For the major companies, perhaps, this year has provided the lull before the storm, a chance to take stock and raid the archives for the deluge of Beethoven releases and rereleases that is sure to come in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Certainly the number of truly outstanding new recordings seemed lower than usual, and the proportion of those coming from what used to be thought of as the major labels was lower still.
Opera seems to have been the most serious casualty of this reining back, and it’s hard to think of a single popular opera that received a worthwhile new recording during the year. Significant stage works, though, were still unearthed; Sardanapalo, the rediscovered single act that is all that exists of Liszt’s shot at composing a grand opera in the mould of Meyerbeer, was perhaps the most important, while Pascal Dusapin’s bleak, haunting Penthesilea from 2015 clearly deserves to be performed much more widely.
The year’s most significant anniversaries featured Berlioz (the 150th of his death), Offenbach and Clara Schumann (the 200ths of their birth), and all resulted in valuable new recordings – François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles in period instrument performances of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy and Symphonie Fantastique; Offenbach’s La Périchole in Palazzetto Bru Zane’s sumptuously documented French opera series, and Isata Kanneh-Mason’s survey of Schumann’s piano music.
Core repertory orchestral releases of note remained few and far between.
There were a couple of outstanding recordings featuring the Lucerne Festival Orchestra – a two-disc Bruckner set conducted by Claudio Abbado, which included the last performance he ever gave, and an all-Strauss album under Abbado’s Lucerne successor, Riccardo Chailly – but other celebrated orchestral partnerships proved disappointing, such as Kirill Petrenko’s low-key reading of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, and Christian Thielemann’s bombastic Schumann cycle with the Staatskapelle Dresden. But closer to home, two important symphony series were completed – Andrew Manze’s Vaughan Williams and Martyn Brabbins’ Tippett – and maintained high standards to the end.
There were plenty of smaller-scale treasures, though – glorious lieder singing from Stéphane Degout in Brahms and Schumann, a second instalment of Christian Gerhaher’s Schumann series, and exuberant Grieg from Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn. There were a wealth of exemplary piano discs, too: Lucas Debargue’s Scarlatti, Francesco Piemontesi’s Schubert, Steven Osborne and Yevgeny Sudbin’s late Beethoven and Cédric Tiberghien’s late Liszt were just a few of them. New music abounded, especially from the smaller specialist companies, led by NMC’s continuing support for British composers including Howard Skempton, David Fennessy, Erika Fox, Joanna Baillie and Sam Hayden, while two newer labels went from strength to strength – Philip Thomas’s survey of Morton Feldman’s piano music was Another Timbre’s standout release of the year, while All That Dust’s mix of CD and digital-download releases included vocal works by Cassandra Miller and an alarmingly vivid binaural recording of Stockhausen’s Kontakte.
Andrew Clements’ top 10 classical releases 2019
4 Christian Tetzlaff: Beethoven and Sibelius Concertos
5 András Schiff: Schubert Sonatas and Impromptus
8 Rachel Podger: Bach Cello Suites
9 Holliger and Kurtág: Zwiegespräche
10 Ensemble Diderot: Paris & London
