My Concert Highlights 2014

Anna Prohaska‘s outstanding Lieder recital at Edinburgh: vocal assurance, combined with great  interpretive skills and artistic integrity

Thomas Allen‘s defiant and moving Winterreise in Oxford: an astonishing (and for me reassuring) celebration of reaching 70, and part of the extraordinary Schubert Project in that city

My return, after more than forty years, to a Sunday chamber music concert in London’s Conway Hall.

Discovering John Ireland’s Piano Concerto, with Leon McCawley and the BBC Phil at their Studio in Salford’s Media City

The dazzling Concertgebouw Orchestra performing, in Amsterdam, Stravinsky’s Jeu de Cartes under Gustavo Giumeno

The recital of Christian Zacharias at Harrogate: nothing flashy, no melodrama or excessive sentimentality, just superb pianism

My favourite chamber music group, the Sacconi Quartet, giving an electrifying performance of Janacek’s No 1 in Ripon Cathedral

The Joe Lovano-Jack DeJohnette Quartet at the Sage, Gateshead: jazz at its very best

And – the greatest disappointment – the complete Rosamunde at Vienna’s Musikverein: a piece which betrays Schubert’s creative genius and which even Harnoncourt and the Vienna Phil could make nothing of