The best classical of 2025

The best orchestral premiere

ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K Dick) by the British composer Mark Simpson: for electric guitar and orchestra. Combining organ, drum kit, synthesiser, piano, harp and more, Simpson and soloist Sean Shibe took us into other sonic worlds inspired by the wild hallucinations of the cult novelist Philip K Dick in a mesmerising premiere at the Proms. 

The best opera premiere

Festen by Mark-Anthony Turnage, with a libretto by Lee Hall, premiered by the Royal Opera, winning rave reviews and sell-out houses despite its grimly shocking subject matter. Based on the Thomas Vinterberg film in which a son accuses his father of child abuse, this 95-minute operatic version found wit and heart, and broke its own relentless tension with a sinister conga.

The most culinarily nifty heroine

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, semi-staged at the Proms to mark Shostakovich’s anniversary year. Amanda Majeski played the frustrated housewife who breaks with convention by cooking up some deadly mushrooms for her creepy father-in-law. This gripping and brutish work, superbly played by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgårds, with the English National Opera chorus and others, nearly blew the roof off the Royal Albert Hall.

The luckiest composer

Handel, without a major anniversary, had a top year. Some of the many highlights: Opera North’s Susanna, Partenope (ENO), Giustino Ariodante (Royal Opera), Rinaldo (the English Concert on tour), Alexander’s Feast (Proms), Jephtha (with Joyce DiDonato, Barbican) and Deidamia (Wexford festival). Never mind all those Messiahs the world has been waiting for this week…

The most surprising guest star

Even the subtitle of Oliver Leith’s new work, Garland, performed at Bold Tendencies, London, is a kind of mini-epic: “A processional work for solo soprano, vocal consort, mixed choir and large ensemble, to a text by Charlie Fox in collaboration with the composer.” If you add in shopping trolleys, hot water bottles, a 6ft-long leather whip and some more common-or-garden orchestral instruments, you grasp the scale. And then there’s the horse of course.

The most overhyped

Anna Netrebko in Tosca. Should the Royal Opera, in a high-profile new staging, have hired the Russian soprano, once thought closer to Putin than she now is, to sing the title role of Puccini’s masterpiece? The buildup generated confused and raucous debate. The event, when it finally arrived, was quite like any other opening night at the opera…

The best against the odds

The entire season at Welsh National Opera. Struggling for financial survival, chorus and orchestra wearing “Save WNO” T-shirts during performances, the depleted Cardiff-based company produced sterling new stagings of Peter Grimes, starring Allan Clayton, and Tosca with Natalya Romaniw, as well as reviving Bernstein’s Candide.

The most deserved not-quite UK premiere

English National Opera honoured the 96-year-old composer Thea Musgrave with a semi-staging of her 1977 opera Mary, Queen of Scots, not seen in the UK since Scottish Opera toured it to Sadler’s Wells in 1980. Musgrave, based in the US, was present to see her intensely dramatic work once again, and won a moving ovation.

The most heartfelt farewell

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, in Philharmonic Hall, said goodbye to Michael Eakin, their CEO for the past 16 years, who has helped the RLPO spread its wings. In his honour, conductor Domingo Hindoyan, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Youth Choir and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, gave a storming performance of Mahler’s massive Third Symphony.

The best of home from abroad

Peter Grimes, at Gothenberg Opera. Britten’s outsider Suffolk fisherman was given powerful energy and psychological force in this staging by the British director Netia Jones, set not in the fishing village of Aldeburgh but on a remote island off the far north-west coast of Sweden. Inspired and shattering.

Photographs by Dan John Lloyd/Marc Brenner