From exquisite Elgar to razor-sharp Cage: our classical recordings of the year | Classical music

Most end-of-year lists will surely be featuring a remarkable young pianist, Yunchan Lim, whose very special talent had first been spotted when he won the 2022 Van Cliburn competition and whose debut studio recording for Decca brilliantly confirmed those first impressions. But the release that heads our top ten was more of a surprise. Vilde Frang had already established herself among the leading violinists of her generation, but even so the sheer excellence of her recording of the Elgar Violin concerto, arguably the best to appear in 40 years, was totally unexpected.

Meanwhile, the age of the all-star studio-made opera recording is very much over. DVDs of stage productions now easily outnumber new audio-only opera sets, and this year the highest-profile operatic releases on CD were all sourced from either stage or concert performances: Sony Classical’s Parsifal, with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, was taken from the Vienna State Opera’s production; LSO Live’s version of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, conducted by Mark Elder, came from concert performances at the Aix-en-Provence festival, while the same label’s Janáček series, based on performances under Simon Rattle at the Barbican in London, continued with Kát’a Kabanová. The two outstanding rarities to have come from the ever invaluable BruZane stable this year started life in concert too – Louise Bertin’s fascinating Fausto, and the baritone version of Massenet’s Werther, with Tassis Christoyannis in the title role and Véronique Gens as an exceptional Charlotte.

As with operas, so with large scale symphonic works too, with live recordings now largely supplanting bespoke studio sessions. The trend away from yet more versions of the core orchestral repertoire has continued, so that new cycles of, say, the Beethoven or Brahms symphonies, become rarer year by year. Significant anniversaries do to some extent negate that tendency: the Bruckner bicentenary this year has resulted in a rash of releases, not all of them reissues of the tried and tested, such as Vladimir Jurowski’s glorious performance of the Seventh Symphony. And while the household names, the multinational labels that dominated the classical market through the second half of the last century, have a consistently lower profile, and often seem more concerned with cultivating their cross-over catalogues than maintaining their mainstream classical output, the niche independent labels continue to thrive and proliferate, with the range of new music particularly now much wider than ever before, and often appearing very quickly after the works’ premieres.

How the continuing trend away from discs and towards downloads and streaming services has impacted the range of new recordings remains hard to estimate. So far it doesn’t seem to have affected the sheer quantity of releases each month in any significant way, nor to have influenced the range of music being recorded. But when subscribers to services such as Spotify or Apple Music have access to almost the whole history of recorded music at the tap on a screen, and are presented with a dazzling selection of versions of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata or a Schubert symphony, it must at least give anyone planning to record such well traversed works pause for thought, and perhaps nudge them towards tackling pieces that have been rather less frequently covered.

A young pianist is surely more likely to get attention if they produce a disc of, say, Alkan or John Field than yet another of Schumann or Beethoven (though Yunchan Lin’s debut studio recording of Chopin has of course gloriously defied that trend this year). With so much music in so many superlative performances now available without even involving the chore of taking a disc off the shelf and putting it into a CD player, new recordings really have to have a point of difference to make a genuine impact.

Andrew Clements’ top 10 recordings of the year

1. Elgar: Violin Concerto (Vilde Frang/Deutsches SO Berlin/Ticciati)
“From first note to last Frang never puts a foot wrong … Her playing has a thrilling authority and confidence in what is technically one of the most demanding concertos in the violin repertory.” Read the full review

2. Chopin: Études (Yunchan Lim)
“Enjoy the brilliance of Lim’s playing, whether in the breathtaking evenness of the A minor study Op 10 no 2, the sheer delicacy of Op 25 no 6 in G sharp minor, or in the fresh details he consistently reveals.” Read the full review

3. Linda Catlin Smith: Flower of Emptiness (Apartment House)
“Hers is a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty.” Read the full review

4. Bruckner: Symphony No 7 (Berlin RSO/Jurowski)
“This special performance has a natural flow, in which nothing is forced, and nothing over-manicured; there’s never any sense that Jurowski has any agenda other than to present the symphony as it is laid out in the score.” Read the full review

5. Cage2: Bertrand Chamayou
“Every one of these pieces is a brightly coloured gem… Chamayou’s performance of all of them, each complex rhythm razor sharp, every phrase perfectly articulated, is exemplary.” Read the full review

6. Contemplation: Huw Montague Rendall/Opéra Orchestre Normandie Rouen/Glassberg
“Hamlet’s soliloquy from Ambroise Thomas’s opera – velvet-toned, nuanced, with beautifully floated high notes – sets the tone for an eclectic programme on themes of self-discovery. You can almost hear the orchestra’s thoughts as he holds the final note: who is this guy? Does he ever need to breathe?” Read the full review

7. Lang: Composition as Explanation (Eighth Blackbird)
“The wonderfully compelling musical journey that Lang has created takes the listener through moments of chiming, crystalline beauty, stomping free-for-alls, vertiginous instrumental solos and insistent minimalist repetitions.” Read the full review

8. Bertin: Fausto (Les Talens Lyriques/Rousset)
“The full score of Louise Bertin’s Fausto was only rediscovered a few years ago, but this first recording, conducted with missionary zeal by Christophe Rousset and superbly played by the period instruments of Les Talens Lyriques, suggests that it deserves more than occasional performances.” Read the full review

9. Brahms: Piano Pieces Op 116-119 (Igor Levit)
“Levit’s accounts are utterly compelling. Each piece is perfectly shaped, its subtly varied emotional charge instantly identified. It’s hard to think of many better recordings of these 20 gems.” Read the full review

10. Schumann: Works for Oboe (Daniel/Drake)
“Pure delight from first note to last.” Read the full review