Too many of the year's best recordings were tombstones. Recording of the Year was a tie between Claudio Abbado's transcendent Bruckner Ninth Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (DG) and Patrice Chereau's production of Strauss' Elektra from the 2013 Aix Festival (BelAir Classiques DVD). Abbado died Jan. 20, depriving the music world of one of its true visionaries, but this live recording of his last-ever performance with the hand-picked orchestra he had groomed for just such a mission was, in the words of some who were there, cosmic, and so it sounds.
Gay director Chereau, by general consent the greatest and most discerning of opera directors, was gravely ill with the lung cancer that claimed him when he was making his Elektra, but that didn't stop him from doing his customary meticulous, searching work. He both gave the opera back its dignity by respecting it on its own terms and found its molten core in the Elektra-Klytemnestra scene lesser directors were glad to play as camp.
Iconic gay composer Benjamin Britten was long dead, but the 2013 Britten Year that recognized the 50th anniversary of his passing spilled over, in recording, into the Opus Arte DVD of his final opera, Death in Venice, in a radiant production by English National Opera. Like the La Scala Peter Grimes of the previous year, and with the same tenor, John Graham-Hall, this Death in Venice took the opera out of Venice and Aldeburgh and into the universal, while also giving us what Britten had envisioned by way of Sam Zaldivar, a dancer worthy of the silent role of Tadzio.
Legendary soprano Magda Olivero, who sang Tosca at the War Memorial in what was to be history-making gay Supervisor Harvey Milk's last night at the opera, herself died, at the age of 104, on Sept. 8. Composer Francesco Cilea came out of retirement to bring Olivero out of early retirement (she married well) to school her in his Adriana Lecouvreur , which became one of her signature roles. Perhaps the finest recording of her as Adriana, live from the 1963 Edinburgh Festival, appeared at year's end, on the aptly named Testament.
Jonas Kaufmann, a sensational Maurizio in Adriana , if not with Olivero, continued showing on record why he's such an exemplary singer. He won a 2014 trifecta for Sony with a glowing Parsifal in the Met's ideal production of the opera, a powerful Schubert Winterreise, and in proof of his versatility, a CD and DVD (slightly different contents) of German popular (semi-classical) songs from the Berlin Christopher Isherwood knew, You Mean the World to Me . Same back at you, Jonas.
Schubert's other major song cycles, Die Schoene Muellerin and Schwanengesang , brought revelatory, mandatory and in some particulars game-changing readings from baritone Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau (Onyx). A year that recognized the centenary of the beginning of WWI in myriad musical ways also was the year of the themed vocal/song recital, and produced none better than the overlooked Behind the Lines (DG), songs of soldiers and war delivered with spell-binding power by soprano Anna Pohaska and pianist Eric Schneider.
Openly gay pianist Stephen Hough headlined a simply stunning year for keyboardists with In the Night (Hyperion), a canny program of night-themed pieces that included his own Sonata No. 2, "notturno luminoso," which any of the following young pianists would do well to learn and perform. Jan Lisiecki made the Chopin Etudes (DG) sound fresh-minted. Alessio Bax matched a Beethoven Moonlight Sonata as individual as Hough's with an arresting Hammerklavier to take its place among the best. The best would also include the one by Igor Levit in his revelatory Beethoven Late Sonatas, and at year's end, the complete Bach Partitas, both for Sony. A pianist of staggering virtuosity, the 26-year-old Levit has already established himself as one of the great minds at the instrument, a successor to Rudolf Serkin in the way most of his age-mates are successors to Vladimir Horowitz. Into that second group, welcome 24-year-old Daniil Trifonov. Martha Argerich, still the greatest pianist playing, inimitably said that Trifonov has it all and more, and doubters need go no farther than The Carnegie Recital (DG), a scorching 2013 performance of Scriabin, Liszt and Chopin. If you hurry, you can find his subsequent, Dec. 9 Carnegie recital online, where you can encounter not just his Liszt and Bach-Liszt, but an ecstatic performance of Beethoven's final sonata, Op. 111.
The Composer Years were Jean-Philippe Rameau's (250th anniversary of his death) and C.P.E. Bach's (300th birth anniversary), and breaking harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani proved nothing short of revelatory in the music of both. His recording of Rameau's complete Pieces de clavecin (Hyperion) makes it clear that he's the equal of Christophe Rousset in this repertoire, and very much his own man. And his Hyperion CD of the second-greatest Bach's Wuerttemberg Sonatas was widely considered the best of the C.P.E. celebrations.
But in the end it was really Papa Bach's year, in recordings at least. The first book of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier got a compellingly fresh outing by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (DG), the second a masterful, concentrated reading from gay early-music wizard Rousset (Aparte). The two books together yielded a brilliant re-visioning by onetime Berkeley music professor, harpsichordist John Butt (Linn), whose Mozart Requiem (Linn), a recreation of the first performance with his ace ensemble the Dunedin Consort, similarly shed new light on the piece and would have been choral recording of the year, had it not been for gay director Peter Sellars' ritualization of Bach's St. John Passion, with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin Radio Chorus under Simon Rattle. It is a worthy, devastating yet unforgettably uplifting successor to the same musicians' St. Matthew Passion .
It's not, strictly speaking, my turf, but the recording that spent the most time on my various players was the SF Symphony's complete West Side Story, one of my favorite pieces, in a performance with unfading visceral, emotional impact.