It's usually not a stretch to bring weekly news of a classical recording featuring a gay composer, performer or subject, but 2016 yielded the most gay-everything new composition and recording of our young century, Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard (Harmonia Mundi). Shepard, its far-too-soon expired subject, lives on in the hearts of LGBTs, and this profound secular cantata-oratorio augurs to keep the memory alive forever.
Johnson, out creator and director of the superb chamber chorus Conspirare, has fashioned a work of historical moment, high topicality and imagination, merging music of a wide range of genres into a piece with a devastating dramatic arc. Other choruses are already performing it, but the musicians for whom Johnson wrote this remarkable music perform it as if all of our lives depend on it, as increasingly they do.
Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you, a haunting cantata for (very high) soprano and orchestra, set to Paul Griffith's remarkable text using only the 400-plus words spoken by Shakespeare's Ophelia, yielded one of the year's top records, with Andris Nelsons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Soprano Barbara Hannigan went on to perform it in the world's music capitals. (You should lean on MTT.) Abrahamsen also took "song title of the year" with the name of his new concerto for piano left-hand, Left, alone . There hasn't been a commercial recording yet, but you can hear the premiere, with out pianist Alexandre Tharaud, on YouTube.
In my eons as a music critic, I've rarely seen a single recording make everyone's "Best of" list, but this year Daniil Trifonov's Transcendental (DG), a recording of all of Liszt's solo-piano etudes, has done just that. The astounding pianist seems one of those musicians that comes from another planet, to which he offers us a peek in this truly transcendental recital. If we're extra nice, maybe someday he'll take us back there with him.
If I'm allowed to go on loving swishy Chopin under the new regime, I promise I'll limit myself to the mazurkas. I'll be altogether content with the astonishingly good set by Pavel Kolesnikov (Hyperion).
It was hard to imagine Andris Nelsons maintaining the standards of his towering recording of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony in the Boston Orchestra's Life under Stalin series, but he followed it this year with searching accounts of the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth (DG). If you want a preview of life under a Russian autocracy, ask a Latvian like Nelsons, who's distracting himself from Putin's stink-eye on his homeland by leading most of the world's greatest orchestras, superbly.
Handel's operas are now such an omnipresence in the music world that you can buy just about any Handel recording, of which there were gobs in 2016, confident of a strong performance. Decca's Arminio was a hit you don't want to miss. If you like vocal superstars and empty, mocking European opera productions, run, don't walk for Decca's Giulio Cesare, but don't say you weren't warned. Two stunning new DVDs of Alcina will be reviewed very soon. Don't go away.
Dmitri Tcherniakov's brilliant Parsifal for Berlin (BelAir DVD/Blue-ray) is probably the best Wagner opera production I know. Cavalleria Rusticana is a piece I'd hoped I'd heard the last of three decades ago. But the new Salzburg production (Sony, paired with Pagliacci ), with Christian Thielemann working his magic in the pit and Jonas Kaufmann at his greatest, found me crawling back.
French soprano Sabine Devielhe was out of this world with her Mozart: The Weber Sisters recital disc (Erato) before going off to have a baby. Her musical partners, Rafael Pichon and his marvelous early-music ensemble Pygmalion, were also brilliant all over the place, knocking off one of the most adventurous CDs of the year with Rheinmaedchen (Harmonia Mundi).
The goodbyes of 2016 were painful, but the valedictory recording of the late, great Nicholas Harnoncourt, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (Sony), made the most of it. No one was better at this strange, monumental score than Harnoncourt, who recorded it several times. This was with his beloved Concentus Musicus Wien, just as he wanted to hear it, and it properly crowned his career.
Rising harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani weighed in with an important reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations, now one of the most recorded pieces of keyboard music, for DG. But he's been such a perfect prick on social media, and by all accounts to his SF audience this year, that as we shake our booties on the way out the door of 2016, we're sayin', "See ya next time."