This new work by the composer and trumpeter Nate Wooley was for quartet, but its primary mood was loneliness. Performed at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on a chilly February night, with Mr. Wooley alongside Susan Alcorn, Mary Halvorson and Ryan Sawyer, it did evince a sense of camaraderie amid gloom, of quiet exaltation and dread in the face of the great beyond.

Addio, we said in March, to Sonja Frisell’s eye-wideningly gargantuan, lovably hoary, undeniably dramatic Met staging of Verdi’s Egyptian classic. After 31 years and nearly 250 performances, it was stepping aside, to be replaced next fall by a Michael Mayer production that will, most likely, involve a lot less stone-styled plaster and pseudo-weathered hieroglyphics. Both will be missed, as will the hordes of often-recalcitrant horses in the Triumphal Scene.

Meredith Monk’s only true opera — an almost entirely wordless, ethereal and lyrical parable of exploration — hadn’t been done since the early 1990s, and, like the other theatrical pieces she’s masterminded, it had never been attempted by new creative forces. Enter Yuval Sharon, a talented director who was entrusted by Ms. Monk with reviving “Atlas.” This he did, in June, with both admirable ambition and essential modesty, and with the tremendous resources of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which paid for the massive sphere, 36 feet in diameter, that seemed to float over the stage and served as both playing space and projection screen.

I had heard about the success of this superstar cellist’s performance of the six Bach solo suites for his instrument at the 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl in 2017. But it just seemed impossible that this intimate, subtle music, played almost without pause for nearly two and a half hours, could scale to such surroundings. But now I’m a believer: When he repeated the feat in June at Millennium Park in Chicago, many thousands of people — including me — were silently riveted putty in Mr. Ma’s hands.