By Nestor CASTIGLIONE

It seems that every passing year brings increasingly greater and richer musical experiences to music lovers in Southern California. If there was anything in which 2017 was pronouncedly better, it was in the amount and quality of great live music.

As the twilight of 2017 dims before the auguring of 2018, I’ve compiled a list of my top three favorite concerts I’ve attended this past year. Here they are presented in no particular order.

Piano Spheres: Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Lesemann performed by Svrcek and Ojeda-Valdés – Listeners can always count on Piano Spheres for carefully wrought programs and probing performances. But the series outdid itself in late April with a program that revolved around Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in its guise for two pianos. The story of the work’s scandalous world premiere has long been the stuff of classical music lore. But less remembered was Stravinsky’s indignation at the Champs-Elysees audience’s reaction to his newest work. For behind the rawness of its façade, its “emancipation of rhythm,” as a critic years later would express it, was a work whose veins coursed with the influences of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Russian peasant folk music. Svrcek and Ojeda-Valdés were keenly attuned to the Janus-faced qualities of this watershed score, shining a light on the surprising elegance and lyricism that thrives beneath the surface of this often savage music.

Le Salon de Musiques performs works by Barber, Clarke, and Beach – François Chouchan, the founder of Le Salon de Musiques, is never one to dampen his intrepid streak. Instead it’s the guiding light of his sense of programming, with his remarkable knack for unearthing works by composers long ago forgotten who richly deserve repeated hearing. Perhaps his chamber group’s finest moment this year was in the spring when it mounted a program of music by composers who were marginalized from the mainstream in one way or another by virtue of their gender or sexual orientation. While Amy Beach wasn’t exactly marginalized because of her being a woman (she was a highly regarded composer and pianist in the early years of the 20th century), nor did Samuel Barber’s homosexuality preclude him receiving the honors and commissions commensurate with his talent (he, in fact, won the Pulitzer for music twice, even at the height of serialist music’s popularity), there was no arguing the real diminishing of the genius of English composer Rebecca Clarke, whose “Piano Trio” made up the core of that program. Passionate, brilliant, tough and highly original, it was a true masterwork that made one lament all the more so that her art was so cruelly ignored for decades on account of her gender.

Los Angeles Philharmonic and Michael Tilson Thomas perform Bruckner’s “Symphony No. 7” – In a concert originally to be conducted by Zubin Mehta recently, San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas stepped in on short notice on account of the former’s shoulder injury, replacing Bruckner’s anguished “Symphony No. 9,” which had originally been programmed with the composer’s ecstatic “Symphony No. 7.” What resulted was the sort of sparks one dreams to encounter as a listener. MTT’s Bruckner was far removed from the monolithic and somewhat impassive performances made famous by conductors such as Wand, Celibidache and Asahina. This was deeply emotional and heartfelt Bruckner that kicked and sang with a full heart, swooning and sighing. It was “American-style” Bruckner: open-hearted and engaging, often argumentative. The performance, swift yet carefully built, was perhaps the most memorable that has been heard at Disney Hall in quite a while.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE