Classical CDs of the year: a year for lieder, piano recitals – and remembering

Stand-out performances … Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Polina Leschenko, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sabine Liebner and Eric Lu Photograph: PR Company Handout

In 2018, musical commemorations seemed to sustain the classical CD industry more than ever. Some significant anniversaries – Gounod’s bicentenary and BA Zimmermann’s centenary – were mostly ignored, but other centenaries, especially Debussy’s death and Leonard Bernstein’s birth, as well as the end of the first world war, generated new discs and reissues throughout the year.

Warner Classics started things off with its uber-comprehensive, 33-disc Debussy retrospective.

That proved just a bit too uneven to be definitive, but among the new discs, Harmonia Mundi’s complete survey stood out, with two of the finest instalments saved until the end of the year – Roger Murano’s set of Debussy’s Etudes, paired with some newly discovered Messiaen, and François-Xavier Roth’s accounts of Jeux and the Nocturnes with the period instruments of Les Siècles.

Bernstein’s conducting car eer was celebrated in bumper collections, but there were also some notable new versions of his own music, including Kent Nagano’s account of the opera A Quiet Place, and Antonio Pappano’s survey of the three symphonies. Simon Rattle’s one-off account of the Second Symphony, The Age of Anxiety, with Krystian Zimerman as the matchless solo pianist, stood out too.

While collections such as Ian Bostridge’s recital with Pappano, and Tenebrae’s Walk with Ivor Gurney were tied to the armistice centenary, the most significant issues of British music came from elsewhere. Andrew Manze’s cycle of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies is growing into a major achievement, and Edward Gardner’s more wide-ranging series included Elgar’s Falstaff and Walton’s symphonies.

Some areas of the repertory produced few memorable discs. It’s hard to think of a mainstream orchestral release that looks set to become a classic, though if it counts as mainstream, Riccardo Chailly’s collection of early Stravinsky, including the rediscovered Chant Funèbre, seems pretty definitive.

Outstanding new opera recordings were similarly thin on the ground, though Opera Rara’s complete Semiramide, conducted by Mark Elgar, was a exception, while rarities included Salieri’s Les Horaces under Christophe Rousset.

But at least the stream of fine new discs of lieder, chamber and piano music continue unabated. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Polina Leschenko’s 20th-century violin sonatas, Vikingur Ólafsson’s fleet-fingered Bach, Stephen Osborne’s luscious Rachmaninov and Sabine Liebner’s unflinching Stockhausen, as well as Andreas Staier’s Iberian harpsichord concertos, Alexandre Tharaud’s late Beethoven and, last but certainly not least, Eric Lu’s dazzling performances from the Leeds piano competition, were all treasurable, a list that could have been twice as long.