistic level in Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2. Trifonov has always been hugely impressive, but has he ever been more moving with bold, personal ideas at every turn? The Berlin Phil definitely knew what it had; both orchestra and Petrenko were with him at every turn.
Cincinnati May Festival had a guest curator in the form of the expansive, extravagant, socially-conscious composer Julia Wolfe. With her own choral works (such as Anthracite Fields) plus those of her colleagues from the Bang on a Can composer collective (such as Michael Gordon). Thus, Cincinnati had the coolest music festival east of Ojai. Broadcast recordings of Wolfe’s Her Story (among others) suggested the normally magisterial May Festival Chorus was chanting, shouting, rocking and rolling (sometimes simultaneously) – though bolstered by the imported new music group the Lorelei Ensemble. I have no idea how that, or other Bang on a Can pieces fared with audiences, but with the Cincy Symphony at forefront of progressive programming in recent years, one might well see a large Ohio contingent in North Adams MA for the annual summertime Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend.
TENET Vocal Artists and Piffaro the Renaissance Band celebrated the easily-missed 650th anniversary of the death of poet Francesco Petrarch with the Oct. 18 concert, titled Triomphi at Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel. Organized around Petrarch’s principles of truth, eternity, fame etc., music was drawn from the fascinating cusp between Renaissance and Baroque eras where aesthetic rules were up in the air. Whether entrancing or just engaging, the seldom heard pieces by Lassus and Cavalieri had Petrarch words and world views shining consistently – as presented in sympathetic context and sung with great comprehension. The strangeness of this music – melodic contours, unexpected cadences, irregular rhythms – was strange no more. Instrumentally, Piffaro set a new standard. I didn’t know it was possible for the players of shawms and other arcane instruments to keep getting better. But they are.
Res Facta vocal ensemble’s Sept. 6 Thomas Tallis concert, titled Variis Linguis and led by Ryan James Brandau, was aggressively recommended to me but fell on a day when my cat was having eight teeth extracted (with an uncertain recovery time). But arriving late at Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street in Manhattan, I was instantly enveloped in an atmosphere of rich choral sound inflected with such a rare understanding that your ear never n needed to search for a through line in this heavily layered 16th-century music. The high point of this (and any other) Tallis program was Gaude gloriosa: The more one listens, the more one finds feats of word painting, voices branching off from each other plus mysteries around the music’s original purpose – giving you an encapsulated world unto itself in 17 minutes. This is the core of the NYC early music world, which doesn’t have London’s many early-music orchestras but great vocal ensembles – with concerts augmented by visiting groups brought in by the Miller Theatre and Music Before 1800. And then there’s the Philadelphia vocal invasion….
Variant Six, which has singers in common with Philadelphia’s The Crossing, seems to be up for anything, modern and ancient, and sang madrigals by Gesualdo and Monteverdi in the Brooklyn Art Song Society’s Histories III program on Dec. 1 at Roulette Intermedium performing arts center. The idea was to contrast 17th-century innovators with a secobd half featuring the group’s own art song recitalists singing Wolf and Britten. Problem is that Variant Six has such tight chord tunings and artistic confidence that it outclasses everybody in earshot. This group shouldn’t have guest slots, but programs all to themselves.
Junction Trio – that part-time union of violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao – converged for a Nov. 1 concert at the 92nd Street Y, New York. The program included Shostakovich and Zorn, but the Brahms Piano Trio Op. 8 showed why this group should have the executive pass to the chamber music world – or at least a good recording contract. Pianist Tao, for one, is a composer himself and thus brings the group closer to the music’s inside story than one can typically hope for. What’s especially remarkable is the ease of expression. Energy, technique and musical meaning are all one – and flowing effortlessly.
Ousleyfests – as they are called among New York insiders – are concerts produced by Andrew Ousley’s Death of Classical organizatin in unconventional venues like crypts, catacombs and caves, and on Oct 11, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine underground spaces where bishops and deans are laid to rest. The program was titled Into the Light, featuring works by Caroline Shaw, Juhi Bansal, Andrew Yee, David Lang and Osvaldo Golijov were played by the NOVUS ensemble from Trinity Church. The most successful performance was Golijov’s Tenebrae, which was written partly in response to a Israel-related conflict from years past, but felt like a much more relevant prayer today.
Cleveland Orchestra’s Jan 21 at Carnegie Hall concert under Franz Welser-Most reclaimed Prokofiev’s forever-troubled Symphony No. 2 – and that was indeed a feat. Though the composer described the 1926 symphony as being made of iron and steel, I would call it a tsunami filled with wrecked, random artifacts of the lives and cultures that it has swept away. That may not be a flattering description but the fact that any description is possible with such a chaotic piece is in fact a triumph, again demonstrating the Cleveland Orchestra’s transparency and accuracy, as well as Welser-Most’s x-ray vision. The orchestra’s recording is strangely disappointing. Maybe you need to be in the same room to feel the visceral sweep of the piece.
Grounded, the new opera by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant that I heard Oct 19 at the Metropolitan Opera, was one of the season’s more controversial events. Previously heard at the Washington National Opera, the opera about a modern drone-warfare operator suffering from PTSD had a troublesome birth that gave its migration to the Met an aura of doom. Despite a dazzling, technologically-advanced production by Michael Mayer, some critics dismissed it, some viewers loved it and Met chief Peter Gelb complained that personal aesthetic biases among the opinion makers clouded the piece’s reception. To me, Grounded represents a new operatic mutation, one that’s more artistically cooperative: Here, the composer knew when to step aside and let the production, libretto and individual performers (such as Emily D’Angelo) carry the kind of story that has never been told on the opera stage. It’s not the about the score but the total package. New opera needs to be something other than old opera with updated costumes. Its stories need to be told on their own terms.
Composer Bruno Mantovani need little introduction in Europe but much explanation in the US. He has nothing to do with the light-classics maestro of the 1950s with a similar name but is a fearless beyond-Saariaho composer with a prestigious track record. His latest stage work Voyage d’automne is the true story of French intellectuals who were lured into a 1941 Nazi propaganda event and thus, in their own ways, becoming collaborators. As premiered at Toulouse, the radio broadcast alluded to the piece’s less-realistic psychological realms where, one can argue, opera belongs. Watch for the piece. It will get to the U.S. sooner rather than later.
