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

Špaček subtly illuminated the tough and serious first movement with shafts of light, convincingly sweetened his tone for the lyricism of the intermezzo-like Andante moderato, and gave a dazzling display in the exhilarating finale.

At the Ravinia Festival, David Zinman conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the eminent violinist Gil Shaham in music by Prokofiev and Brahms.

David Zinman marked his own 80th birthday and the CSO's 80th Ravinia season with Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety featuring the formidable Misha Dichter, and Brahms' bucolic Second Symphony.

After 19 years, David Zinman took his leave from the post of music director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich yesterday with an affectionate Proms programme of Strauss, Dvořák and Beethoven. 

On Friday morning here in the United States, 27 individuals lost their lives in a tragic mass shooting. I would like to preface this review by expressing my sincere condolences for all affected by the tragedy.At the same time on Friday morning, the New York Philharmonic performed a lovely if conventional concert under the baton of David Zinman (replacing Daniel Harding, who was ill).

There is, nowadays, no one way to play a Beethoven symphony – if indeed there ever was. Just as we today are exposed to the myriad methods of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Christian Thielemann, Bernard Haitink, and Osmo Vänskä, the supposedly bad old days of the 1950s found space for the very different talents of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, and Hermann Scherchen to rub shoulders

Nothing quite made sense in this programme, but the confusion was impressive nonetheless. The opening, the UK première of Anders Hillborg's 'Cold Heat', was a prime example of post-minimalism: an eclectic assortment of styles, juxtaposed with consideration, but without much sense of unity for the work itself.

We spent last night in Zurich, where we had the chance to see the Zurich Opernhaus production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. It’s the first time I’ve been to the opera house here and the first time I’ve seen Offenbach on stage, so interesting on both counts. The opera house is “small but perfectly formed”, as the cliché goes.