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

Youthful Mahler, earth-shattering Shostatovich and life-affirming Schumann, played by The Maisky Trio and Maxim Rysanov at the Istanbul Music Festival.

Vasks’ Viola Concerto receives its Scottish première with Maxim Rysanov and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as they explore music and nature in the Baltic, Rome and America.

The Turku Philharmonic showcases some of the finest work from 20th-century Slavic composers.  

Playing repeatedly in my mind as I walked home on 24 July was the spine-chilling orchestral performance of the "Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in the Franz Liszt Academy’s superb Solti Hall.

A few nights after the Berliner Philharmoniker brought us Janáček’s late masterpiece, the Glagolitic Mass, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conductor Tugan Sokhiev took the stage with his other great work from the same year, 1926: the Sinfonietta, Op. 60, which originally appeared with the modifier “Military”.

An introductory reading by local writer Philip Pullman was an appropriate introduction to the “Dusk to Dawn” concert, one of the last in this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival (themed “Fairytales and Fantasy”). The collision of a light-hearted surface with darker undertones was not just in Pullman’s retelling of the Grimm stories, but pervaded Artistic Director Priya Mitchell’s programming.

It's not always that Schoenberg is out-weirded in a concert programme. More often, his is the eyebrow-raiser, the tougher music on display, which takes more effort to enjoy.

Friday night’s performance by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was not just in the National Concert Hall: it was also recorded live for RTÉ Lyric FM. Despite the additional pressure of a national audience, the orchestra performed to their much-acclaimed high standard.