But who cares what a library looks like, so long as it works? And early reports on the new Humanities Reading Room are promising; as are the lovely desks, the efficient retrieval system and the smoking area thoughtfully provided outside. And the star was Gerald Finley whose astonishing all-round performance – valiant, vulnerable, heartfelt, honest – had me on the edge of my seat and the verge of tears. For Finley, Hickox, and the piece itself, the Pilgrim gets my vote for Opera of the Year.Previous winners, 1991-1996: ‘King Priam’, ‘The Duenna’, ‘Die Meistersinger’, ‘Turn of the Screw’,'The Makropulos Case’, ‘Theodora’.BuildingsBy Jenny TurnerIt’s a funny time for architecture coverage in Britain. It gets harder and harder to distinguish actually existing buildings from exquisitely modelled computer-aided proposals: and in London especially, it’s mostly the fault of the millennium, already exerting its weird imaginative pull.

So, one real-life edifice and a veritable Atlantis of possible ones make fitting highlights for the year. Colin St John-Wilson’s new British Library building in Euston Road, London – just opened, after its troubled 35-year gestation – was described by our writer as looking like an overscaled DIY superstore. The director was Joseph Ward, the conductor Richard Hickox (who also conducted the piece, magnificently, at the St Endellion Festival, Cornwall). One was Deborah Warner’s minimal but masterly Turn of the Screw.The other was the semi-staging of Vaughan Williams’s epic pageant-opera Pilgrim’s Progress, which took the received wisdom on this piece (that it’s a no-no) by the scruff of the neck and proved it to be the sublime English Gesamtkunstwerk that only a few die-hard pastoralists had dared believe.

But, along with all-time lows like the disastrously un-Merry Widow and incompetent Il Barbiere di Siviglia, there have been a couple of all-time highs when the constraints of the ROH’s new, enforced austerity regime proved inspirational. And yes, I did say the Royal Opera, which bowed out of Covent Garden in July with all the shabby grandeur it could muster and now wanders the streets like an old tart with no appearances left to keep up “Annus horribilis” somehow understates the case. And Glyndebourne also delivered two of the year’s best individual performances – from Anja Silja as the seductive senior citizen of The Makropulos Case, and from Gerald Finley in the title role of Owen Wingrave.But it was with the Royal Opera that Finley had what I’d consider to be his and the whole British opera world’s finest moment in 1997. So that left most of the “events” to projects outside London or in less- than-mainstream theatre circumstances, like the Elegy for Young Lovers at the QEH; the concert performance of Die Walkure Act III at Edinburgh; the plucky, pint-sized Ring in Norwich; and the superb City of Birmingham Touring Opera’s cycle of Britten’s Church Parables, which took one giant leap forward in our understanding of these powerful, if pristine, pieces.The best design of the year came in Alison Chitty’s virtuoso paste-and- paper sets for the Glyndebourne children’s opera, Misper.