E-Mail This Article to a Friend More, please! Some unforgettable classical events of 2005 BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

If no other classical-music events in 2005 had been any good (which, of course, was not the case), the new tenure of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, James Levine, would have been enough to make this an outstanding year. He fulfilled his promise to perform American music and especially contemporary American music: among the composers he played were Charles Ives, George Perle, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller, Yehudi Wyner, Charles Wuorinen, John Harbison, Peter Lieberson, late (American) Stravinsky, and above all, Elliott Carter, including premieres commissioned by the BSO. The BSO’s marketing department had the happy inspiration of offering half-price tickets to anyone who wanted to return for another shot at a contemporary program.

Levine promised more opera and gave us the major opera composer most absent from the Boston scene, Richard Wagner. There was an exciting concert version of Der fliegende Holländer|The Flying Dutchman, with star soprano Deborah Voigt recovering from an illness only in time for the last performance. And he led the amazing young fellows of Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in the two richest acts of Wagner’s Ring cycle, act one of Die Walküre and the final tragic act of Götterdämmerung.

Any year would be blessed by the appearance of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. This year we were doubly blessed. She first appeared in Bach Cantatas, with Craig Smith conducting the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music in Peter Sellars’s staging of two profound cantatas dealing with self-torment and joyful release — a happy reunion of three artists of international renown whose work has been crucial to the musical life of Boston. Health problems forced Hunt Lieberson to abbreviate Bach Cantatas’ European tour and to drop out of Sellars’s San Francisco Opera production of John Adams’s highly publicized Oppenheimer opera, Dr. Atomic. But she was back in stunning voice and presence for the BSO’s East Coast premiere of her husband’s gorgeous love-song cycle, Neruda Songs, which was co-commissioned by the BSO and composed for her.

The Bank of America Celebrity Series brought us stellar performers in rare form: Yo-Yo Ma playing some of his best Bach, beguiling Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli in unusual Baroque pieces, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (co-sponsored by the Boston Early Music Festival), and the Takács String Quartet in bracing Haydn and lyrical Borodin. Former Takács violist Roger Tapping has relocated to Boston and has already made his warm and thoughtful playing a cherishable addition to the community.

David Hoose extended his already wide range of interests in leading powerful performances of the Verdi Requiem, Bach’s St. John Passion, and Schoenberg’s moving Friede auf Erden|Peace on Earth with the Cantata Singers and Pierre Boulez’s bewitching Sur incises with Collage New Music. He also stepped in at the last minute to helm the BU Opera Institute’s sparkling early Mozart opera La finta giardiniera. Boston Cecilia’s Donald Teeters returned to Handel with an electric performance of the composer’s delectably comic and rarely scheduled late one-act oratorio The Choice of Hercules, with wonderful singing from Jeffrey Gall, Sharon Baker, and Pamela Dellal.

Veteran singer and impresario Richard Conrad gave a stellar 70th-birthday vocal recital; Russell Sherman gave a splendid 75th-birthday piano recital. In the last song of Schubert’s Winterreise, bass Philip Lima and pianist Beverly Orlove transformed a good performance into a transcendent one. The Borromeo String Quartet played luscious Schoenberg at the Gardner Museum. Peggy Pearson’s group La Fenice gave a loving rendition of Brahms’s A-major Piano Quartet. Benjamin Zander was at his revelatory best leading the Boston Philharmonic in Schumann, Bruckner, and (with the astounding Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero) Rachmaninov. Richard Pittman’s Boston Musica Viva gave the premiere of Andy Vores’s engaging Forgot, a setting of two contrasting Seamus Heaney poems. And Susan Davenny Wyner bade a touching farewell to the New England String Ensemble, a group she transformed in her six-year directorship, with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen.

The top opera production was surely Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque with a scintillating Agrippina, Handel’s ruthless political satire, which Sam Helfrich "semi-staged" in Peter Sellars–style modern dress and, more important, with Sellars-like attention to both words and music. Boston Lyric Opera’s moving Eugene Onegin got under my skin, and I got a kick out of Intermezzo’s darkly comic Kurt Weill — The Seven Deadly Sins, with the impressive young mezzo Krista River. Mezzo-soprano Christina Baldwin made a memorable Carmen in Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s pared-down production at the ART.

And Boston continued its love affair with Teatro Lirico d’Europa, which returned with even better Bizet (Carmen) and vibrant Rossini (Il barbiere di Siviglia). When a snowstorm prevented many ticket holders from coming to a sold-out La bohème, Teatro Lirico offered on its next visit a performance for which people who still had their original tickets didn’t have to pay again.

The Boston Conservatory reconfirmed its excellence in musical theater with Jerome Kern’s nostalgic Roberta ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes") and Neil Donahoe’s dazzling production of Wright & Forrest’s tongue-in-cheek Kismet ("Stranger in Paradise"). And American Classics (Ben Sears and Brad Conner, with music director/pianist Margaret Ulmer) brought American musicals from the 1920s back alive with Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revues and Cole Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchmen ("You Do Something to Me").