by This time last year, the headlines were mostly concerned with the huge funding cuts Arts Council England had seemingly unheeded, to opera companies and ensembles. A year later, much of that disparity still exists, and has only increased in some ways, with the consequences of those cuts still unfolding.
Manchester-based new music group Psappa has disbanded, and the future of Leeds Lieder has been called into question, in both cases as a result of their grant being withdrawn, and despite both being organizations that appeared to meet all ACE’s criteria for with regionalism and “leveling up”.
Meanwhile it was announced that the Cheltenham music festival, one of the longest established in the UK, would be a pale shadow of itself from next year. Since then, too, Creative Scotland and the Arts Council of Wales have emulated their English counterparts by withdrawing funding from the Lammermuir festival and Mid Wales Opera respectively, the former an autumnal oasis of musicality. first class and highly regarded, second imaginative, a small-scale touring company committed to bringing opera to those parts of Wales and its borders that no other company can reach.
Uncertainty continued over the future of ACE’s most notable victim, English National Opera. The year ends with the company cutting its music director, Martyn Brabbins, who resigned when plans to significantly downsize the orchestra were announced.
Since plans to move ENO’s executive out of London were finally announced, confusion and anger have grown: the company’s new Manchester base appears to bring only smaller-scale work to the city, and with full-scale productions. every year at the Coliseum in London in a season of four or five months, more or less what he is doing now. In addition, there is still no mention of the company touring its stages, a move that could finally justify its “national” epithet.
As for the opera that hit the stage in the current year, performances of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, presented at ENO in February and Covent Garden in September, led the way, the former, directed by Richard Jones to a generally mixed reception, the latter. , staged by Barrie Kosky, was considered a promising start to the Royal Opera’s new cycle. Otherwise at the Coliseum there was artistic director Annilese Miskimmon’s own staging of Korngold’s The Dead City, superbly directed by Kirill Karabits, and a revival of David Alden’s brilliant 2009 production of Britten’s Peter Grimes as a poignant reminder of much older times. happy, and the Royal Opera brought new versions of Berg’s Wozzeck, directed by Deborah Warner, with a very strong Christian Gerhaher in the title role, and Verdi’s Il Trovatore, vividly presented by Adele Thomas.
Covent Garden also presented three of the most significant new works. Regardless of its dramatic shortcomings, Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence offered an orchestral score of expertise, but it was an event remembered with sadness, as the composer’s death was announced a few weeks later. The stark, fairy-tale simplicity of George Benjamin’s Picture A Day Like This was matched with music where not a note or instrumental color was out of place, and Brian Irvine’s moving rendition of Rosemary Kennedy’s story, Least Like the Other. to the Linbury theater in London at the Irish National Opera. The Aldeburgh festival also opened with the premiere of a wonderfully imaginative opera – Sarah Angliss’s Giant (coming to Linbury next year) – and the highlight of the year at Welsh National Opera (another company that ended the year without a permanent leader) was Osvaldo . Ainadamar Golijov, previously seen in Scotland.
Orchestras took the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninov’s birth as an opportunity to overdose on his symphonies and concertos, and the year’s other significant anniversary, the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death, was also widely celebrated. The BBC Proms probably did a lot of Rachmaninov, rather less of Byrd. There were, however, Mahler performances, notably Simon Rattle’s account of the Ninth Symphony in his last concert in Britain as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Aurora Orchestra’s stunning performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in a theater package presented to quick, that it was among the highlights of the night – along with the half-stage UK premiere of György Kurtág’s Endgame and a weekend of concerts with Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. All this in a year where other major European orchestras were conspicuous by their absence at the Albert Hall.
Klaus Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic, however, were among the visitors to the Proms, bringing with them soloist Yuja Wang, as stunning in Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody as she was earlier in the year with the LSO in the UK premiere of concerto Magnus Lindberg composed for her.
Wang and the Oslo orchestra also visited the Edinburgh international festival, which began this year, under the artistic leadership of Nicola Benedetti, showing signs of returning to its former status. In London, the Southbank Centre, once the heart of the capital’s music scene, continued its slow decline. Occasional concerts, such as the UK premiere of Heiner Goebbels’ A House of Call, and Ligeti’s 100th anniversary celebrations, were a reminder of the kind of special events that used to be a regular part of the Southbank programme, but concerts were really important. the opposite was rare.
There weren’t many great piano recitals, either, but Steven Osborne’s Rachmaninov evening at the Wigmore Hall, Emanuel Ax’s Schubert and Liszt at the Chipping Campden festival and Vikingur Ólafsson’s London recital in his international tour promoting his CD release of Goldberg Variations developed by Bach. , which would stand out in any year.
The success of Bach Ólafsson’s disc was perhaps the most striking aspect of the year’s classical releases. A year ago, the recording industry was still recovering from the impact of Covid, and the inevitable restrictions it placed on new projects, whether based in the studio or in concerts. Those knock-on effects have now all but disappeared, although the shape and emphasis of the industry has changed, almost certainly forever. Studio recordings of large-scale works have become extremely rare.
What has also changed is listeners’ reliance on CDs, with digital downloads now taking an increasing share of the market. Although the fraction of recordings released exclusively as downloads is still relatively small, the emergence of the Classic Apple Music app has certainly accelerated, offering high-quality streams of a surprisingly high proportion of the catalog which was greatly contributed to by Hyperion’s decision to make some works streamable in the end. The move towards disc-free listening.
The ecology of classical music and opera in Britain may still be fragile, but there are still things to enjoy and even reasons for optimism, if you look hard enough.
