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«Our verdict is in: This was the year’s best music»
Our verdict is in: This was the year’s best music
It’s almost 2012 — so naturally, it’s time for a roundup of the best music that 2011
had to offer. Here are the Top 10 albums of the year (and the best in the classical
category) according to The Globe’s music critics.
Elissa Poole’s Picks
- Ann Southam: Returnings —
Eve Egoyan, piano — So different from the joyful minimalism
of her earlier music, the late Ann Southam’s final works for
piano, written for Eve Egoyan, are spare and haunting,
inhabiting a circumscribed world where the expressive resonance of even the simplest
musical element is questioned, and where resolution is always possible but rarely
permanent.
- Hector Berlioz: Nuits d’été;
Handel: Arias — Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano; Philharmonia
Baroque Orchestra, Nicholas McGegan, conductor — The
now-legendary Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang Berlioz’s Nuits d’été in public only once, in
1995, but fortunately the microphones were there to capture that luminous
performance, and it has finally been released. The orchestra may not be as suave as
we’d like, but the singing is in a class all its own.
- Martin Arnold: Aberrare —
Quatuor Bozzini — When is a string quartet not a string
quartet? When it’s a string quartet by Martin Arnold, which
is as likely to conjure a primitive consort of stone flutes or the musical
ruminations of a medieval monk. Live inside this music for a while and consciousness
alters.
- Poesie: Orchestral Songs by Richard
Strauss — Diana Damrau, soprano; Munich Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann,
conductor — Silvery sound, beautiful diction and an extraordinary range of expressive
nuance give soprano Diana Damrau’s captivating performances
of Richard Strauss’s orchestral songs — many of them written
for his wife, with piano accompaniment only — the kind of intimacy we rarely get
outside of chamber music.
- Max Reger: Piano Concerto in F
Minor; Richard Strauss: Burleske in D Minor —
Marc-André Hamelin, piano; Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Ilan Volkov,
conductor — How often do we listen to a late romantic concerto we haven’t heard a
hundred times? Gone are the memory cues; gone the baggage of the canon. And who
better than Marc-André Hamelin to make a formidable case for
Max Reger’s virtuosic, semi-modernist tribute to
Brahms and let listeners decide for themselves where it
fits?
- Béla Bartôk, Richard Strauss,
Edvard Grieg: Violin Sonatas —
Vilde Frang, violin; Michail
Lifits, piano — Vilde Frang plays Bartok with astounding precision, but her performance is as potent as it
is clear. Her instincts are also astute in late romantic repertoire, evident in her
supple phrasing and tonal nuance. No wonder the music industry has its eyes on this
young Norwegian violinist.