Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Season 2012, entitled ‘The Play's The Thing’, centred on Henry V and Richard III, with new music scores by Claire van Kampen, and The Taming of the Shrew, with a new score by Richard Hammarton. In addition – and well timed in the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and also the London Olympics – the Globe Theatre celebrated by sending out a worldwide invitation asking who would like to participate in their ‘Globe to Globe Festival’. As a result, 37 countries performed Shakespeare in 37 different languages here during the Season, within the architecture for which Shakespeare wrote, bringing with them a vast array of cultural diversity in music and dance dovetailed into the drama.

Born in Vermont in 1981, and raised in Rhode Island, then based in New York, the young post-minimalist composer Nico Muhly was, at the age of 20, commissioned by the Juilliard School to write Music in Transition for versatile pianist Bruce Brubaker. Later Brubaker and Muhly created a performance piece ‘involving electronic commentaries and “graffiti” overlaid on live performances of piano sonatas by Haydn’, to quote the Kings Place programme notes for Muhly's new piece Drones and Piano, which received its UK première on 19 May, with Brubaker at the keyboard. Again fragments of Haydn are used, ‘as well as lexia from John Adams’ Phrygian Gates, Janáček, … along with the eighth hymn by Thomas Tallis'.

In a substantial concert at the Barbican Centre on 15 February 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov, presented the British debut of Schubert Fantasia (1978, revised 1989) – senior German composer Dieter Schnebel's subtle reconstruction of one of Schubert's most original piano sonata movements – and the first performance of David Sawer's dramatic scena for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists and orchestra, Flesh and Blood (2012). Both premières lasted around 25 minutes. Sawer's new work made a satisfying contrast with its Schubertian surroundings. But an even more rewarding, and certainly more congruent, companion to the Schnebel might have been Luciano Berio's Rendering for Orchestra (1990), which reworks the fragments of Schubert's unfinished Tenth Symphony in D major, D936a into a three-movement symphonic work that would have complemented Schnebel's postmodern re-imaginings. It would also have made some fascinating associations with the Viennese master's last completed work in symphonic form: the ‘Great’ C major Symphony, which was heard after the interval. Enough speculating on what might have been; what of the fare that was actually on offer?

Since reviewing the opening of London's latest new concert hall complex, King's Place, in 2008 I have welcomed the opportunity to follow this up by reviewing subsequent premières in their purpose-built studio-style concert halls pretty well annually. For 2013 Kings Place celebrates the centenary of the birth of one of the UK's most illustrious composers, in its three-day series ‘Britten at 100’. As one of the involved presenting pianists, Andrew Matthews-Owen, aptly commented in the Kings Place brochure: ‘It's strange that people are still a little scared of Britten – I think he'd enjoy the fact that his music still has the ability to shock and unsettle us today’. Well I'm certainly not scared of any composer I'm reviewing, but on this special ‘Britten’ occasion I was at pains to point out to the powers that be that I was mostly there on 9 February to review the two probably rather more ‘quirky’ world premières by Simon Holt and Jonathan Dove rather than make any major comment about Britten as such.

The music of Shostakovich's abandoned opera Orango wasn't itself such a surprise: the première, given in Los Angeles in December 2011, was recorded live and released soon after on a Deutsche Grammophon CD (0289 479 0249 2). But experiencing it in the flesh – at its European première in the Royal Festival Hall on 16 May – revealed the music all over again and left at least this listener slack-jawed in astonishment at the profligacy of Shostakovich's genius.

Philip Moore, Organist Emeritus of York Minster was one of the main featured composers at this year's London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, now in its twelfth consecutive year. A week of concerts and services at St Pancras Church in London showcases a number of new works, and this year saw new choral pieces by Gordon Crosse, Diana Burrell and Ed Hughes (whose Chaconne for organ was composed in memory of Jonathan Harvey, who died on 4 December 2012 at the age of 73). The Festival also marked Robin Holloway's 70th birthday, with a concert of his choral works on 17 May.

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy prevented the New York-based JACK quartet from crossing the Atlantic to join forces with the Arditti Quartet in the UK première of James Clarke's 2012-S. So the belated first performance within these shores of Clarke's new piece for two string quartets, which took place at a Wigmore Hall recital on 6 May 2013, had been much anticipated.

This new opera, premièred on 25 May, is based on the book The Firework-Maker's Daughter by the popular British children's author Philip Pullman. Set in ancient China at the time of the emperors, it tells the story of a widowed firework maker (baritone Wyn Pencarreg) struggling to bring up Lila (soprano Mary Bevan), his only daughter, who (against his wishes) has ambitions to follow his line of work. This seemed an apt tale to convert into an opera, even one ostensibly for children, given the relative simplicity of the outline plot. However, one of the difficulties was obviously going to be to depict the various quests Lila undertakes as she attempts to prove her worthiness to follow her father into the family profession. These potential pitfalls were solved by skilful stagecraft.