(Photo: Amber Darragh)

6. Brooklyn Rider at the Brooklyn Lyceum
The borough’s chief string quartet teamed up with the Iranian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor for one of those cross-cultural evenings that might have made no sense at all but instead displayed a loose, magical logic. One of the quartet’s inaugural pair of CDs—titled Passport—captures some but not all of that night’s meandering beauties.

7. The Opening of (Le) Poisson Rouge
In September, the old Village Gate was reincarnated as (Le) Poisson Rouge, just the sort of thinking person’s music club that the new-music scene requires. It’s one of the homes of Wordless Music, a series that pairs indie pop, rock, and folk performers with their classically trained colleagues. Now genre-hoppers have a place to call their own.

8. Alarm Will Sound
The energetic ensemble Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson, doesn’t hop from program to program but develops its shows over months. Its last undertaking culminated in an evening called “a/rhythmia,” where they played an orchestration of a player-piano piece by Conlon Nancarrow— one that couldn’t be performed by human hands.

(Photo: Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera)

9. Tristan und Isolde
Cold-and-flu season kept Ben Heppner as Tristan and Deborah Voigt as Isolde from singing together until the last performance in the Met’s run. But when the sneezing stopped, that night proved worth the wait. Both singers breathed and phrased in such miraculous sympathy that it almost seemed as if they had prepped together for a joint comeback.

10. YouTube Symphony
Last week, Google announced its entry into the patronage game with global online auditions for an orchestra to play a new work by Tan Dun at Carnegie Hall. (Google posted sheet music and a silent video of Tan conducting; you film an audition and post it on YouTube.) Sure, it’s a gimmick, but it launches a new way for talent to emerge and raises the odds for classical music to go viral.

Related:

• Articles by Justin Davidson
• Table of Contents: Dec 15, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!