Three of my 10 choices for the best events of 2014 were presented in the intimate halls and clubs that are increasingly popular in classical music, an encouraging trend. I begin, though, with an unforgettable production in an enormous space.

Berlin Philharmonic’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’ As part of the White Light Festival, Lincoln Center took over the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory to present the director Peter Sellars’s overwhelming staged version of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin Radio Choir under the conductor Simon Rattle. The inspired vocal soloists, especially the plaintive tenor Mark Padmore as the Evangelist, along with the superb choristers and the musicians of this great orchestra, all courageously gave themselves to this intensely dramatic concept. This was a shattering and profound “Matthew Passion.”

‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ After all the controversy, and the demonstrations from hundreds of protesters, audiences at the Metropolitan Opera were finally able to hear “The Death of Klinghoffer” rather than just hear about it. In the Met’s grimly realistic production, by Tom Morris, the composer John Adams’s opera, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, came across as a searing yet ruminative work that explores a horrific event and the seething tensions behind it. David Robertson conducted magnificently. The only wrong call by Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, was canceling the live in HD telecast as a gesture of compromise to the Anti-Defamation League. Still, he and the Met deserve credit for presenting the opera, which, is, tragically, all too timely.

‘Prince Igor’ Borodin left “Prince Igor” a shambles. He wrote copious amounts of inspired music. But what goes with what? Every performance must be a reclamation job. For the magnificent, updated production that the Metropolitan Opera presented, the ingenious director Dmitri Tcherniakov and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda devised a new edition (call it the Met version) that made “Prince Igor” seem one of the landmarks of Russian opera. The bass Ildar Abdrazakov, in the title role, headed a compelling cast.