Passion, New and Old

‘Adriana Lecouvreur’ The Metropolitan Opera swept in 2019 with a true gala performance: this Cilea potboiler, in a straightforwardly sumptuous David McVicar production conducted by a spirited Gianandrea Noseda. Anna Netrebko was commanding yet tender in the title role, one of her best parts to date. (She added another to that pantheon in London in March, with a fervent Leonora in Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”) Anita Rachvelishvili smoldered at the Met as Adriana’s malignant enemy; Piotr Beczala elegantly trumpeted as the man desired by them both. It was old-fashioned spectacle, in the best way.

Esa-Pekka Salonen After shocking the classical world with the announcement that he’d be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony, this widely admired conductor and composer — who had previously indicated he was firmly out of the running for a new podium position — came to California in January to lead his new band. The charged, time-crossing program of works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Strauss and Sibelius, played with unified commitment, boded well.

‘Columbia Icefield’ This new work by the composer and trumpeter Nate Wooley was for quartet, but its primary mood was loneliness. Performed at Pioneer Works in New York City on a chilly February night, with Wooley alongside Susan Alcorn, Mary Halvorson and Ryan Sawyer, it did evince a sense of camaraderie amid gloom, of quiet exaltation and dread in the face of the great beyond.

‘Aida’ Addio, we said in March, to Sonja Frisell’s eye-wideningly gargantuan, lovably hoary, undeniably dramatic Met staging of Verdi’s Egyptian classic. After 31 years and nearly 250 performances, it was stepping aside, to be replaced next fall by a Michael Mayer production that will, most likely, involve a lot less stone-styled plaster and pseudo-weathered hieroglyphics. Both will be missed, as will the hordes of often-recalcitrant horses in the Triumphal Scene.

‘Atlas’ Meredith Monk’s only true opera — an almost entirely wordless, ethereal and lyrical parable of exploration — hadn’t been done since the early 1990s, and, like the other theatrical pieces she’s masterminded, it had never been attempted by new creative forces. Enter Yuval Sharon, a talented director who was entrusted by Monk with reviving “Atlas.” This he did, in June, with both admirable ambition and essential modesty, and with the tremendous resources of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which paid for the massive sphere, 36 feet in diameter, that seemed to float over the stage and served as both playing space and projection screen.

Yo-Yo Ma I had heard about the success of this superstar cellist’s performance of the six Bach solo suites for his instrument at the 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl in 2017. But it just seemed impossible that this intimate, subtle music, played almost without pause for nearly 2 1/2 hours, could scale to such surroundings. But now I’m a believer: When he repeated the feat in June at Millennium Park in Chicago, many thousands of people — including me — were silently riveted putty in Ma’s hands.

‘Oedipe’ During an especially strong Salzburg Festival this summer, including a poignant “Alcina” with Cecilia Bartoli, this was unforgettable: George Enescu’s rarely performed Oedipus opera, a perfect match for the director Achim Freyer’s surreal, symbol-laden, carefully childlike style. The stage was covered in his signature faux-naïve chalk drawings — and puppets, giant rag dolls, primary colors, skull masks, the juxtaposition of elongated and squat figures, expressionistically bold makeup and glacial movement. They all conjured a fairy-tale nightmare, while Ingo Metzmacher expertly unleashed the Vienna Philharmonic’s full radiance.

‘Denis & Katya’ After “4.48 Psychosis,” Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s brutal operatic study of mental illness, impressed in New York in January, expectations were high for their new piece, the highlight of Opera Philadelphia’s O19 festival in September. Written for two singers and four cellos, and performed on a nearly bare stage, “Denis & Katya” was a stark yet sensitive study of the voices surrounding a real-life tragedy: the death (possibly at the hands of Russian security forces) of two teenage lovers holed up with weapons in a cabin in 2016. Never didactic, it nevertheless suggested, through tense, delicate music, musings on language, storytelling, social media and artistic ethics.

‘Les Indes Galantes’ It could have gone so, so wrong. A French Baroque opera that puts an aesthetic gloss on colonial encounters, refitted with street choreography: a recipe for awkwardness, at best. That it was instead one of the freshest, most charismatic and poignant performances I’ve ever seen speaks to the conceptual focus of Clément Cogitore, an artist and filmmaker making his debut as a stage director, and Bintou Dembélé, a pioneer of French hip-hop dance and to the keen instincts of Stéphane Lissner, the leader of the Paris Opera, where I saw it in October). The cast of singers and dancers was superb, led vibrantly by the conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and his Cappella Mediterranea ensemble.

‘Requiem’ After leading an intense “Idomeneo” in Salzburg — the latest in a slew of recent coups at that festival — Teodor Currentzis did it again. In November at the Shed, this Greek-born, Russian-incubated conductor and MusicAeterna — the orchestra and choir of estimable passion and cultlike devotion to Currentzis — brought both grace and literally spine-tingling ferocity to Verdi’s Requiem, a work that even in good performances can have an audience checking its watches. An accompanying film by Jonas Mekas, the nonagenarian avant-gardist who died in January, suffered from some banal, repetitive imagery, but MusicAeterna made a stylish impact on its own, even given the traces of amplification required by the looming space.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .