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Superbly responsive performances of standard repertoire given a new lease of life by a young Norwegian conductor in Basingstoke.

A cello concerto by CPE Bach headlines Nicolas Altstaedt's appearance at the Istanbul Music Festival with the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

A young conductor and a venerable orchestra unite in Berlin for three 20th-century works, covering vastly different soundscapes. 

The French conductor leads a “Salome-centric” concert high on drama and color, joined by Nicolas Altstaedt in presenting a cello concerto new to American audiences.

The first programme of Nicolas Altstaedt and Aleksandar Madžar for their tour around Australia offered an insightful selection of 20th-century chamber music masterpieces.

Nicolas Altstaedt and Alexander Lonquich give Beethoven’s cello sonatas a chance to breathe in a thoughtful and accomplished performance of all five at Wigmore Hall.

Discovering Enescu through the lens of his folkloric genes was the beginning of the musical adventure that awaits listeners in the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in Austria.

For the third concert of their 2015 Premier Series, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra under Musical Director Eckehard Stier presented "Out of this World", a varied programme of Bach, Dutilleux and Shostakovich.

Janine Jansen's International Chamber Music Festival offered a special treat this year: scratchcard concert, where a scratchcard determined which concerts one got to see.

A series of three concerts over the course of one weekend, designed to reflect upon and champion the work of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which has supported a significant number of worthy performers in its first ten years, was always going to present an interesting range of repertoire – if not something of a conundrum for those planning the programming of the concerts.

Surely, Michael Tippett must be considered the most important British composer of the mid 20th century, even if this might be an unfashionable thing to say in this Britten-filled centenary year. Certainly, the BBCSO’s brave performance of his Third Symphony was evidence of this in itself.Since his death in 1998 at the age of 93, performances of Tippett’s work have gone into sad decline.

It’s rare to be at a concert, of any genre, and to experience a very profound sense of involvement on the part of the performers, combined with total commitment to the music, both in terms of fidelity to the written score and integrity of performance.

Regarded as one of the best young string quartets around today, the Quatuor Ebène have made a name for themselves with their homogeneity of sound, in equal parts vibrant and mellifluous, and the powerful immediacy of their playing.

Young German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt was at the emotional centre of the BBC Philharmonic’s all-Elgar concert in Manchester. An award-winner with a fast-developing global reputation, he made the opening four chords of the Cello Concerto exceptionally dramatic, more immediate than usual, as we were plunged into the composer’s agonised responses to the Great War.

Each piece in Nicolas Alstaedt and José Gallardo's programme was re-imagined for the cello as a direct response to existing musical material. The original music either came from a different genre, or was composed for a different instrument. Four significant works in the cello repertoire emerged.