Monterey County’s music scene continues to impress with a year of standout concerts.

Music played all year long in 2018 on local stages large and small. These shows stood out:

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time | March

This Holocaust-inspired masterpiece was given a dazzling reading by a foursome of players – on an appropriately foggy Carmel evening, given that the work was premiered in a Polish Nazi detention camp outdoors in a driving rainstorm on makeshift, largely broken instruments. Only the tiniest handful of musical compositions possess the power to change you as a person when you simply hear them. This is one of them.

Fire and Grace – William Coulter, guitar and Edwin Huizinga, violin | March

Two players, as comfortable with Bach as they are with Irish jigs, decided to follow their passion (fire) and appreciate their virtuosity (grace) to the delight of a sold-out audience at Folktale Winery. Listeners were stunned by their sheer sonic mastery and creative diversity.

New World String Project | May

An amalgam of Molly’s Revenge (fiddler John Weed and stringist Stuart Mason) plus Windham Hill-decorated harpitst Lisa Lynne and multi-instrumentalist Aryeh Frankfurter, literally pranced through their hour-long program at St. Mary’s in P.G., displaying both calculated structure and unbridled abandon.

Bach Festival: St.Matthew Passion | July

The performance of J.S. Bach’s masterwork at Sunset Center in Carmel lived up to the score’s brilliance as artistic director and principal conductor Paul Goodwin deftly guided two choirs and two orchestras though the massive three-hour narrative piece, making it look easy.

KRML Live in the Vines: The Stone Foxes | July

This originally garage band duo now turned legendary six-piece group rocked the Barrel Room at Folktale Winery. This set covered a gamut of emotions and musical styles. This was a show to remember.

War | August

From the first note that reverberated around the Monterey Fairgrounds to the last, this decades-old protest rock street band proved why their longevity is no fluke. They were first to combine R&B with Latino melodies.

Daniel Hope and Friends present Air – A Baroque Journey | October

Hope took Sunset Center audiophiles on an educational tour de force, cataloging how the violin morphed from being a dance and folk instrument into the pinnacle of concertizing we know it as today.

There’s more, if space would allow. And fans in Monterey County may have a different list in mind – evidence that, all in all, it was a stellar year. On to 2019!