Year in Review

The big news on the local classical music scene was the appointment of Jaap van Zweden as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Formerly a virtuoso violinist, the outgoing Dutchman doesn't take over until September 2008, but his first concerts as music director-designate suggested this could become one of the hottest conductor-orchestra partnerships anywhere.

But then, earlier this month, came the surprising news that Fred Bronstein, DSO president and CEO since 2002, is leaving to head the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Dallas Opera general director Karen Stone, who was expected to lead the company into the new Winspear Opera House in 2009, surprised the opera community by stepping down with no other job in hand. After a quarter-century, and many memorable performances, Walden Chamber Music shut down its Dallas concert series.

And it was a year of personal losses, deaths including singers Luciano Pavarotti and Beverly Sills; cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich; former DSO conductors Walter Hendl, Donald Johanos and James Rives Jones; and acoustician Russell Johnson, mastermind of Dallas' Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

Darnell Renee / Special to DMN

Conductor Claus Peter Flor

1 Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden, Nov. 2 – The DSO has had quite a year of great concerts. A fall festival of the nine Beethoven symphonies got superb performances from conductors Gilbert Varga and Markus Stenz, but music director-designate Jaap van Zweden fairly electrified the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Wow.

Michael Ainsworth / DMN

Rod Gilfry and Ruth Ann Swenson in The Merry Widow

2 Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Claus Peter Flor, Sept. 20 – The DSO wasn't entirely together in the first evening's performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, but from the first notes the orchestra's principal guest conductor set an intensely personal stamp on the score. By Saturday it was a white-hot interpretation never to be forgotten. That the DSO isn't renewing Mr. Flor's contract is mind-boggling.

3 The Dallas Opera: The Merry Widow, Nov. 30 – Franz Lehár's operetta was served up in one of the best productions the local company has mounted in recent memory. Director Candace Evans had a flawless sense of timing, and even the slightest characters had real personalities. With a superb cast led by Ruth Ann Swenson and Rod Gilfry, with gloriously opulent costumes, it was a joy start to finish.

Rick Moon / Special to DMN

Radu Lupu

4 Radu Lupu, Jan. 31 – Four decades after he took first prize in the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, the grizzled Romanian is one of the most magical musicians alive. Presented by the Cliburn Foundation, he conjured up amazing sounds and effects in Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Debussy.

Darnell Renee / Special to DMN

Sharon Isbin

5 Orpheus Chamber Singers, June 18 –Dallas' world-class professional chamber choir is a pretty sure bet on every year's top 10 list. The group made particularly gorgeous sounds in the sumptuous acoustics of the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, opening a regional convention of the American Guild of Organists.

6 Mimir Chamber Music Festival, July 5 – Combining a concentrated summer camp for young musicians with a faculty concert series, Texas Christian University's Mimir Festival provides some of the area's finest chamber-music performances. Once again, it was hard to choose just one, but an all-Beethoven program was the most consistently probing and finely finished.

Dominic Bracco II / Special to DMN

Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya

7 Sharon Isbin, March 6 – The American guitarist certainly validated her renown in authoritative, suavely nuanced accounts of feel-good Spanish and Latin-American music as well as pieces composed for her by Tan Dun, John Duarte and Leo Brouwer. Presented by the Dallas Guitar Society.

Mike Stone / Special to DMN

Gina Browning in Voices of Change

8 Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Sept. 14 – One keeps wanting more interpretive depth from Mr. Harth-Bedoya, but he has turned a formerly roughhewn ensemble into an orchestra comparable to the Dallas Symphony. The Brahms Double Concerto, with violinist Augustin Hadelich and cellist Alban Gerhardt, and the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique got top-notch contributions from all concerned.

9 Brentano String Quartet, March 19 – In an age of so many over-heated chamber-music performances, this young American foursome soothed the ears with subtlety and sophistication. A new string quartet by the young Scottish composer David Horne outstayed its welcome, but performances of Mendelssohn and Brahms were elegant. Presented by Dallas Chamber Music.

10 Voices of Change, Jan. 7 – Two one-act, one-woman mini-operas got riveting performances from sopranos Lauren Flanigan (in Thomas Pasatieri's Before Breakfast) and Gina Browning (in Poulenc's La voix humaine). Joe Illick accompanied so deftly on piano that one hardly missed the original orchestrations.

1 Wagner: Götterdämmerung Polaski, Schmidt, Halfvarson, Struckmann, Schwanewilms, Kirchner, Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra, Levine (Deutsche Grammophon, two DVDs). – James Levine sometimes plods, and some of one-name designer Rosalie's costumes are pretty goofy. But the overall sci-fi look of Alfred Kirchner's staging is arresting, and singing is unusually consistent. Too bad it's the only video recording from Mr. Kirchner's 1990s Bayreuth Ring.

2 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas. Freire (Decca) – Too long neglected by the record companies, Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire has made a welcome return to Decca's new-release lists. His Moonlight , Waldstein and Les adieux sonatas are elegance personified.

3 Hindemith: Cardillac (Held, Denoke, Ventris, Bracht, Minutillo, Workman, Engle, Paris Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Nagano (BelAir Classiques DVD) – Paul Hindemith's 1926 opera about an obsessive jeweler who robs and murders his customers proves entirely unworthy of its neglect. A strong cast and a vivid staging in dazzling art deco settings are allied to incisive musical direction by Kent Nagano.

4 Porter: String Quartets Nos. 1-4. Ives Quartet (Naxos) – Three years older than Aaron Copland, Connecticut native Quincy Porter (1897-1966) was a fluent and cosmopolitan composer. The first four of his nine string quartets, suggesting influences as various as Bartók, Shostakovich and Frank Bridge and smartly played by the Ives Quartet, whet the appetite for the rest.

5 Brahms: Variations for Piano. Kern (Harmonia Mundi) – One of two gold medalists in the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Olga Kern has dazzled audiences with scorching, if rarely subtle, performances. Here, though, she deftly balances brilliance with playfulness and even poetry.

Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition: Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs.

MacArthur "Genius" Grant: Dawn Upshaw, soprano.

Musical America Musician of the Year: Anna Netrebko, soprano.

Musical America Composer of the Year: Kaija Saariaho.

Kennedy Center Honors: Leon Fleisher, pianist.

National Medal of Arts: Morten Lauridesen, composer.

"From the very first note he drew from the orchestra, I was jolted. I thought, 'My God, there is some energy here.'" Emanuel Borok, Dallas Symphony Orchestra concertmaster, on music director-designate Jaap van Zweden's first rehearsal

"There are many parallels between climbing a mountain and preparing a piece for performance. Both have to do with discipline — and spiritual beauty." Jo Boatright, pianist and artistic director of Walden Chamber Music, which ended its Dallas concert series in October

"To be a human being, to be a great artist, you've got to have unusual experiences. You've got to get out of your comfort zone." José Antonio Bowen, dean of Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts