Welcome to our final Classical Choices roundup of 2024! This month’s edition is an extended one, featuring music from some of the year’s most notable recordings and events...
It’s a rare year that doesn’t bring an interesting composer anniversary or two to explore, and 2024 was no exception. Bedřich Smetana and Anton Bruckner were born 200 years ago. Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Gustav Holst were born 150 years ago. Giacomo Puccini and Gabriel Fauré died 100 years ago. There was also a 100-year anniversary for the first classical crossover work, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Concert halls and music festivals around the UK pulled the stops out to give these figures due honour, not least at the BBC Proms. My own favourite tributes included cellist Steven Isserlis’s Fauré-themed Wigmore Hall residency this past autumn, which shone a beautiful spotlight on Fauré’s still rather lesser-spotted chamber output.
Anniversary-themed recordings featured in our Classical Choices series included Smetana’s Má Vlast from Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic (July), who went on to be named Gramophone’s 2024 Orchestra of the Year this Autumn. One further 2024 Gramophone Award-winning album tying in with a composer anniversary was The Great Puccini from tenor Jonathan Tetelman, which brought golden-toned, technically polished fervour to warmly committed orchestral support from the PKF – Prague Philharmonia under Carlo Rizzi, with Tetelman and a top-drawer cast of additional voices including Federica Lombardi. There was also a vibrant period-instrument account of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony from Anima Eterna Brugge under Pablo Heras-Casado.
One living artist whose birthday was marked with much admiration-filled love this year was conductor-composer-pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, who turned 80 on December 21. Pentatone marked his milestone with Grace, a bumper four-CD set bringing together his wide-ranging compositions. I’ve given you the jazzily, playfully exuberant Agregram – written in 1998 to celebrate the 90th birthday of Agnes Albert, friend and patroness of the San Francisco Symphony (where Tilson was Musical Director for 25 years) – for this month’s playlist.
Another major milestone that was amply celebrated in the recordings domain was the 50th season of the world-renowned Takács Quartet, which formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. Now based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, with its founding cellist András Fejér these days playing alongside violinists Edward Dunisberre (himself 31 years in the quartet) and Harumi Rhodes, and violist Richard O’Neill, it released in November the debut recording of Flow, a brand new quartet written for it by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, and earlier in the year an extremely fine Schubert album revisiting two quartets the ensemble had recorded in the past but with different constellations of players: the late, great, ‘heavenly length’ String Quartet No 15 in G major D887, which it last recorded in 1996, and the early-middle-period String Quartet No 8 in B flat major D112, which it had recorded all the way back in 1982.
Sadly 2024 also brought losses, among them the conductors Sir Andrew Davis fm (1944-2024), Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024) and pianist Maurizio Pollini (1942-2014), and most tragically, much-loved and critically acclaimed coloratura soprano Jodie Devos, aged nnnn 35, to breast cancer.
Turning back now to the chamber domain, this was the year that Quatuor Ébène officially waved goodbye to its cellist for almost 25 years, Raphaël Merlin, who left to pursue his flourishing conducting career. His album-shaped send-off was a jazz one, Milestones. His replacement, already looking and sounding very much at home in the group, is Yuya Okamoto.
Moving on to attention-worthy orchestral releases, this year saw an auspicious debut on Deutsche Grammophon from Joana Mallwitz, inaugurated in 2023 as Chief Conductor of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin – thus becoming the first woman to become a chief conductor of a major Berlin orchestra. For their debut together on disc, she chose the symphonies of Kurt Weill, and the resultant colourfully multi-faceted, momentum-filled accounts make a compelling case for these under-performedworks.
London’s concertgoers meanwhile welcomed Sir Antonio Pappano into his new role as Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra – a tenure he kicked off via a pair of magnificent season-opening performances in the orchestra’s Barbican home. Their readings of English repertoire – Elgar and Holst – were especially exciting, and equally in the recordings domain they were flying high with English repertoire, releasing powerful accounts of Elgar’s and Walton’s cello concertos with Gautier Capuçon. Another strong LSO release for 2024 was with its Conductor Laureate Sir Simon Rattle – the second in their live series together of Janáček operas, Katya Kabanova with soprano Amanda Majeski. Incidentally, one further celebration hosted by the Barbican this autumn was the 100th birthday of the BBC Singers, saved from disbandment last year after a huge public campaign forced the BBC into a u-turn, allowing them instead to be the stars of a concert whose many guest collaborators included cellist and vocalist Abel Selaocoe, whose own autumn included giving London one of its most zinging concerts of the year, bringing his Sirocco project with Manchester Collective to Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Sticking with choral, strong 2024 releases in this genre included two major works given the period-instrument treatment: in May, the first-ever period-instrument recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, courtesy of the Gabrieli Consort and Players under Paul McCreesh, their gut strings and soft brass bringing a new, magical luminosity to its transcendental moments, and tenor Nicky Spence leaping out of the stereo as Gerontius; then at year’s end, a Mozart Requiem from Pygmalion under Raphaël Pichon which doesn’t just represent a wonderful mix of warmth, weight, brightness, clarity, drama and momentum, but enterprisingly also has lesser-known Mozart works dotted between its movements.
Back to the chamber domain, and this was a year of swings and roundabouts for violinist Hilary Hahn – on the one hand having to withdraw from concerts in order to heal from a double punched-nerve injury, but on the other hand carrying off Gramophone’s 2024 Solo Instrumental and Recording of the Year awards for her Ysaÿe solo violin sonatas. Over to piano, and Bertrand Chamayou released not one but two attention-grabbing albums: CAGE2, a showstopper of a solo recital bringing together 20 dance-inspired pieces for prepared piano written during the 1940s by John Cage – surely one of the most creative and surprising releases of 2024; and also Mendelssohn, a duo album presenting Mendelssohn’s cello sonatas alongside 20th century pieces following in Mendlessohn’s footsteps, Chamayou in close, poetic and elegantly virtuosic partnership with his longstanding friend, cellist Sol Gabetta.
Young artists were as usual the source of much recorded gold in 2024, significant amounts of which turned up in Classical Choices. However, by no means not all of it. Quatuor Agate, for instance, didn’t only release the magnificent Brahms quartets debut recording which landed them in April playlist here – it also appeared on Quatuor Ébène violinist Gabriel Le Magadure’s first solo album, with pianist Frank Braley, for a superlative reading of Chausson’s strange and wonderful Concert for violin, piano and string quartet. Another chamber ensemble going from strength to strength this year was Trio Concept, formerly Trio Chagall, which in the summer won the Verbier Festival Academy’s Prix Yves Paternot as its most promising member of the year, then in the autumn was both announced as a 2025/2026 ECHO Rising Star, and released its first recording – an EP on the Verbier Festival Academy’s brand new label which has been conceived simultaneously as a platform for its promising young artists, and for the young sound engineers receiving training on its prestigious Audio Recording Programme.
Other young artist recordings I wished I could have squeezed in as they appeared included Alle Menschen werden Schwestern (All people will become sisters), an engaging programme from cellist and pianist sisters Anouchka and Katharina Hack, presenting works by sister and sibling composers alongside joint improvisations, with its title work a piece composed especially for them by Ukrainian composer Marina Baranova. Another was Echoes, a second album from violinist Coco Tomita – 2020 winner for the BBC Young Musician Strings Category, partnered as before by pianist Simon Callaghan, presenting a wide array of lyrically performed late nineteenth and twentieth century repertoire, rounded off with a beautiful duet with her younger sister Yume of the traditional Irish song, O Danny Boy. Also another stunning programme from violist Timothy Ridout, celebrating the legacy of Lionel Tertis.
Then away from strings, recorder player Lucie Horsch released The Frans Bruggen Project, performing on 14 historic recorders made between the 1680s and 1740s from the collection of the legendary recorder virtuoso and early music pioneer Frans Bruggen – recorded under the trickiest conditions imaginable, because for preservation reasons the instruments couldn’t be played for longer than 3 minutes at any one time. The resultant recording, though, is a kaleidoscopic triumph.
Perhaps the young artist whose name was most frequently on everybody’s lips this year, though, was Korean pianist Yunchan Lim. It was 2022 when, aged 18, Lim became the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, displaying an astonishingly mature and distinctive combination of artistry and technique for one so young. 2024 then became the year which saw him explode onto the concert and recording landscape, with sell-out performances, the release of his first recording on Decca – the Chopin Etudes opp. 10 and 25 – finishing the year as Apple Music’s most-played classical album of 2024, and awarded both Gramophone’s Piano Album of the Year and Young Artist of the Year.
Looking ahead, I have a hunch that one young artist set to have a head-turning 2025 is violinist Maria Dueñas. Not only will February see her release an album presenting the most songfully distinctive, non-exercise-y set of Paganini Caprices I’ve ever heard, but the year will also bring the general release of a film in which she both plays and makes her acting debut, Measures for a Funeral directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, whose fact-and-fiction-blending narrative follows a young academic as she uncovers the forgotten story of Canadian virtuoso violinist Kathleen Parlow; and the good news for music-lovers is that this is a film in which music doesn’t play second fiddle to the performance, because we get to see Dueñas play two full movements of the Halvorsen Violin Concerto (of which Parlow was the dedicatee) with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
For now though, enjoy listening back on the year that was, and we’ll be back with more playlists in 2025!
