The new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is now the permanent home of more than nine-tenths of the work of one of the great masters of American Abstract Expressionism. Though its first weeks have been marred by a shocking act of vandalism, the museum's opening is the past year's pre-eminent art event.

A typical Philadelphia Orchestra subscriber will encounter Beethoven's Fifth only about 30 or 40 times in a lifetime. We watch our favorite movies more frequently.

Piffaro's repeat performance of Kile Smith's Vespers demonstrated that Smith has produced a work that could have staying power.

The misunderstood Tinker, Tailor is certainly a tale of a stagnant elite obsessed by its declining international prestige. But it's also about the toll of a profession that we spy fans— and spies themselves— try to imbue with a glamour that quickly turns to dross in the sunlight.

Hair, that '60s celebration of all things hippie, is closing its revival tour just when the Occupy movement threatens to make it relevant all over again.

Even a dance critic can't help stumbling into the theater now and then— especially since so many plays these days seem to be about dance. Here are a few of my serendipitous highlights of the past year.

Even with a six-month toothache, I took in countless wonderful dance performances in 2011. The programs I mention here especially stand out for the way they caught me by surprise and often left me flustered and panting for more.

At last the Baroque operas of Handel and his contemporaries have found a proper medium. It's not on the stage of any opera house, but on the cinema screens where the singers don't need to push and their subtle gestures are readily accessible. Rodelinda. Opera by Georg Frederic Handel; directed by Stephen Wadsworth; conducted by Henry Bicket. Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, Broadway and 65th St., New York. HD cinema encore showing at movie theaters Wednesday, January 4, 2012; Canadian encore January 28, 2012. www.metoperafamily.org or www.ncm.com/fathom.

In Lars Von Trier's quasi-operatic Melancholia, a wedding party by way of Bergman and Woody Allen gives way to a meditation on the end of the world, courtesy of an approaching rogue planet. As a disaster film, it's unclassifiable, but it does invite us to ponder our destructive social and psychological mores.

I was highly critical the first time I saw director Robert Carsen's admiring characterization of the title character in La Scala's new Don Giovanni. On second viewing, I saw new cause for concern in the miscasting of Anna Netrebko.