Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Christopher Widauer

Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder are not performed often, and one reason involves simple logistics. Not only is a professional orchestra of gigantic proportions required, but also five soloists with Wagnerian voices, a narrator, an eight-part mixed chorus, three four-part male choirs, and a conductor crazy enough to try to keep some 400 musicians from going off the rails.

Entering a standing-room-only hall on Tuesday evening in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, Leonidas Kavakos calmly made his way to center stage, hugged the concert master, smiled at the orchestra and then cued the beginning of Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G major, which he both played and conducted.

The great jazz composer Bob Brookmeyer used to instruct his students that they should never write a solo section in their composition until it was absolutely inevitable that a solo should take place.

The Wiener Symphoniker has suffered recently from more late conductor cancellations than most orchestras, and things reached a peak last season when their chief conductor Fabio Luisi pulled out of a string of engagements in order to substitute for James Levine at the Met.