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Iestyn Davies shows how to make every word count in a fairly standard sampler of Baroque arias; Ticciati is a fireball on the podium with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Giovanni Antonini leads Il Giardino Armonico through a sampler of Vivaldi's L'estro armonico, with a stellar Isabelle Faust leading the soloists.

Watching Ma inspire younger musicians is an extraordinary experience. Renaud Capuçon conducts an entertaining if imperfect Eroica.

Intimate and powerful, Fischer's performance with Camerata Salzburg feels like a match made in heaven. 

The South African soprano wows the audience with astonishing vocal and dramatic qualities – but do they stretch to a programme of art song?

The 19-year-old performs four masterpieces presented in chronological order and illustrating the evolution of the art of the keyboard from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century.

The Italian pianist's recital included Schubert Impromptus and rarely heard works by Beethoven and CPE Bach. 

The French pianist pairs the last two sonatas in his Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad recital. 

Bomsori Kim and Jean-Paul Gasparian prove an ideal coupling of natural musicality and effortless technique in Beethoven, Brahms and Szymanowski.

An unmissable recital as the Sommets Musicaux festival takes on an online incarnation. 

Freire convinces in Bach, but soft attack and heavy pedal use make for flat renditions of romantic works.

Radu Lupu produces Mozart so sublime as to delight the angels, Saraste and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra give us a lesson in poise, balance and blended sound.

Elisabeth Lenoskaja's ability to execute a perfect phrase lights up a fine performance by the Polish Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra.

Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad opens with a programme of beautiful music and a pair of fine soloists, but a concert somewhat let down by a lack of rapport between soloists and orchestra.

A magnificent evening of lieder from Thomas Hampson with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in crisp accompaniment.

Let's be brutally honest, concertgoers: Vivaldi's Four Seasons has been played to death - recorded by everybody who's anybody. It's been a wonderful old warhorse over the years, but it has been flogged once too often. Can it really be possible, then, to bring this animal back from the dead and rekindle our enthusiasm?

The programme for the closing concert of Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad had a familiar form: a late twentieth century concerto sandwiched between two classical pieces – a sure sign, if ever there was one, of a “difficult” work sugar-coated by material more palatable to a mainstream audience. But signs can be misleading, extremely so in this case.

Question: how do you demonstrate to a sceptical audience that baroque opera seria doesn’t have to be boring? To answer this, the organisers of Sommets Musicaux and David Greilsammer, conductor of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra came up with a programme consisting of four Handel arias interspersed with orchestral passages from French baroque opera, these chosen for their variety and dance-based charac

There are some concerts where everything comes together, where the music is perfectly suited to the performers, and the hall is perfectly suited to their playing style. Last night’s concert at Saanen Church, in which Elisabeth Leonskaja joined Wojciech Rajski and his Polish Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, was just such an occasion.

They made quite a contrast on stage: the diminutive figure of violinist Alexandra Soumm, resplendent in bright pink evening dress, and the imposing black-clad bulk of conductor Peter Csaba. Both, however, are bundles of energy, which was deployed at full tilt in this performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, closing the violin-laden programme of this year’s Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad.

If you go to enough concerts, it’s bound to happen to you every now and then: the programme includes a work that you weren’t particularly looking forward to, and the performers blow you away, utterly transforming your view of the piece. In this case, the performers were Camerata Bern and the work was Bartók’s Divertimento for strings.

Winter in the Swiss Alps: freezing temperatures and snow outside. A modest seventeenth-century church of elegant proportions, painted plasterwork and wood panelling. A dozen crack musicians, specialists in baroque music.