by This time last year, the headlines were dominated by bewilderment at the draconian funding cuts imposed on opera companies and ensembles by an apparently careless Arts Council England. A year later, much of that confusion remains and, in some ways, has only grown, while the consequences of those cuts are still emerging.
Manchester-based new music group Psappha have disbanded, while the future of Leeds Lieder was left in doubt, in both cases as a result of the withdrawal of their grants, and although both were organizations that appeared to meet all the criteria of ACE for regionality and “leveling up”.
Meanwhile, it was announced that from next year the Cheltenham music festival, one of the oldest in the UK, would be a pale shadow of its former self. Since then, Creative Scotland and the Arts Council of Wales have also emulated their English counterpart by withdrawing funding from the Lammermuir festival and Mid Wales Opera respectively; the first is a valuable autumn oasis of high-level music creation; A small 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 prominent victim, the English National Opera. The year ends with the company stripped of its musical director, Martyn Brabbins, who resigned when plans to significantly reduce the orchestra became public.
Since plans to forcibly relocate ENO out of London were finally announced, confusion and anger have only intensified: the company’s new base in Manchester looks set to bring only smaller-scale jobs to the city, and that large-scale productions will continue to take place is presented each year at the London Coliseum for a season of four or five months, more or less what is done now. Furthermore, there is still no mention of the company carrying out tours for its performances, a measure that could finally justify its “national” label.
In terms of opera hitting the stage this year, productions of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, staged at ENO in February and Covent Garden in September, led the way; the first, directed by Richard Jones, had a generally mixed reception, the second, staged by Barrie Kosky, is considered a promising start to the Royal Opera’s new cycle. Additionally, at the Coliseum there was Korngold’s own staging of The Dead City, directed by artistic director Annilese Miskimmon herself, superbly directed by Kirill Karabits, and a revival of David Alden’s brilliant 2009 production of Britten’s Peter Grimes as a sharp reminder of much happier times, while the Royal Opera gave new versions of Berg’s Wozzeck, directed by Deborah Warner, with Christian Gerhaher compelling in the title role, and Verdi’s Il Trovatore, vividly presented by Adele Thomas.
Covent Garden also presented three of the most striking new works. Whatever its dramatic flaws, Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence offered an orchestral score of characteristic luminosity, but it was an occasion remembered with sadness, as a few weeks later the composer’s death was announced. The slender fairy-tale simplicity of George Benjamin’s Picture a Day As This was combined with music in which not a note or instrumental color was out of place, while Brian Irvine’s moving depiction of Rosemary Kennedy’s story , Least Like the Other, was brought to London’s Linbury Theater by the Irish National Opera. The Aldeburgh festival also opened with a surprisingly imaginative opera premiere: Sarah Angliss’s Giant (coming to the Linbury next year), while the year’s highlights at Welsh National Opera (another company ending the year without a permanent boss) was Osvaldo’s production. Golijov’s Ainadamar, previously seen in Scotland.
Orchestras used the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth as an opportunity to overdose on his symphonies and concertos, while the year’s other major anniversary, the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death, was also widely celebrated, albeit more quietly. . Unsurprisingly, the BBC Proms did a lot of Rachmaninov, and considerably less of Byrd. However, it was Mahler’s performances, especially Simon Rattle’s performance of the Ninth Symphony in his last British concert as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Aurora Orchestra’s notable memorial performance of the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in a skilfully presented theatrical package, which were some of the most memorable evenings, along with the semi-staged UK premiere of György Kurtág’s Endgame and the weekend of concerts by Iván Fischer and his Festival Orchestra from Budapest. All this in a year in which other great European orchestras were conspicuous by their absence at the Albert Hall.
Conductor Klaus Mäkelä was among the international visitors to the Proms, along with pianist Yuja Wang, as dazzling in Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody as she had been earlier in the year with the LSO in the UK premiere of the concerto that Magnus Lindberg had composed for her.
Wang and Mäkelä, this time with their Oslo Philharmonic, also visited the Edinburgh International Festival, which this year, under the artistic direction of Nicola Benedetti, began to show signs of returning to its former size. In London, the Southbank Centre, once the center of the capital’s musical life, continued its slow decline. Occasional concerts, such as the UK premiere of Heiner Goebbels’ A House of Call and Ligeti’s centenary celebrations, were a reminder of the kind of special events that used to be a regular part of the Southbank programme, but concerts of real note . otherwise, they were scarce.
Truly notable piano recitals were also few and far between, 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 recital in London on his international tour of promotion of its CD release with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. , would have stood out in any year.
The great success of Ólafsson’s Bach album was perhaps the most notable feature of the year’s classical releases. A year ago, the recording industry was still recovering from the impact of Covid and the inevitable limitations it had imposed on new projects, whether studio or concert. Those side effects have all but disappeared, although the shape and emphasis of the industry has changed, almost certainly forever. Studio recordings of large-scale works have become increasingly rare.
What has also changed is listeners’ reliance on CDs, with an increasing portion of the market now dedicated to digital downloads. Although the fraction of recordings released exclusively as downloads is still relatively small, the emergence of Apple’s Classical Music app, which offers high-quality streams of an impressively high proportion of the catalogue, was significantly enhanced by Hyperion’s decision to finally make its works can be transmitted, it has surely accelerated. the step towards listening without discs.
The ecology of classical music and opera in Britain may still be fragile, but there are still things to enjoy and even reasons to be optimistic, if you look hard enough.
• This article was amended on 2/14/23 to clarify that the Oslo Philharmonic was at the EIF with Klaus Mäkelä but not at the Proms, where he conducted the BBCSO.
