“Kinder! macht Neues!” Richard Wagner once scowled—“Children! Make something new!” He was berating fellow composers for reworking old pieces instead of delivering fresh creations. One can only imagine how Wagner would have been exasperated by the contemporary classical world, with its sclerotic fear of the new. Nonetheless, modern music is making headway, ever so gradually. The New York Philharmonic’s inaugural Biennial fell short of its potential, producing no wow-inducing event, but it established a persuasive template and cemented Alan Gilbert’s position as one of the most imaginative of American maestros. Let’s hope that it becomes a permanent institution, exercising a gravitational pull on the rest of the New York schedule.

[#image: /photos/59096053c14b3c606c105be6]

The Metropolitan Opera flailed for much of the year, surviving a summer-long labor crisis and then becoming engulfed in protests over its presentation of John Adams's “The Death of Klinghoffer.” But the Met faces a problem more fundamental than the issue of how it will maintain its generous salaries or respond to the music criticism of Rudolph Giuliani. The house has so little relation to modern life that a politically charged piece like “Klinghoffer” has a disorienting effect on audiences, eliciting bewildered questions that would never be asked of plays, novels, films, or television shows (“How can you put a terrorist onstage?”). In October, the composer Suby Raman published a series of graphs illustrating the severity of the disconnect: after 1950, the Met has presented season after season in which not a single opera by a living composer has been performed. (The longest stretch was from 1974 to 1991.) Alas, the company is hardly exceptional in this regard. Conventional wisdom has long held that programming too much new music is suicidal, yet the L.A. Phil, the boldest of major orchestras in this regard, also happens to be the one in the healthiest financial condition. The institutions that are stuck on repeating the past are, I would guess, condemned to join it.

Here are ten notable performances of 2014, with links to reviews.

January 8th: Gregory Spears’s chamber opera “Paul’s Case,” the most memorable event in last year’s edition of the suddenly indispensable Prototype Festival, succeeded in bringing to dramatic life Willa Cather’s oblique, ambiguous story of a young aesthete on a downward spiral. The tenor Jonathan Blalock was transfixing in the title role; Spears’s score glistened beautifully and eerily around him.

January 12th: Kate Soper’s “Here Be Sirens,” at Dixon Place, was another bracing blast of twenty-first-century music theatre, ringing intricately variegated, at times convulsively funny variations on the siren myth.

January 26th: Iván Fischer, the most radical-minded of conductors, staged a Midnight Music concert in Budapest, seating much of the audience on beanbags in the midst of the orchestra. Earlier in the season, he had defied Viktor Orbán's repressive regime with a staging of his own opera “The Red Heifer,” a sardonic indictment of modern Hungarian anti-Semitism.

March 7th: Amid a blandly conservative Vienna Festival at Carnegie Hall, the Talea Ensemble’s rendition of Pierluigi Billone’s 2001 ensemble piece “Mani.Long,” under the auspices of the Austrian Cultural Forum, honored Vienna’s high-modernist tradition with a magmatic flow of instrumental sound.

March 12th: At the Park Avenue Armory, the young Russian-German pianist Igor Levit made a hypnotic North American début, playing the last three piano sonatas of Beethoven with the wisdom of a player twice his age.

April 10th: The Australian-born composer Liza Lim absorbs the sounds of far-flung cultures without condescension or World Music kitsch. A survey of her works at Miller Theatre, with the International Contemporary Ensemble, was a tour-de-force of rigor and empathy.

August 7th: The twenty-eight-year-old Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a new star of the podium, led a startlingly precise, potent Mahler First with the L.A. Phil, at the Hollywood Bowl.

October 7th: Peter Sellars’s production of the St. Matthew Passion, at the Park Avenue Armory, was an overpowering sermon on the subject of suffering, complicity, and compassion: the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Rundfunkchor Berlin became actors in the drama of Christ’s death.

October 20th: A shamefully misguided, exploitative protest, involving New York politicians who should have known better than to condemn an opera they had not seen, failed to stop New Yorkers from attending, and acclaiming, “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Far from dishonoring the terrorist victim Leon Klinghoffer, the opera has insured that he will not be forgotten.

December 6th and 10th: Meredith Monk’s “On Behalf of Nature,” at BAM, used song, dance, and instrumental composition to evoke the fragile immensity of the natural landscape. A few nights later, Gabriel Kahane’s “The Ambassador,” in the same space, summoned a whirlwind of language and music from the haunted spaces of Los Angeles. On both nights, a single singing voice created a world.

Recordings:

“All the Things You Are”; works of Bach, Gershwin, Kern, Perle, Kirchner, Mompo, Koston; Leon Fleisher (Bridge)

[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/165366563"]

Galina Ustvolskaya, Violin Sonata, Clarinet Trio, Duet; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Markus Hinterhäuser, Reto Bieri (ECM)

Strauss, “Elektra”; Evelyn Herlitzius, Waltraud Meier, Adrianne Pieczonka, Mikhail Petrenko, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Orchestre de Paris (Bel Air Blu-ray)

“Fantasticus”; works of Weckmann, Bertali, Buxtehude, Kerll, Schmeltzer, Vierdanck, Oswald; Quicksilver (Acis)

Sibelius, “Lemminkaïnen Suite,” “The Wood Nymph”; Osmo Vänskä conducting the Lahti Symphony (BIS)

Anna þorvaldsdóttir, “Aerial”; various ensembles, including CAPUT, Iceland Symphony, Nordic Affect (DG)

Ted Hearne, “The Law of Mosaics,” Andrew Norman, “The Companion Guide to Rome”; A Far Cry (Crier Records)

Harrison Birtwistle, Chamber Music; Lisa Batiashvili, Adrian Brendel, Till Fellner, Amy Freston, Roderick Williams (ECM)

Agata Zubel, “Not I”; Zubel, Clement Power conducting Klangforum Wien (Kairos)

Monteverdi, Madrigali, vol. 2; Paul Agnew, Les Arts Florissants (Éditions Arts Florissants)

Ten more:

Milhaud, “L’Orestie d’Eschyle”; Lori Phillips, Dan Kempson, Sidney Outlaw, Sophie Delphis, Brenda Rae, Tamara Mumford, Jennifer Lane, Julianna Di Giacomo, Kristin Eder, Kenneth Kiesler conducting the University of Michigan Symphony, University Choir, Orpheus Singers, and UMS Choral Union (Naxos); Poulenc, Stabat Mater, Sept Répons des Ténèbres; Daniel Reuss conducting the Capella Amsterdam, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (Harmonia Mundi); John Luther Adams, “Become Ocean”; Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony (Cantaloupe); John Adams, “The Gospel According to the Other Mary”; Kelley O’Connor, Tamara Mumford, Russell Thomas, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the L.A. Master Chorale (DG); Mahler, Symphony No. 9; Jascha Horenstein conducting the Vienna Symphony (Pristine Audio); “Stella di Napoli”; Joyce DiDonato, Riccardo Minasi conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Lyon Opera (Warner); Shostakovich, Six Romances on Verses by English Poets, Scottish Ballad, Suite on Poems by Michelangelo; Gerald Finley, Thomas Sanderling conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic (Ondine); Ferdinando Richardson, Complete Works for Harpsichord; Glen Wilson (Naxos); Lully, “Amadis”; Cyril Auvity, Judith van Wanroij, Christophe Rousset leading Les Talens Lyriques (Aparté); “Wagner without Words”; Llŷr Williams (Signum Classics).

Year in review: New Yorker writers look back on 2014.