Evviva the classical independents

It came as no surprise to find that all the CDs I'd enjoyed most last year had come from small outfits, most of them promoting unusual repertoire and helping little-known artists to spread the word. The mascot of them all ought to be Odradek, the non-profit-making promoter of pianists based in Pescara. It burst upon us with its first disc, Mei Yi Foo's ingenious programme of contemporary miniatures Musical Toys, which only just got picked up in a mini-review for the BBC Music Magazine.

All of us present at the BBCMM Awards, I fancy, fell for her engagament and her choice of pieces; and I did so further at a squeezed-in Kings Place recital. Probably my most returned to track of 2013 was another Odradek pianist, Domenico Codispoti, playing Granados's 'El Amor y la Muerte' from Goyescas, which I must investigate further.

But I've written about those discs and, in passing here as well as for the BBCMM, about the Mythos accordion duo's phenomenal transcription of Stravinsky's Petrushka - Arts Desk colleague Graham Rickson's top choice in our obligatory best-of-year selection, and mine too. This film, in the absence of the excellent Orchid Classics' more perfect trailer for the CD, has enough of 'Petrushka's Room' to give you a good idea of how the amazing orchestral score works in this arrangement.

Top image is from Andreas Cellarius's 1660 Harmonia Macocosmica reproduced in the Accent label's gorgeous presentation of Bach's B minor Mass. The set was only one of many discs which Jan Kucera, a Prague-based music enthusiast, has been showering me with  - and if I haven't worked my way through a fraction of his gifts, I can at least thank him by acknowledging that the Collegium/Collegium Vocale 1704's performance under Václav Luks is perhaps the very best I've heard of this greatest mass.

Luks seems to have an uncanny instinct for the right tempi, by which I mean breathable ones with which I happen to agree (I used to say the same about Sir Charles Mackerras's Mozart). The six soloists, including two very natural basses, are superlatively good; it says much about the plethora of fine countertenors around that I'd not encountered Terry Wey before. The choral singing is both focused and, when need be, ecstatic, and the three trumpets - or should I say clarini - as remarkable as the ones I heard in a weekend of Bach before Christmas (the B minor Mass at Kings Place and four parts of the Christmas Oratorio at St John's Smith Square). I may not be re-embarking on the cantatas pilgrimage which only got up to Easter last year, but I'll be bathing at the source whenever I can.

Beethoven wouldn't usually figure among the must-hears for me, but Bettina Schimmer sent me a captivating disc which isn't even out yet: the young Ukrainian pianist Alexej Gorlatch in three very well-known sonatas - the Pathétique, the Moonlight and the Tempest - on the Oehms Classics label.

The wonder here, and some may not like it as much as I do, is the lightness, the deftness which avoids Sturm und Drang in favour of something much more delicately spiritual. The finales are a miracle of expressive precision. I can't wait to hear Gorlatch live, but I may have to travel to the continent to catch him some time soon*.

Ditto the most unexpected discovery, for me, of three days at the Stavanger Festival. It was a late night cabaret evening in the former workers' meeting place, and after much of the day spent travelling we thought we could always slip out after one or two numbers. But we were captivated by Music for a While, chanteuse Tora Augestad and the most unexpected of quartets (coolest of jazz trumpeters Mathias Eick, tuba-player Martin Taxt, percussionist Pal Hausken and man of many instruments, but chiefly accordion, Stian Carstensen - also a much-loved stand-up comedian in Norway, but needless to say his spiel went over our heads while everyone around us fell about).

The next day, inspired above all by their Weill arrangements including the best 'Surabaya Jonny' I've heard, I bought their CD from the charming lady who owns an adored music shop down the road in Sandnes and has a stand at most concerts. I've played it a lot. And when I bumped into the charming Tora at a Stavanger Cathedral concert, she said she'd send me a copy of their latest, 'Graces that refrain'. And she was as good as her word.

I wasn't quite so sold on the Dowland arrangements live, but there are treasures here too, most surprisingly a cool version of Desdemona's 'Ave Maria' from Verdi's Otello which, to my amazement, works brilliantly on its own terms. I'm campaigning to bring the group to the UK, so if there's any help or interest out there, let me know. In the meantime, here's 'Surabaya Jonny' on film.

Another Norwegian group I have yet to experience live - but will do so in Oslo later this month - is baroque violinist Bjarte Eike's Barokksolistene. This time not exactly my milieu, but I was genuinely captivated by their BIS collection The Image of Melancholy which, like Gorlatch's Beethoven, has yet to be released here. Like Music for a While's discs, it's eloquently annotated by the artist(s). There's a new concert-programming creativity in the air - I've just witnessed the best use of it in the Aurora Orchestra's 'Road Trip' at Kings Place on Saturday - and this bears witness to it.

More Dowland, this time with Byrd and Holborne, but interspersed with Norwegian traditional numbers ( a wedding march is - and again I find myself using the word - captivating). Not sure about the Slovakian interpolation or the pure but to me bland soprano of Berit Norbakken Solset, but otherwise it's a wonderful sequence, and not all melancholy (though I'm told it's very much tied up with the death of Eike's father, and he thinks it's the most important thing he's ever done).  Niel Gow's lament for the death of his second wife makes for a transcendental conclusion.

I've been much more restrained in my CD choice than I was in what turned out to be not so much a pick of the classical/opera live scene for TAD as a survey of it. Where was I to stop? How could I have forgotten the magic of Irish tenor Robin Tritschler's Finzi Dies Natalis and Britten Serenade with the Britten Sinfonia in Gresham School's woods, capped by the horn sounding somewhere from within the high beeches surrounding the platform? Here he is as one of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists in a sublime Christmas song by Cornelius. Over the hols I'd been listening to all of Cornelius's little Weihnachtslieder, a sequence most famous for the 'Three Kings' setting, in Fischer-Dieskau's performance with Gerald Moore, and this compares well, to say the least. Shame the pianist isn't credited.

If Tritschler is definitely one young artist of the year, there are others among the singers I've heard, not least  Andrew Staples, Marcus Farnsworth and Kitty Whately doing the new generation proud in the Barbican Albert Herring - and that reminds me about another discovery on disc, mezzo Karen Cargill in Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and, best of all, La mort de Cleopâtre with fab Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Where does it come from, this intuition for greatness? Oor Karen seems an ordinary enough Glasgow girl in 'normal' life, but here she's a queen.

Ir was a shame there was no ballet choice of the year on TAD. I'm only reminded because I've been listening to so much dancy-dancy music in the early days of 2014, and reliving the splendours of English National Ballet's homage-to-Nureyev Raymonda Act Three (photographed below by Dave Morgan) in going through Alexander Anissimov's amazingly good complete recording of the fantastical Glazunov score.

Maybe Neeme Järvi can carry on the winning streak of his Tchaikovsky ballets with the Bergen Philharmonic, once The Nutcracker is in the can, with this. Though Anissimov's recording, to be honest, is fine enough, and I hope NJ will act on my pleas for him to follow in Ansermet's footsteps with his Suisse Romande Orchestra in a complete Delibes Coppelia and Sylvia.

I realize (7/1) I can also indulge a Best of Theatre 2013 slot, too, though I hardly ran the gamut. Even if I had, hopefully Best Actor and Actress would be the same. Among actors, Chiwetel Ejiofor excelled by a long way as a rangy, charismatic Patrice Lumumba in Joe Wright's joky-scary Young Vic staging of A Season in the Congo (photo by Johan Persson).

Wright's work would win him Best Production too, though equal contender was Richard Jones's characteristically unpredictable take on Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (as Public Enemy) in the same theatre (how I love the Young Vic, and what treasures it has in store this year). This time the play, a complex masterpiece, was as compelling as its treatment. Here's another risk-taking actor, Nick Fletcher, as Stockmann, photographed by Keith Pattison.

Kudos to the Barbican, too, for showcasing French classics I'd never seen on stage before from French companies, Rhinocéros and Ubu Roi, and linking them to the superb Duchamp et al exhibition. Standing out from what looked like a sea of middle-of-the-road stuff at the National Theatre were Joe Hill-Gibbins' disorienting production of Marlowe's Edward II, hopefully a sign of more experimental things to come under Rufus Norris, and the melting/zesty child's eye take on Emil and the Detectives accompanied by breathtaking designs/video projections

Best Actress award, again no question from my limited experience: Hilde Kronje as a spoilt young Afrikaaner of infinite variety in Mies Julie at the Riverside Studios (which need saving now from the greedy property developers). How she and Bongile Mantsai (the two pictured below by William Burdett-Coutts) kept up the intensity night after night is one of the mysteries of live theatre.

But now it's time to leave the self-indulgence and froth behind, get down to work and - sigh- sort out the tax return.

*Bettina tells me he's playing Beethoven and Chopin concerts with the Royal Northern Sinfonia in April, but I'm waiting on a recital.

The statue in the orchestra

Writing a programme article on Strauss's operatic canon for the Royal Opera's recent Capriccio, I was struck - and took the same title as a result - by the composer's reminscences about his operas from the perspective of 1942. He quotes Berlioz on Fidelio: 'Grétry has accused Mozart of putting the pedestal on the stage and the statue in the orchestra'. A bizarre charge, of course, as Berlioz recognised: just because the greatest operatic composer of all time gave his orchestra a dramatic commentary equal to the singers' music, not more important, he fell under suspicion.

There's a rather different application of the conceit in the case of my visit to the English National Ballet's triple-bill 'Tribute to Rudolf Nureyev' on Thursday with my Arts Desk colleague Ismene, who reviewed it with her usual knowledgeable stylishness. I should quickly point out that, despite this initial plaint, this was an evening of pure pleasure. Yet the middle of the three ballets did provide a case of the statue in the orchestra being so riveting that I hardly looked up at what could only be garlanding.

This was Maurice Béjart's brave - for 1971, but still not brave enough by our standards - attempt to give two men a Pas de deux in his choreography to Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, called Song [singular] of a Wayfarer. Maybe it's because I'm a 'first the music, then the dance' kinda guy that I couldn't take my eyes off young baritone Nicholas Lester (pictured above) in the pit, effortlessly projecting Mahler's intense meanings as he covered the extraordinary vocal and emotional gamut of these four songs. That's a real quality voice, too, something of a rarity. I sometimes find the company's principal conductor, Gavin Sutherland, a little stodgy, but the orchestra is a luxury band and both were on good form in the partnership.

What seemed to be going on above wasn't easily readable: two young men, connected physically but emotionally distant, reacting to the moods of the cycle but never going anywhere as the music's trajectory so obviously does (this is a beef I have with ballet, that it can't develop). Some surprising gestures, a fluid movement of the arm at a trill, the most striking complement to the funeral march of 'Die zwei blauen Augen'; and it was strongly danced by tall young ENB treasure Vadim Muntagirov, partnering a perhaps deliberately impassive Esteban Berlanga. But for me it was just ornamental. Ismene says I have to see what Kenneth MacMillan does in Song of the Earth, so at the first possible opportunity I shall.

In a way, though, I'm putting the cart before the horse, and the statue only briefly in the pit, in accounting for a box of delights which now strikes me as all the more welcome since what followed was total immersion in great, but thorny, Britten, up in Norfolk. Petrushka - what new can one say about the total co-ordination between Stravinsky's score, Fokine's choreography and Benois's designs, looking fresh and lavish in the sets and costumes ENB has borrowed from the Birmingham Royal Ballet?

Every musical gesture finds its vivid counterpart in the dance, from Petrushka's hammering on the walls of his prison booth and the Moor's coconut games - the dodginess in the role these days slightly undercut by having a black dancer, Shevelle Dynott, playing up the caricature -  to the footstamping of the coachmen and the hanky-waving wetnurses.

The sets can still surprise, especially when the forecloth of black demons flying over Petersburg falls during the scene-linking drumroll and leads to the stark interior chez Petrushka. Fabian Reimair was poised fabulously between the doll and the human (above in Petrushka's death scene), but no more so than Dynott and Nancy Osbaldeston as an absolutely deadpan Ballerina (both pictured below).

How do they do that opening scene when they seem to hang from pegs jigging about to the Danse Russe? Above all this was a real ensemble show, every detail beautifully illuminated in dance, design and sound. What a great masterpiece it is, still absolutely fresh.

Nureyev's exuberant elaboration of Petipa in Raymonda Act III, on the other hand, keeps the high St Petersburg classical style very much alive. I'm fascinated by so much of his often overstuffed but oh so vital choreography, and I was surprised to learn - even though I read Julie Kavanagh's wonderful biography when it came out, and must have forgotten - how much work he did with the London Festival Ballet, as it then was, around the same time in the mid 1970s that the above photo was taken.

The Raymonda divertissement is done to the highest standards here, with a dazzling take on the old-fashioned by designer Barry Kay radiantly lit by John B Read. I was delighted to hear some of Glazunov's fondant score live for once, and the act begins dazzlingly with a Straussian apotheosis. But apart from two numbers it isn't musically the best stuff in the ballet (postscript: been listening again today to Anissimov's excellent performance of the complete ballet, and the big Pas de deux - plural - in the first two acts are much more remarkable. What a rich, if sometimes sticky, score it is, the fourth Tchaikovsky ballet fallen into decadence). The exceptions are the Grand Pas Hongrois for the corps in glittering white and Raymonda's variation, written for piano to imitate, I assume, the cimbalom (the Hungarian links are tenuous in the plot but give the composer plenty of opportunity for specific colour).

This last was one of the loveliest bits of ballet I've ever seen, Daria Klimentová bewitching and slightly self-mocking en pointe. What a stylish dancer she is, so much more characterful than Rojo in the company's Sleeping Beauty (though Ismene assures me there are things in Aurora's part Klimentová could never manage and that technically Rojo is in a class of her own). Klimentová's partnership with young Muntagirov has become one of the surprise success stories of the ballet world, and their Grand Pas (Pas Classique Hongrois in the original) rightly set the house alight.

But then so did much else in this highest quality evening. I can hardly believe the whole triple bill was up for a mere few days, but then that's the evanescent ballet world for you. One thing's for sure: ENB, especially with newly defected dancers, can certainly give the Royal Ballet a run for its money.

All dance images by Arnaud Stephenson, courtesy of English National Ballet