Sounds of stirring music and shaking up the status quo

There is nothing scientific or comprehensive about my list of favorites this year. They represent the most memorable stops in a time of musical wanderings across the two cities (New York and Boston) in which I lived.

To start with the local news, the biggest classical music story was James Levine's torn rotator cuff after an onstage fall at Symphony Hall in early March. His surgery and recuperation sidelined him for four months and left both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera without a captain. When he returned to open the Tanglewood season in early July, looking well-rested and fitter than before, he conducted the very same program he had led the evening of his fall: Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It went off magnificently.

Levine carried the momentum of the BSO's ongoing two-season Beethoven/Schoenberg project into the autumn, leading several programs that highlighted the music of these two revolutionary composers in mutually illuminating ways. In one program, Daniel Barenboim gave probing readings as the soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto together with Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. In another, the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff played Beethoven's Concerto with sublime flights of eloquence and paired it with Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, a fiercely difficult piece that he delivered with all the ardor of a Romantic blockbuster. The Beethoven/Schoenberg project came to a high point with Schoenberg's monumental opera "Moses und Aron," a thorny work for which an impressively large audience turned out, went the distance, and ultimately cheered.

Make no mistake about it: Levine's sustained championing of the high-modernist canon is virtually unprecedented at a major American orchestra. This fall, I heard a bit of grumbling from some patrons, but I also heard reports of listeners returning to the BSO after years of sitting out concerts. One thing over which no one disagrees is that the orchestra has been playing at a very high level. The group's European tour this summer will bring the current BSO exposure far beyond Boston, as will its first CD under Levine: Peter Lieberson's supremely inspired "Neruda Songs" performed by his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose tragic death this year spurred an outpouring of appreciation from her legions of admirers, and made this release all the more precious.

The year also witnessed a major changing of the guard at the Metropolitan Opera, with Peter Gelb taking over from Joseph Volpe as the company's new general manager. So far Gelb, a former record executive, has been shaking up the staid institution in beneficial ways, and his most passionate energies seem to be reserved for broadening opera's audiences. I will not soon forget the surreal sight of Times Square serving as an outdoor amphitheater on the Met's opening night: Broadway was closed down to accommodate hundreds of opera fans seated in neat rows, "Madama Butterfly" was simulcast on the jumbo screens, and the music poured out of large speakers into the heart of the city. How do you follow a stunt like this? Stay tuned for more high-tech feats of Gelbian populism, as the Met was scheduled this weekend to begin a series of live high-definition broadcasts at various movie theaters across North America, including one in the Boston area.

Mozart, Shostakovich, and Steve Reich had big birthday years that brought forth avalanches of their music. Since I came to the Globe in early fall, Opera Boston mounted a capable production of Mozart's seldom-heard "Clemenza di Tito," Boston Baroque gave us "Don Giovanni" on period instruments, and student string quartets at New England Conservatory began a survey of all the Shostakovich quartets. The city chose, for the most part, to skip the Reich party. But the birthday moment that will most endure in my memory was when Shostakovich's old friend and cello muse, Mstislav Rostropovich, conducted the New York Philharmonic in a blazing performance of the composer's Tenth Symphony and inspired the Siberian powerhouse violinist Maxim Vengerov to perform the luminous First Violin Concerto with more depth than I have ever heard in his playing. Every note of the symphony was suffused with an intimate knowledge of the life and times that produced this harrowing music.

The year also witnessed plenty of chaos in the recording industry, as Tower Records went out of business; the local Virgin Megastore, which occupied the spot where a Tower store once stood, also closed; and such big companies as Sony BMG Masterworks hemorrhaged staff. But as the major labels struggled, many of the smaller ones did just fine, and there were unheard of bargains to be found at the periphery, such as box sets of the complete works of Mozart and Bach (on Brilliant Classics) for less than $150 each. Meanwhile, the Internet continued to create new opportunities for classical-music devotees, as podcasts gained momentum and such invaluable online resources as the New Mozart Edition (offering full access to scores) became available free to users.

In the field of contemporary music, the Composer Portraits series at the Gardner Museum continued its successful run, with the fearless young ensemble So Percussion performing David Lang's mesmerizing work "the so-called laws of nature." (The opening section was so loud that several of the players wore earplugs as they banged away.) Gyorgy Ligeti, one of the most restlessly innovative composers of the 20th century, died in June, and earlier this month at Carnegie Hall, the French pianist Pierre - Laurent Aimard gave a Ligeti-themed recital of coruscating brilliance. It was called "A Study of a Study," and he interspersed etudes by Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, and others with Ligeti's own explosive etudes. Fortunately, Aimard will perform with the BSO in April and again at Tanglewood next summer.

But the action in 2006 did not take place exclusively in the concert halls, churches, museums, and opera houses. The Parker Quartet took to the Lizard Lounge, and the adventurous Boston Modern Orchestra Project gave a cabaret-style concert in the Moonshine Room of Club Café in the South End. New music often breathes more easily in these easygoing spaces, and when BMOP composer-in-residence Lisa Bielawa sang Gordon Beeferman's haunting "West of Winter" in a vocal quartet with three prerecorded versions of herself, the effect was so entrancing that you could have been anywhere.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.