Best of 2024: Classical music concerts

As always, great concerts have outnumbered great opera productions over a year, and all of our national orchestras can be proud of their record. I’ve sometimes started by celebrating youth, and it’s good to be able to do that in the shape of two competition finales totally satisfying as programmes. The palm, though, goes to two veterans who made me wonder at their ease and natural communication.

In the case of 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt conducting Mahler’s immensely taxing Ninth Symphony, it was the Philharmonia which did all the burning and intensity, while the conductor’s natural sense of evolution saw to the perfect pacing. A miracle (Blomstedt pictured below returning to the platform with leader Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay). After last year’s appearance at the Pärnu Music Festival, coasting slightly on his easy charm, 87-year-old Neeme Järvi was back on form, invigorated by a new international youth orchestra – the youngest player, Armenian cellist Aren Toplaghaltsian, was only 11 – in typically idiosyncratic and characterful performances of Beethoven One and Schubert’s “Unfinished”. As with the National Youth Orchestra, whose Prom this year culminated in an equally original Mahler One under Alexandre Bloch (who will ever forgot the joyous collective shout at the first-movement climax?), no allowances needed to be made for age. The symphony is clearly a work for special occasions: Robert Beale hailed the advent of the Halle's new chief conductor, Kahchun Wong, while remaining in awe of Mark Elder's Manchester farewell. 

Competitions may be a necessary evil – not all world-class musicians have found their route to fame that way – but the finals can be turned to good. The Guildhall’s year of focusing on instrumentalists rather than singers for its gold medal gave us three rare concertos for harp, clarinet and double-bass respectively; the Leeds International Piano Competition, decamping from that city’s under-renovation town hall to nearby Bradford, gave us two evenings of perfectly-contrasted concertos: Bartok 3, Rachmaninov 4 and Beethoven 4, followed the next night by Prokofiev 3 and Brahms 2. The winner, Canadian Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, seemed to me an obvious choice, though not all my colleagues agreed. One thing was abundantly clear: all players seemed totally to one with the wonderful Domingo Hindoyan and his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. I’d love to hear more of their work, but none of London’s orchestras or their chief conductors fell short. The big celebration was for Antonio Pappano, finally leaving the Royal Opera House after glorious years and delivering on every front with the London Symphony Orchestra (pictured above by Mark Allan). I attended the inaugural concert, Alexandra Coghlan the second and Boyd Tonkin the third; it was five stars from two of us and four for the concert with Yuja Wang and Anna Lapwood. And earlier in the year, Pappano and his new orchestra gave us the most sensuous, detailed and exciting Ravel Daphnis et Chloé imaginable. Boyd was knocked out by a Proms special: “in a year of unrelenting global horrors, Britten’s War Requiem – movingly shaped by Pappano, with soloists including Allan Clayton and Natalya Romaniw – has never felt so necessary.”

Outgoing Simon Rattle gave me the biggest never-heard-live-before treat in the shape of Roy Harris's superb Third Symphony, and it's a shame that Francois-Xavier Roth has kiboshed his chances by sending inappropriate messages to colleagues; his programme featuring four recent works including winners from the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme was just the sort of adventure we need in the concert hall. The LSO would no doubt like to see more of the conductor every orchestra wants (and quite a few have already got), Klaus Mäkelä; their first meeting included a feral Sibelius Tapiola and possibly the most impactful Rite of Spring I’ve ever heard (that’s saying something; the team pictured above by Mark Allan). I don’t understand the negativity from some quarters about Mäkelä: he’s a wise head on young shoulders, and while he may not get everything right, or to everyone’s liking – the Proms Petrushka with the Orchestre de Paris was curious, totally redeemed by a blistering Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, eclipsing even a superb one from unfamiliar face on the podium Jader Bignamini and the BBC Symphony Orchestra – several hundred orchestral musicians can’t be wrong.

Other visiting orchestras enriched the Proms and had an equally strong showing at the Edinburgh Festival, where Simon Thompson was deeply moved by Jakub Hrůša and the Bamberg Philharmonic in Suk’s “Asrael” Symphony (he gives a big shoutout for Nicola Benedetti's programming too). The highlight of the Czech Philharmonic/Hrůša Proms visit for me was actually the revelation of Dvořák'’s fascinating Piano Concerto with a big imagination in the shape of Dao Fujita (pictured below with Hrůša and members of the orchestra by Andy Paradise). It was the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko who gave the vital performance of Smetana’s epic Má vlast in the composer’s 150th anniversary year. Magic seems assured every time John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London take the platform. Boyd loved their Prom, especially the “blazing account” of John Adams’s Harmonielehre : “proof that this high-octane, high-impact band-of-all-the-talents doesn’t only shine with obvious crowd-pleasers” (though I’d add that this of all late 20th century works is the one most established as a contemporary classic). Alexandra was similarly enthralled by their Barbican concert in October, with the always phenomenal Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Shostakovich’s extraordinary Second Cello Concerto.

Sheku championed the Cello Concerto by Shostakovich’s colleague Weinberg, waxing more popular by the year, in a concert where inevitably Rachmaninov’s The Bells stole the show in a blistering interpretation from Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra plus Philharmonia Chorus, a top team. That performance was equalled by Edward Gardner and his London Philharmonic: in Rachmaninov anniversary year, the composer’s deep and broad “choral symphony” was always welcome. Less so, you’d think, the Third Piano Concerto, but Leif Ove Andsnes has a unique way with it, and this first half was just as thrilling. Likewise Boris Giltburg’s volatile but always together partnership with Mark Wigglesworth, newly at the helm of the underrated Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (pictured below); I’d have loved all of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker rather than just the second act, but the pairing made for a world-class concert in Plymouth’s Guildhall. Giltburg has been a regular visitor to the Wigmore Hall, and after his brilliant programme in February, he’s embarked on a Beethoven sonatas cycle, always thoughtful. Pavel Kolesnikov twice enchanted here: Bernard Hughes’s top choice was the man in the white suit “giving a miscellaneous first half of Couperin, Messiaen and Ravel run together in a single sequence, which gave way to lovingly-rendered Schubert Impromptus in the second half. A joyful evening.” And I found all the depths I’d hoped for in the last of the final Schubert piano sonatas, only a week before his great mentor and friend Elisabeth Leonskaja stunned in all three.

The biggest impact of all at the Wigmore, though, was Steven Isserlis’s curation of five concerts celebrating anniversary wizard Fauré and his contemporaries. I only heard the first and last live, but the treasury online has been enriching beyond words. Isserlis also masterminded a different sequence at the always enthralling Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, paving the way for the Wigmore Fauré; before he arrived to perform we heard revelatory Saint-Saëns, and I fell in love with the late sonatas for woodwind and piano from some of the brilliant players of Ensemble 360.

We’ve not been so strong on song recitals, but Sebastian Scotney celebrated Brahms from Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber in Oxford. For me, the accolade of greatest Lieder singer goes elsewhere. A voice new to me, Andrè Schuen, mesmerised at Aldeburgh with Julius Drake in a perfect triptych: top Schumann song-cycles flanking the out-of-body experience of Thomas Larcher setting W G Sebald aphorisms in a masterpiece, Unerzählt (Unrecounted). What a team, and at the risk of sounding portentous, this is the new Fischer-Dieskau. There’s not been so much otherwise of the shock of the relatively new, but in terms of the antique I went outside my comfort zone to the Early Music Festival in the unique Estonian coastal town of Haapsalu, a superbly programmed weekend of concerts with the revelation of Anna-Liisa Eller on two Estonian kannels, arpanetta and psaltery, and her partner Taavi Kerikmäe demonstrating for the first time the cembal d'amour, built this year by Latvian instrument maker Kaspars Putriņš on designs for a very significant 1721 model.

This was both educational and food for the soul. So too was a concert of Bach remodelled here, too: an inexhaustible resource. I'll never forget the astounding results of the Goldberg Variations on the accordions of phenomenally gifted Dermot Dunne and Martin Tourish, not even overshadowed at the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival by living legend Abel Selaocoe. And the deepest impact, Mahler Nine notwithstanding, came from Peter Whelan and the Irish Baroque Orchestra in a Bach St Matthew Passion with the best line-up of soloists I’ve ever heard, rivalling their Wigmore Messiah in 2023: Nick Pritchard the most sensitive of Evangelists, and young Hugh Cutting the only countertenor ever to persuade me to do without the mezzo or contralto voice in “Erbarme dich”. Having so nearly got to the end, I realise that women soloists are in the minority, and no women conductors topped the list (though see Opera, where Anja Bihlmaier succeeded Robin Ticciati so well for Glyndebourne's Carmen at the Proms). Three more amends needed in the instrumental and vocal spheres: Louise Alder running the gamut in Strauss's chameleonic Brentano Lieder with Vasily Petrenko and the RPO; a violinist I hadn't encountered before, Karen Gomyo going as deep and ferocious as anyone in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto; and – also in the National Symphony Orchestra's Dublin series – flamenco performer Rebecca Sánchez leaving her Cavan care home post again as part of Jaime Martín's coruscating all-Spanish programme. Finally, the conductor, the vivacious Elim Chan with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the First Night of the Proms, by virtue of Rachel Halliburton's rave for the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto as played by Isata Kanneh-Mason (pictured above by Chris Christodoulou with Chan and members of the orchestra) – yes, that remarkable family is going to hold centre stage for years to come.

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