2019
By the numbers:
- total live performances: 33
- distribution of performances by location: uptown (24), midtown (6), downtown (2), “out of town” (1), Brooklyn and elsewhere (0)
- concerts: 20
- operas: 13
- operas not at the Met: 4
- distribution of opera composers: Wagner (4); Mozart (2); Bartók, Gershwin, Glass, Gluck, Michael Gordon, Hannah Lash, Poulenc (1)
- performances featuring work by living composers: at least 6
- performances involving “early music” (let’s say pre-1750): 11
- performances of early music by early music specialists: 7
- performances of Handel’s Messiah: 1
- programs entirely devoted to the Virgin Mary: 2
2019 was a relatively boring year for performances for me. With that said, here are my subjective awards:
Best opera (Met division): Porgy and Bess
Best opera (non-Met division): Acquanetta at Bard
Best opera of the Met’s Ring cycle: Probably Die Walküre?
Least describable opera experience: The Met’s Akhnaten. This was the production with the jugglers and the nude Anthony Roth Costanzo and the enormous, inscrutable spherical vaporwave sun. I enjoyed myself but didn’t quite know what to think. The music doesn’t really deserve any description other than that it was loud and repetitive and there was a lot of it. The jugglers were very good! I felt like I was being hypnotized, but not necessarily in a good way. I don’t know.
Best early music concert: Cappella Pratensis’s performance of Jacob Obrecht’s dense, fascinating Missa Maria zart, which, at around an hour long, is the longest known polyphonic setting of the mass. (I just looked up the Tallis Scholars recording, and Peter Phillips in his notes called it “a masterpiece of sustained and largely abstract musical thought.”) Cappella Pratensis had a full, earthy sound that was ideal for the music, and (in “liturgical reconstruction” style) they chanted the Marian feast propers in a harmonized, lightly elaborated manner that I’ve never heard before but would like to hear more of. I’ve attended a lot of early music concerts with programs of varied music that ended up coming off as scattered and unmemorable, so it was wonderful to hear a program so singularly focused and perfectly executed.
Best surprise: Calmus’s rendition of Schütz’s metrical psalm settings in the Becker Psalter, tucked away in a program consisting mostly of polyphonic music. For context, one of the musical legacies of the Reformation was the compilation of metrical psalters, which consisted of vernacular psalm translations in verse intended to be sung by church congregations, and whose tunes were often contributed by composers better-known for their more elaborate music. (The best-known example in English is probably Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, which includes Tallis’s Canon.) Schütz wrote quite a lot of 4-part chorale settings of Cornelius Becker’s metrical psalms. Being for congregational use, they’re not what you’d call musically fascinating in and of themselves. Hearing these spare, declarative Protestant hymns sung by a small ensemble between portions of a Palestrina mass was stunning—I was thinking about it for days afterward.
Tomorrow I am starting the new year with the Met’s Rosenkavalier. I liked it with Renée Fleming, but will I like it even more without her? We’ll see.
Happy New Year! I hope you all have a very good 2020.