Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Concerto funebre, for solo violin and string orchestra

It takes artistic invention and considerable courage to design a concert programme solely around tragic topics; yet the connecting link between the various items on the last subscription concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra was – directly or indirectly – death and great composers’ reaction to it. The key of C minor invariably carries sombre overtones in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Alina Ibragimova with the Scottish Ensemble perform exuberant early teenage Mendelssohn, deeply spiritual Pärt and Vasks, politically lethal Hartmann and utterly thrilling Bach.

Vladimir Jurowski put in a surprise appearance at the harpsichord at the start of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, which saw Leonidas Kavakos join the orchestra for concertos by Bach and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. But it was the Eroica that drew the strongest performance.

Even in a festival anchored around a handful of 20th-century composers touched by the presence of war – Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók, Witold Lutosławski – the program on Thursday night with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and their chief conductor, Marek Janowski, was especially haunted by the memory of atrocity. It was a night of tough music with little reprieve.

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