The Year in Review

It's easy to nominate the Book of the Year for 2025. However few new books I read in a year, I'd do well to find one better than Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found if I read them all. One can read lots of books on one's preferred subjects- Shakespeare biography, Handel, Shostakovich, Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin and find much the same material re-arranged in the cause of whatever angle the author adopts but Graham-Dixon genuinely seemed to be breaking new ground. It's hard to see Vermeer Studies going much further- at least for a long time - and so that accolade is easily decided.

There simply weren't enough, or hardly any, new records I heard this year - or books of poetry, or novels- to constitute categories. In recent years it has been Event of the Year, rather than Poem or Poetry Collection, that has provided any internal debate and it has usually meant 'concert'. Now might be a good time to separate out 'concert' from 'event'. It's not obvious how one can compare an hour or so of live music performance with places, buildings or even any other days out and, mundane as it may seem, the arrival of the bus pass made for quite an occasion.

It was hard for the second half of the year to maintain the sublime standards set in the first half by Angelina Kopyrina's Prokofiev Sonata no. 7, gorgeously supported by Beethoven, the Petersfield Orchestra's vast, vibrant and voluble Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 and the Renaissance Choir's Allegri Miserere, starring Jenni Halliday, along with that of James MacMillan. They each fully satisfied the criteria of the visceral thrill that usually separates out the very greatest things from the good and very good. They would all be very worthy Concerts of the Year, making the deepest of impressions but, not for the first time, it's going to have to be the Renaissance Choir, for the Allegri Miserere. 

My visit back to Nottingham was hugely worthwhile and it's hard to know if the remains of my own long ago made more of an impression than that of others in Lincoln Cathedral and Lichfield where the Dr. Johnson Birthplace Museum was an added bonus. Some things from earlier in the year, looking through the diary, seem a very long time ago now which is another of those tricks of time but at least provides the illusion that one is getting good value from retirement. There's a few events that are only sitting in pubs with friends but I don't mean 'only' to put any doubt on their importance because they might easily be counted the most important. Neither can buying second-hand records in a charity shop, surely, count as an Event of the Year but when it's the Complete Works of Bach, it counts as a contender. It has to go down as a good year, even up to yesterday when I achieved a new personal best rating at Lichess, for Bullet, at 1843.

But coming at the time that it did with all its strangeness and vestigial familiarity, Nottingham has to be my Event of the Year. 

The future of the concert reviews is ever in doubt as 'the language burns out long before the music ever does' but I've been saying that for a long time, they haven't stopped yet and since 2026 begins with Cuarteto Casals in Wigmore Hall playing the lifelong favourite, Shos 3, I really ought to come back re-invigorated. I am forever in the debt of those artists that continue to make it all worthwhile.