Chris Kallmyer performing George Brecht.
At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2018.
The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Chad Smith, the Chief Operating Officer of the L.A. Philharmonic.
Some notable music books of 2018: Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times (FSG); Stephen Walsh, Debussy: A Painter in Sound (Knopf); Heidi Waleson, Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America (Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt); Vivien Schweitzer, A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera (Basic Books); Anthony Tommasini, The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide (Penguin); Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (UC Press); Jamie Bernstein, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (Harper Collins); Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema (Oxford UP); Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press); Honey Meconi, Hildegard of Bingen (University of Illinois Press). Belatedly, I caught up with two important Wagner books: Ulrich Drüner's Richard Wagner: Die Inszenierung eines Lebens (Blessing, 2016) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Wagner antisémite (Bourgois, 2015). Both are deserving of translation.
Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (New Directions), Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All (Knopf), Brian Phillips's Impossible Owls (FSG), Leland de la Durantaye's Hannah Versus the Tree (McSweeney's), Susan Orlean's The Library Book (Atlantic), Jill Lepore's These Truths (Norton), and Caroline Weber’s Proust's Duchess (Knopf), among others. My favorite films of the year were Roma, The Death of Stalin, and, of course, The Other Side of the Wind.
