Turnage’s Festen at the Royal Opera House swept all before it, but there was plenty of extraordinary new music, exhilarating performances and triumphs of talent, commitment and resourcefulness across the UK this year. We pick our best moments
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I was only able to get to live music for less than three months of this year, but among the few events that I did attend was one of the most remarkable operatic premieres I’ve heard in more than 40 years. Commissioned by the Royal Opera, and based on the movie and stage play of the same name by Thomas Vinterberg, Festen was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s fifth large-scale opera, and showed vividly how the sure dramatic instincts revealed in his earliest stage works, Greek and The Silver Tassie, have matured into an operatic language of immense power and flexibility. Not a word of Lee Hall’s libretto is wasted in revealing the dark family secrets that are exposed at a 60th birthday party, while Turnage’s wonderfully varied, unsparing score never makes a false step. The horror of the drama was remorselessly focused by Richard Jones’s production, with a cast in which every role was made horribly believable. The best British opera in half a century? Probably. Andrew Clements
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