Ambitious aims, skillful execution made 2006 sing

Thinking back on favorite musical moments of 2006, it's natural to start with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and James Levine. Not just because they always come to mind first -- they're the musical equivalent of the Red Sox -- but because they began the year by launching their Beethoven-Schoenberg project, an ambitious series of concerts bringing together two immensely great and difficult composers. Set to conclude in March, it is one of the boldest programming ventures undertaken by a major orchestra in recent years.

Among the marvelous concerts that this venture produced, one that's likely to live longest in my mind is the opener in January: a searing performance of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," that rough, glowering masterpiece that seems to sum up all the complexity and hard-won ecstasy of Beethoven's late style. Here Levine was at his most fervent, the orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus at their most thrillingly responsive. Not even the withdrawals of soloists Deborah Voigt and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson could blemish a performance for the ages.

Other 2006 highlights may have come in smaller packages but gave no less delight. The ever-inventive Boston Modern Orchestra Project programmed Lee Hyla's wonderful "Lives of the Saints," a kaleidoscopic meditation on religious devotion, expertly rendered by mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger . The memory of it is bittersweet, though, with thoughts of Hyla's impending departure for Chicago and Northwestern University in mind.

Speaking of contemporary music, it was hard to believe that eighth blackbird has been around for a decade, but the sextet came to Harvard's Sanders Theatre in March with a 10th-anniversary program, courtesy of Bank of America Celebrity Series. The show was a visual as well as musical riot that confirmed the group's place at the forefront of new-music ensembles. Equally hip are the four guys in So Percussion, who played David Lang's exhausting and transfixing work "the so-called laws of nature" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. That was part of the Gardner's valuable "Composer Portrait" series, which also brought pianist Christopher Taylor in a jaw-dropping evening of the complete etudes of György Ligeti , four months before the composer's death in June.

Composers also had milestone birthdays. Mozart turned 250, Shostakovich 100, Steve Reich 70. The Emerson Quartet marked the Shostakovich centenary with a straight-into-darkness evening of his death-haunted last three string quartets, another Celebrity Series event. The quartets were well-served in recordings as well, with two top-flight versions of the Third, Seventh, and Eighth by the St. Lawrence and Hagen quartets . Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic offered excellent versions of two symphonies, the youthful First and the bleak Fourteenth . There was also a reissue by ECM of Keith Jarrett's beautiful and mysterious recordings of the 24 Preludes and Fugues, a personal favorite.

There seemed to be fewer great Mozart recordings to mark the occasion, but the year brought at least one: a new "Magic Flute" that crackles with energy and fresh insight, thanks to an outstanding cast and Claudio Abbado's inspired leadership of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra . Among newer operatic fare on CD, two of the best releases were Osvaldo Golijov's smoldering "Ainadamar" and Louis Andriessen's hallucinatory "Writing to Vermeer."

Eighth blackbird also made its fourth strong album, " strange imaginary animals." And the all-female vocal quartet Anonymous 4 made a welcome return with "Gloryland," an exploration of traditional American folk music, with help from fiddler Darol Anger and guitarist Mike Marshall . You could debate whether this is classical, folk, country, or some fusion of the above, but when it sounds this good, who cares?

Finally, at the end of the year, came a recording by Lieberson of her husband Peter's "Neruda Songs" with the BSO and Levine. The sublime mezzo-soprano died this summer at 52. Plenty has already been written about this recording, even though it was only officially released this week. A cynic might wonder whether all the attention is justified, or whether it may be, in part, the product of well-intentioned sentiment. It isn't. Everything about this recording -- the music and the performance -- is extraordinary. It's also a reminder, among the highlights, of the great musicians who passed away this year, including the venerable Boston composer Daniel Pinkham . They will be missed, even as their art remains.