Highlight of 2010: Conductor Gianandrea Noseda's electric performance of Verdi Requiem with Toronto Symphony Orchestra

I wrote a year-end best-of/worst-of article for Tuesday's Star. It included a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.

2. The electric Feb. 18 Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Mendelssohn Choir performance of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, led by guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda.

This was a great concert -- the kind that makes the world feel like a different place when you emerge from the concert hall.

"If everyone could face death with the help of a live performance of Verdi's Requiem, the world would have no more need of grief counsellors," I wrote in my review in the Star. "It means even more when the live performance is as fine as Noseda's inspired reading, which took into account all the potential of the silences between the notes as the notes themselves."

Gianandrea Noseda has, for the past seven or eight years, been a guest of the Toronto Symphony at least once a season. I've been there for most of these visits, and have always come away impressed with his musical leadership.

Unfortunately for Toronto, Noseda has too many other things -- most of them operatic -- on his plate now, so we won't seem him at all this season.

If you want to hear him at work sometime soon, you can tune in to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on Jan. 15, for a performance of Verdi's La Traviata.