The biggest classical music events of 2024 and why they mattered

Classical music has been on the front lines in a year marked by division and distraction, protest and intolerance, war and suffering. A pro-Palestinian UCLA student encampment fell under violent attack in April on the same day that, just across the quad, the ambitious Hear Now festival of Los Angeles new music held the last day of its four-concert series. The concluding work turned out to be George Lewis’ “Lonnie and Lonie,” a double concerto that found common musical ground for two uncles with opposing views of the world.

Meanwhile, youth orchestras demonstrated that kids from both sides of a divided Venezuela could work together in a children’s symphony; the same with young musicians from Israel and surrounding Arab countries and territories in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

The first to bring a sense of community after the U.S. presidential campaigns were the new music ensemble Brightwork on election night and Wild Up in a series of weekend “Democracy Sessions.” Both ended in meditative peace. It’s been a consequential, demanding year.

An L.A. Phil year

In January, Frank Gehry turned his incomparable Walt Disney Concert Hall into a new-fangled immersive 21st-century Wagner shrine with a set he designed to give Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and singers wondrous expressive free rein in a staged production of “Das Rheingold.” In the spring, Dudamel remounted the remarkable L.A. Phil production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” with Deaf West Theatre and took it, kit and kaboodle, to Europe. Over the summer, the orchestra got a new president and chief executive, Kim Noltemy, and Dudamel hosted an international youth festival. By fall, Dudamel and band were back on the road for Carnegie Hall’s opening night gala. More recently, the L..A. Phil mounted an astonishingly ambitious new music marathon, “Noon to Midnight.”

Esa-Pekka in Sad Francisco

In March, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen performed John Adams’ “Naïve and Sentimental Music” on a San Francisco Symphony tour to Disney Hall, offering the buoyantly best evidence yet for considering this orchestral score among the select few great American symphonies. Back in San Francisco, Salonen led a monumental performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, showing what his orchestra can be. It received Grammy nominations for its recording of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Adriana Mater.” Alas, the blinkered SFO board has disgracefully not supported Salonen’s transformative vision. He will depart at the end of this season.

A Yuval Sharon surge

This has been the year that the 45-year-old L.A.-based opera director rose to the top.

He mesmerized an avid audience at Detroit Opera with John Cage’s “Europeras 3 & 4.” He created the opera of the year, “The Comet/Poppea,” a new work by George Lewis that is ingeniously performed simultaneously with a Monteverdi classic for the Industry, the experimental L.A. company that Sharon co-founded. He accepted the Metropolitan Opera’s invitation to direct the upcoming Wagner productions of “Tristan und Isolde” and the “Ring” cycle.

He published his thought-provoking “A New Philosophy of Opera,” an indispensable handbook for making opera matter in the 21st century.

Ojai moments

Pianist Mitsuko Uchida opened this year’s Ojai Music Festival, of which she was artistic director, with Schoenberg’s “Six Little Piano Pieces,” Opus 19. The third is a mere nine bars lasting less than a minute. Uchida stopped time, opening vistas of a universe full of starry galaxies. Her Mozart amazed too. Ojai also introduced the debutante of the year, accordionist Ljubinka Kulisic, a purveyor of wow.

Unforgettable festival

The Salzburg Festival does it all, this year more than ever. Opera doesn’t get any better than Peter Sellars’ dazzling production of “The Gambler,” the revelation of Mieczysław Weinberg’s neglected “The Idiot” or the sheer perfection of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” conducted with dug-in profundity by Teodor Currentzis. But more important, the global picture that this Austrian city brings to its vast array of events demonstrates how great artists from all parts of a warring world can practice cultural diplomacy on an exalted level.

POP pops up

Pacific Opera Project, L.A.’s goofiest opera company, has never been goofier nor made goofiness so radiant as in its revival of a super-obscure 19th-century satire, Antonio Cagnoni’s “Don Bucefalo.” The company also showed an unexpected serious side, remounting its production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” sung in English and Japanese.

Wild Up wild ups

Wild Up questions the orchestra status quo, and founder and music director Christopher Rountree stayed the course in his indefatigable mission to promote the music of Julius Eastman. That included the latest exuberant Eastman recording, which is nominated for a Grammy, and the orchestra’s European debut at Ruhrtriennale in Germany with an Eastman program, which as heard on a radio broadcast conveyed off-the-charts exuberance.

Kronos goodbye and hello

The Kronos Quartet said farewell to two core members, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt, at the group’s annual San Francisco festival in June. These two inner voices of the quartet have been crucial to more than 1,000 new pieces, which have changed chamber music the world over. The new Kronos — with its founder, David Harrington, and three young colleagues (Paul Wiancko and new members Gabriela Díaz and Ayane Kozasa) — made its debut in Europe in the fall.

New life for old movie theaters

The San Diego Symphony finally has a concert hall worthy of the excellent orchestra and its exciting Venezuelan music director, Rafael Payare, thanks to the renovation of its century-old former movie palace. Meanwhile the Sierra Madre Playhouse, built for the silents, has become the L.A. area’s newest performing arts center, where Wild Up will be in residence.

New life for an old parking lot

The Colburn School in downtown L.A. broke ground on the Gehry-designed Colburn Center, a 1,000-seat concert hall at 2nd and Olive streets (site of a parking lot that once belonged to The Times). The new hall promises to further enliven Grand Avenue as an arts destination.

‘Distracted Tymes’

Thomas Tomkins’ “A Sad Paven for These Distracted Tymes” was written 375 years ago. The only attention-thieving screens that the Elizabethan Welsh composer could have known would have been decorative barriers. But this sweet and yearning six-minute pavan, written for an ensemble of viols, and the title track on the gorgeous new recording of the Ricercar Consort, bridges centuries. It nothing else, it is the timeliest release of the year.