Here are some things I’ve been listening to a lot. I recommend each of them highly.

Beethoven Live, Orchestre de la Francophonie, Jean-Philippe Tremblay, conductor (Analekta)

This is the first complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies ever released by a Canadian orchestra. That it’s the work of a youth orchestra, recorded over four nights last July under a passionate but not particularly illustrious 31-year-old, is at once an hint of the project’s limitations and its highest recommendation. Continue…

Gerald Finley sings the showstopper from John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. It’s the night before the Trinity explosion and Robert Oppenheimer has a lot on his mind; John Donne gives him words for his torment. I’ve posted a different video of this same aria before; sue me. It’s not perfect, but I found it deeply evocative when I heard Finley sing it at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 (for this profile).

Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra will perform this piece on Friday at the new Koerner Hall; if I had my act together I’d go. Under Alex Pauk’s artistic direction, Esprit plays only music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Friday’s show is a humdinger. It has distinct mushroom-cloud overtones, with the above Adams aria and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody (To the Victims of Hiroshima), with the composer himself in attendance. R. Murray Schafer’s tuneful, dignified trumpet concerto, The Falcon’s Trumpet, will provide a respite from the evening’s darker material. I’ve had occasion to lament that Canadian compositions, once performed, too often vanish in libraries, never to be heard again. Pauk and Esprit are helping to remedy that by playing a Schafer piece at every concert this year. This is a crackerjack orchestra, thinking hard about what’s worth preserving and celebrating from the past half-century’s musical discovery. They’re playing in the most beautiful new concert hall in Canada. And tickets are $43. I’m kicking myself that I’ll miss it. Toronto readers with an ear for adventure should go in my place.

Ed Thigpen, who died the other day in Copenhagen at 79, was the last surviving member of Oscar Peterson’s great jazz trio, after bassist Ray Brown and Peterson himself. He used to visit Montreal frequently 20 years ago and I could go sit 10 feet from his drum kit and watch him bring all his formidable study, reflection and attentiveness to every beat. You couldn’t watch Thigpen and continue to believe jazz drumming was, or should be, essentially a chaotic and reactive activity. He was an orchestrator, one of the finest his instrument knew, and between sets he was a gentleman eager to discuss this music with strangers. There are plenty of Thigpen clips on Youtube, but you can start here:

Judging by his lyrical obsession with death and drug abuse, Mano Solo probably lasted longer than he ever expected. It’s hard to say the world is a darker place without him—Solo could make Nick Cave seem downright chipper—but it has definitely lost one of the greatest voices to come out of France in decades. Solo would have turned 47 in April.

Here’s two three four videos that reflect some of the activity at my favourite university music faculty, the Schulich School of Music at McGill. Great teachers, wonderful students arriving all the time, great newish building by Saucier + Perotte, a real blend of tradition and innovation. First, excerpts from a documentary about keyboardist Tom Beghin’s ambitious project to record Haydn’s keyboard sonatas on instruments that sound like the originals, in a room that recreates the acoustics of the original rooms. I wrote about it here, but it’s so much more fun to see for yourselves:

Second, the trumpeter Kevin Dean’s new band, which will be playing at Upstairs this weekend (with Fearless Jim Doxas as the new drummer). I was a week out of Western when I heard Kevin for the first time, and I suppose I’ve heard him play 50 times since then. Here’s why.

More after the jump.

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The most beautiful piece of creative work I saw, in any genre or medium, this year was Robert Lepage’s production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. It brought some beautiful Stravinsky music that had been largely overlooked for a century to new audiences. It stretched the cast, crew and audience to the limits of their imaginations. I’ll never forget it. Here is puppeteer Michael Curry explaining part of it.

Happy 2010.