Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Leiden | English

New Year’s concerts have never been that appealing to me: I am not a great lover of Viennese waltzes and that is what most of them consist of. But fortunately this year the Holland Symfonia had a New Years concert with a twist: Russian fireworks.

When you go to see a student orchestra play a concert, your expectations are generally lower than with professional orchestras. And so, when the Symfonieorkest of the Amsterdam Conservatory and soloists from the same Conservatory came to Leiden with an exciting program of Ravel, Prokofiev, Dvořák and Janáček, I thought it’d be a fun night, but not necessarily impressive.

Louis Andriessen is my favourite Dutch composer, but even here in the Netherlands his works are underperformed. So it was all the more exciting that the Clazz Ensemble presented a program solely with works by Andriessen.

Opening the concert season at Leiden’s Stadsgehoorzaal was a beautiful concert of chamber music by two talented young string quartets: the Finzi Quartet and Quatuor Byron. On the program were string quartets by Haydn, Ravel and Shostakovich – an eclectic mix that turned out rather well. The absolute highlight of the evening was Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.