Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Symphony no. 1 in C major, Op.21

Andris Nelsons launches a Beethoven cycle with riveting performances of the first two symphonies. 

Three leading performers join forces for a Beethoven program in Cleveland, all cultivating the highest level of playing from their respective instrument, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The victor at the 2021 Chopin International Piano Competition is predictably brilliant in his Singapore Symphony Orchestra debut.

Violinist Shunske Sato leads the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in an historically informed performance of early 19th-century music, including a spectacular rendering of Louis Spohr's Violin Concerto no. 8 in A minor.

On an eclectic programme that also featured superstar soloist Sol Gabetta, ear-opening Shaw and suave Saint-Saëns balanced muscular Beethoven. 

On the surface, this Verbier Festival program looked mild (Brahms and Beethoven), but in performance, it had the effect of dropping a lit match into a crate full of fireworks.

The elegance of the First Symphony served as a perfect curtain raiser for the mammoth, exultant Ninth.

An all-day Beethoven experience European style with both highs and lows: much diversity revealed and exploited but of variable quality.

Listening to arrangements of Bach is like Dostoevsky’s challenge not to think about polar bears. It’s best to put the Bach out of your thoughts, even if “the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

What links the keys of C major and F minor, and the years 1800 and 1925? The first symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich respectively.

Baritone Peter Mattei brought both musical sensitivity as well as almost Berg-ian drama to Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, ably supported by Manfred Honeck and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, in a successful livestream concert. 

While Kalle Randalu proves an amiable soloist in the First Piano Concerto, it is Beethoven the firebrand who startles in Paavo Järvi's account of the First Symphony with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.

At Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, the Wiener Philharmoniker and Andris Nelsons launch a chronological cycle of Beethoven's nine symphonies with the first three sticks of dynamite.

To mark #Beethoven250, the Australian Chamber Orchestra plays his first three symphonies in concert. But can one eat three delicious desserts in one sitting? 

A month into the year-long "Nature Unwrapped" programme at Kings Place, it was the turn of its resident Aurora Orchestra to contribute to the series.

Nine symphonies, five orchestras, two days: an immersive weekend as part of the Barbican's Beethoven 250 coverage featuring some of the UK's finest orchestras. 

Lang Lang joins Jaap van Zweden and the HK Phil for an all-Beethoven concert in Hong Hong, kicking off the composer’s 250th festivities in style.

Kevin John Edusei steps in to conduct the first concert in the series, and does a great job.

A forced programme change by Hong Kong Sinfonietta proves beneficial, lightening up the evening with Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro before a pair of Beethoven works. 

Marc Piollet and the Belgrade Philharmonic presented a poised, happy Beethoven 1 contrasting with an intense performance of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique

Some 15 minutes long, in a slow-fast-slow form, Le Tombeau de Napoléon wraps a taxing solo part for tenor trombone in a dramatically compelling and sonically thrilling orchestral canvas.

British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason gave the impression that he had been playing the cello since he was in the womb

Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra’s Beethoven symphony cycle saw an auspicious start with an especially memorable Eroica.

Eberle delivers a searingly intense Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major while Stutzmann energises the NSO with some lively Beethoven and Prokofiev.

Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra brought a wide ranging programme from the south coast for their annual Proms visit.

Adès brought a freshness and originality to Beethoven's earliest symphonies, and a sharp portrait of the composer was given courtesy of Gerald Barry.

Michael Sanderling conducts the Dresden Philharmonic in Beethoven in Cardiff.

Three substantial works from 1800, 1913 and 2008 in an enterprising and unusual combination, performed by the London Phlharmonic Orchestra conducted by Markus Stenz, and with the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as soloist.

A criticism of El Sistema orchestras has been that they have only one setting: "beefy". The first half here provided evidence to the contrary.

The Zurich Chamber Orchestra (ZKO)’s programme of “young high achievers” − Shostakovich and Beethoven − struck a positive chord at the Tonhalle this week.

Two seasons after his Met Opera debut, Thomas Adès is back at Lincoln Center making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic, including his own tremendous orchestral work, Totentanz.

Lively performances Beethoven’s First and Second Symphonies demonstrating that composer’s compositional development, plus Hindemith’s colorful Symphonic Metamorphosis, made for an enjoyable evening at Severance Hall. 

Neville Marriner conducts Christopher Palmer’s arrangement of a Walton film score, while Joshua Bell delivers magic with Max Bruch and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Ludwig van Beethoven once said: “Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.” On 19 September, 2013, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra performed three works by the late Classical and early Romantic composer: the overture to Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, and his first two symphonies.

The opening of Henri Dutilleux’s Symphony no. 1, with its distinctive pizzicato opening full of tension and curiosity, opened the concert not with a bang but rather a seductive lure.

If you like your Beethoven clean, precise and streamlined, you should go hear Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra perform the First and Seventh Symphonies, along with the Berg Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory at the Maison Symphonique.

Daniel Barenboim can be a frustrating – and frustrated – conductor. When his grand plans don’t quite come off, he can become irritable, his gestures more didactic and his brow ever more distractedly mopped. Not so in this concert, however.

What better start to a near capacity crowd concert than Mendelssohn's rousing Overture in C Major, Op101. It contains everything required to suggest a promising evening's music: pace, sparkling orchestration, energising counterpoint, dramatic dynamics and panache.

Why would you ever perform Beethoven 1 and 2 today? Beethoven wrote seven later symphonies which are clearly better. That's kind of the point of Beethoven. Looking back on these two quite early works given knowledge of those masterful symphonies yet to come, it's hard to justify their performance except as stages in a story – a story which, if truth be told, is pretty familiar.

Bonn is all about Beethoven. His image is everywhere – on one of the first statues built in Germany for a musician in 1845 in the main Munsterplatz by the cathedral, in the tourist office regalia, in directions to the house where he was born in 1770 (now a museum), in the month-long, annual Beethoven Festival, in the 2,000-seat Beethovenhalle, and, most especially, in the orchestra.

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

Sir Mark Elder and his Hallé Orchestra continue to achieve extraordinary things in Manchester, earlier this week winning Gramophone awards for the third consecutive year and tonight giving further reason to celebrate with the opening concert in their 2011-12 Beethoven cycle.Beethoven’s Symphony No.

Dans Beethoven, le violoniste et chef finlandais mène son orchestre jusqu'au miracle, rappelant les grandes phalanges historiquement informées. Jonathan Biss complète ce beau tableau dans un passionnant diptyque de concertos.

En una triple función de solista, concertino y director, Renaud Capuçon, junto a la Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne ofreció un programa diverso en el que destacó especialmente la interpretación de la Primera sinfonía de Beethoven.

El Festival Internacional de Santander cierra su edición de 2023 con la Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen y la Coral Andra Mari en una magnífica interpretación de la Misa Nelson de Joseph Haydn.

Entdeckungslust und -frische in vortrefflicher Balance und abschließend krönendes Klarinettenkonzert mit Ernst Schlader kennzeichneten u.a. diese neue Wilms-Würdigung.

Afkham desluce con una anodina Noche en los Jardines de España el estreno de la temporada de la OCNE.

Après avoir maintenu le lien avec son public durant le confinement grâce à des vidéos produites et diffusées par ses membres, l'OSM est réapparu "en vrai" à La Filature. Soirées exceptionnelles tant pour leur organisation que pour la qualité des interprétations offertes.

Juste avant que l'interdiction des rassemblements de plus de cent personnes ne fasse plonger la vie culturelle française dans un silence inquiétant, Les Siècles ont donné une lecture extraordinaire de la Symphonie « Pastorale ».