A piano prodigy burst onto the scene, studio opera recordings were few and far between – and the year’s most rewarding discs were the ones that ventured beyond the mainstream

Most end-of-year lists will surely be featuring a remarkable young pianist, Yunchan Lim, whose very special talent had first been spotted when he won the 2022 Van Cliburn competition and whose debut studio recording for Decca brilliantly confirmed those first impressions. But the release that heads our top ten was more of a surprise. Vilde Frang had already established herself among the leading violinists of her generation, but even so the sheer excellence of her recording of the Elgar Violin concerto, arguably the best to appear in 40 years, was totally unexpected.

Meanwhile, the age of the all-star studio-made opera recording is very much over. DVDs of stage productions now easily outnumber new audio-only opera sets, and this year the highest-profile operatic releases on CD were all sourced from either stage or concert performances: Sony Classical’s Parsifal, with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, was taken from the Vienna State Opera’s production; LSO Live’s version of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, conducted by Mark Elder, came from concert performances at the Aix-en-Provence festival, while the same label’s Janáček series, based on performances under Simon Rattle at the Barbican in London, continued with Kát’a Kabanová. The two outstanding rarities to have come from the ever invaluable BruZane stable this year started life in concert too - Louise Bertin’s fascinating Fausto, and the baritone version of Massenet’s Werther, with Tassis Christoyannis in the title role and Véronique Gens as an exceptional Charlotte.