Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Variations on a Theme by Haydn in B flat major, Op.56a

At the Seoul Arts Center, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra achieves a luminous balance of historically informed insight and modern orchestral splendour, delivering performances that feel at once deeply rooted and thrillingly alive.

A varied programme of orchestral showpieces in Liverpool, featuring star soloist Julian Bliss playing Copland's Clarinet Concerto.

An intriguing programme and incisive playing from Igor Levit and Markus Becker as they examine Beethoven and Brahms from a fresh angle, and exceptional Bartók.

Bruckner for the non-Brucknerian: the Philharmonia plays the Fourth with Schubertian delicacy at the Royal Albert Hall. 

Pavel Kolesnikov impresses in a Mozart performance to savour. 

Dame Mitsuko Uchida again brought out her outstanding musicality and special charisma in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

Barry took the honours for OTT, while Asbury and the NSO's “Pathétique” went straight to the soul.

The Vienna Philharmonic played with their characteristic finesse, albeit at times sacrificing the larger arc of the music

If Principal Guest Conductor and Music Director Designate Thomas Dausgaard wore his array of conducting posts as a series of medals on the lapel of his tux, it would weigh him down considerably. 

The aesthetic delights of the Vienna Philharmonic fail to enliven its Beethoven.

Two works by Brahms and an early tone poem by Strauss only partially succeed in performances by the LSO under Alpesh Chauhan and with Benjamin Grosvenor as soloist.

Schumann's Violin Concerto is a relative rarity in the concert hall, but Patricia Kopatchinskaja's performance did little to suggest a neglected masterpiece.

The Romantic fervour of Brahms' Haydn Variations and Schumann's Spring Symphony brought out by Cristian Mandeal and the Hallé, plus Sophia Jaffé's glorious performance of Bruch's Scottish Fantasy.

Fine renditions of Brahms's Haydn Variations and Strauss's Death and Transfiguration and Till Eulenspiegel more than compensate for an underwhelming rendition of Rihm's Lichtes Spiel in the Concertgebouw's performance at the Berlin Festival.

Billed as “Midori performs Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto”, this Orchestre symphonique de Montréal concert conducted by James Colon was notable for a blazing performance of Zemlinsky's symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau.

Silences felt like the pillars in Lorin Maazel's reading of Sibelius' Symphony No.2 and the results were astonishing.

Of the two major orchestras performing in Auckland, the Auckland Philharmonia consistently has the more interesting programming (in recent reviews I’ve praised them in everything from Messiaen to Bach). It was interesting, then, to hear them in the bread-and-butter symphonic repertoire of Bruch and Brahms.

The second concert of the Philharmonia’s Brahms cycle saw Brahms’ orchestra at its richest and most full-blooded. Alongside the burnished, glowing colours of the Haydn Variations were placed the autumnal glow of the Third Symphony and the Concerto for Violin and Cello, Brahms’ final orchestral work, with sibling soloists Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff.

The Salle Pleyel’s programmatic dichotomy between “memory” and “creation” continually seeks to promote the more established names in classical music, whilst also shedding light on lesser-known repertoires from all musical epochs.

The Dresden Philharmonic brought classy Brahms, Barber and Dvořák to Manchester as part of their UK tour in a forward-looking programme of musical new beginnings. If incisive thrust was occasionally lacking, they more than compensated with elegance all evening.

The German Requiem is an unbudgeable fixture on the Viennese musical calendar, and yet selections from Brahms’ more obscure choral output are seldom programmed, with chorus directors typically citing the unfeasible ratio of rehearsal to running time for complicated works like Nänie (which is less than 15 minutes long).

With the sun shining bright and the waning winter months feeling more like spring, it seemed like all of Astoria was out on the streets this past Sunday. Still, the Astoria Symphony Orchestra enticed some of the locals indoors, delighting us with Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.

How do you solve a problem like Schoenberg? Sweetening the musical pill is a good start, and whilst neither the billed Brahms nor Beethoven received saccharine readings, the contrast between the angularity of the programmed modernism and the sheer beauty of these canonical works was all the more acute through their juxtaposition.