I have always found myself reaching for Beethoven on New Year's Day. Though I am not entirely sure why, and it has certainly been a matter of instinct rather than reflection, I suspect it must have something to do with the combination of struggle and the indomitable nature of the human spirit: always appropriate, yet perhaps especially so for the beginning of a new year. And this setting of the Mass is surely in that respect, as in many others, the ne plus ultra. Very best wishes to all my readers for 2013! (Anyone interested in reading my thoughts on this performance at the time should click here. Suffice it to say that it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.)
