E-Mail This Article to a Friend All that opera, and more The best in classical for 2003 BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

1) Artist of the year

One singer — the phenomenal Lorraine Hunt Lieberson — gave three of the greatest performances I’ve ever heard. She took on two major (and diametrically opposite) French roles and made them her own: the haunted Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, at the Boston Symphony Orchestra (see below), and the noble, infatuated, betrayed Dido, Queen of Carthage, in the Metropolitan Opera production of Berlioz’s epic Les Troyens, which Bostonians could hear on WHRB’s live broadcast. Lieberson’s collaboration with pianist Peter Serkin for the FleetBoston Celebrity Series was the best vocal recital of the year, with more Debussy, indrawing Brahms, sizzling Handel, and heavenly Mozart. Her creamy, intimate, heroic voice filled the huge Met house and Symphony Hall as easily as it did small Jordan Hall.

She also made one of the year’s most beautiful recordings, for Nonesuch, a souvenir of the two powerful Bach cantatas dealing with "last things" that Peter Sellars staged for her. Craig Smith conducts the Emmanuel Orchestra, and there’s the heart-easing obbligato oboe of Peggy Pearson. "Lorraine can do anything," composer Peter Lieberson (her husband) said at a special public discussion at Harvard University. She demurred, but I concur.

2) Greatest single event

The BSO’s crowning jewel for 2003 was a concert version of Pelléas et Mélisande. Some people still have a hard time "getting" Debussy’s century-old masterpiece; yet his setting of Maeterlinck’s "symbolic" play is more like real life than almost any other opera. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as opera’s archetypal "lost" girl (she could have come from Haight-Ashbury) and elegant British baritone Simony Keenlyside as a touching Pelléas headed a superb cast. Conductor Bernard Haitink apparently startled even the performers with uncharacteristic passion and energy (not your typical "gauzy" Debussy), and the orchestra itself restored its faded reputation for French music.

3) Most noble effort

"Opera Unlimited," Richard Conrad’s dream of a series of contemporary chamber operas, was brought to fruition by Opera Boston. It was an uneven but fascinating series and won enthusiastic cheers. Conrad himself appeared in two of the operas; baritone Stephen Salters rescued another. The big hit was Thomas Adès’s edgy Powder Her Face, which is based on a 1960s British sex scandal; it was rippingly conducted by Gil Rose, graphically staged by Steven Maler, and impressively sung and acted by mezzo-soprano Janna Baty in the leading role of the sexually voracious Duchess.

4) Most ambitious effort

Conductor Benjamin Zander doesn’t think small. Once fired for playing too much Mahler, he’s now an international cynosure for his Mahler and is devoting his entire season with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra to his favorite composer. In November they gave us the piercing song cycle Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children"); it had a rocky opening night, but mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai recovered her uncanny ability to put herself into a role, and by the third performance, both she and the orchestra had triumphed.

5a) Best opera (staged)

Boston remains an operatic backwater. The most thrilling production I saw this year was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Rameau’s magical Les Boréades, conducted by William Christie and staged by one of the true theatrical geniuses of our time, Robert Carsen. Still, some of the best work in Boston this year, starting with the BSO’s Pelléas, was operatic.

Boston Lyric Opera’s La rondine ("The Swallow"), Puccini’s seldom-performed late operetta, was its most satisfying fully staged production, with considerable help from stage director Colin Graham, John Conklin’s stylish sets borrowed from the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and a knockout star turn by soprano Pamela Anderson heading an unusually strong cast.

5b) Best opera (touring)

Each year, the scrappy Bulgaria-based Teatro Lirico d’Europa comes to town and knocks our socks off. Production values aren’t much, so it was no great loss that Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov couldn’t find a theater its sets could fit (the Majestic was closed for its glittering refurbishment). Boris came to Jordan Hall, without sets but with lavish costumes, and it had not one but two magnificent basses from the Bolshoi Opera alternating as the tormented tsar and the otherworldly monk Pimen. The conductor, Metodi Matakiev, not only knew the score but made it live.

5c) Best opera (Baroque)

The Boston Early Music Festival’s bi-annual Baroque opera is usually more auspicious for production values than for drama. But Johann Georg Conradi’s Ariadne, unproduced since 1725, was a delight, with Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin in the title role, wonderful playing under Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, and some skillful staging by Drew Minter. Robin Linklater’s spectacular sets and costumes had a harder time than usual stealing the show.

5d) Best opera (semi-staged)

The Cantata Singers, under music director David Hoose, and mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove, wearing her new stage-director hat, underlined both the wit and the pathos of Stravinsky’s major opera, The Rake’s Progress. Tenor William Hite in the title role, which librettists W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman based on Hogarth’s famous series of satirical paintings, soprano Jennifer Foster as Anne Trulove, baritone David Kravitz as sinister Nick Shadow, tenor Frank Kelley as the tongue-twisting auctioneer, mezzo-soprano Janice Felty as Baba the Turk, and the outstanding chorus and orchestra all delivered juicy, indelible performances.

6) Best hope for the future

Neil Donohoe’s inspired production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (the American premiere of the super-long Royal National Theater version) was performed by the amazing students at the Boston Conservatory. Some of them — tenor Austin Lesch (Candide) and mezzo-soprano Alysha Umphress (the Old Lady) — seemed born for these parts. Everyone on stage was a triple threat, singing, dancing, and acting up a storm.

Another student musician who puts some professional musicians in the shade is New England Conservatory violinist Gabriela Diaz, whose astonishing performance of György Ligeti’s 1993 Violin Concerto sent the audience into raptures at the opening celebration of the centennial of Jordan Hall.

And last summer at Tanglewood, Yo-Yo Ma and the Mark Morris Dance Group reunited to perform Morris’s Falling Down Stairs, an enchanting, athletic, spiritual piece to Bach’s Third Suite for Solo Cello. Ma and the dancers were sensational. But one section was also set on Tanglewood’s student musicians — not dancers, but they were game, and their informal performance had rhythmic life and an uninhibited, infectious spirit of adventure.

7) Best new pieces (in chronological order by age of composer)

The new pieces I’ll remember best are 94-year-old Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, commissioned by the BSO and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher; 84-year-old Leon Kirchner’s Second Piano Sonata played by Russell Sherman at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; 65-year-old John Harbison’s Second Piano Sonata played by Robert Levin in a Fleet Boston Celebrity Series Boston Marquee concert, his moving Requiem at the BSO conducted by Bernard Haitink, and his 1986 cinemascopic ballet score, Ulysses, getting its first complete musical performance with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose; and 47-year-old Andy Vores’s Goback Goback with baritone David Kravitz and David Hoose conducting Collage New Music.

8) Best solo performances

Russell Sherman ended Emmanuel Music’s seven-year Schubert series with a wise and deep exploration of Schubert’s final Piano Sonata, D.960 (in B-flat). Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomsic opened the BSO season with a scintillating Beethoven Choral Fantasy, under Bernard Haitink, and also played magnificent Haydn, late Beethoven, and Chopin in the Celebrity Series. The New England Conservatory and the Goethe-Institut sponsored a staggering recital by German pianist Steffen Schleiermacher featuring a no-holds-barred Boulez Third Piano Sonata. (Boulez himself made a dazzling solo appearance speaking at a day-long Harvard colloquium on French modernism, but no music of his was performed.) And the Boston Early Music Festival treated us to another visit from that imaginative gamba master Paolo Pandolfo.

9) Best chamber music and small orchestra

Which was better, the Borromeo String Quartet’s Mozart or its Bartók? At the Gardner Museum, the answer was "Both." And Susan Davenny Wyner brought back her stunning debut work as conductor of the New England String Ensemble, Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, and the singer who helped make that performance unforgettable, soprano Dominique Labelle. A young bass, former football hero Morris DeRohn Robinson, made this one even better.

10) Just for the fun of it

The imaginative staging, outstanding acting, and superb musicianship in North Shore Music Theatre’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures so moved me, I went back to see it a second time. I was also knocked out by the Overture Productions concert version of Sondheim’s Follies — and I enjoyed Ted Chapin’s eye-witness account of the creation of this iconic musical, Everything Was Possible (Knopf). And nothing tickled me more than American Classics’ concert revival of Rodgers & Hart’s 1926 Freudian "play with music," Peggy-Ann. I’m grateful to Kino for releasing two landmark movie musicals on DVD: Applause, with Helen Morgan singing "What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man?", and Love Me Tonight, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald singing Rodgers & Hart’s bewitching score — both films directed by the great Rouben Mamoulian.

Happy New Year to all, and special congratulations and thanks to Ellen Pfeifer, NEC’s new PR manager, for three decades of distinguished classical-music reviews in the Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix — and for giving me my own first chance to write about music.