Do you measure a year’s classical music highlights in terms of CD releases, or live concerts, or the new music that emerged? I’m splitting the difference: My Top 10 list for 2011 includes my five favorite concerts in Washington and five CDs of new and recent music (with Charles Ives as the one name from the past).
Concerts:
Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra, May 20, Kennedy Center (Washington Performing Arts Society).
The fabulous Philadelphians declared bankruptcy in April, yet their performance of the Tchaikovsky Fifth was possibly the richest musical experience of the year.
Daniil Trifonov with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, Oct. 8, George Mason University.
The winner of this year’s Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition showed he deserved the prize with a performance of the first concerto that was sometimes disturbing, often brilliant and always compelling.
Wolf Trap Opera gala, Aug. 24, Wolf Trap.
Wolf Trap’s opera companies celebrated its 40th anniversary with a starry gala in which even the weakest links were pretty darn strong, and the strongest — Lawrence Brownlee, Mary Dunleavy — offered old-school excellence that’s as good as you’ll find anywhere in the opera world today.
Marc-André Hamelin, April 29, Strathmore (WPAS).
A thinking man’s piano virtuoso, Hamelin plunged into two centuries of repertory with the ebullience of a child leaping into a swimming pool, freshening a Haydn sonata, elucidating Stefan Wolpe’s challenging passacaglia and adding compositions of his own.
Neeme Jarvi and the National Symphony Orchestra, May 5, Kennedy Center.
The 74-year-old Jarvi is a familiar and sometimes routine figure on international podiums, but the NSO players, always idiosyncratic, responded happily to his authority and savvy, especially in the Shostakovich Sixth.
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