Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | L'Ascension - 4 meditations symphoniques

With a programme spanning from Pagh-Paan, Ravel and Messiean to Sibelius, the Korean orchestra showcases its mastery at the Philharmonie Berlin. 

Messiaen and Bruckner have more in common than you might think, as Paavo Järvi and his players from Switzerland's leading orchestra demonstrate.

Jansen lights up the Tonhalle with Bernstein's Serenade, while Paavo Järvi conducts Bruckner's Third Symphony. 

Sakari Oramo pushes the BBC Symphony Orchestra to breaking point at Symphony Hall

Pianist Joela Jones gives a virtuoso solo performance in Messian's *Couleurs de la cité céleste*.

An adventurous journey with David Robertson included a superlative and unique performance of Ives's The Unanswered Question and a terrific introduction to Luc Brewaeys and his Symphony no. 6. 

Last Friday, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and its musical director Myung-Whun Chung offered a wonderful panorama of French music: Claude Debussy’s impressionism, Olivier Messiaen’s abstraction and Camille Saint-Saëns’ romanticism.

Auckland is a good place to be for Mahler lovers at the moment. Following hard on the heels of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Seventh Symphony, the Auckland Philharmonia brought their interpretation of his Fifth to the same hall.

The risen Christ and a dramatic figure who resists the Christian promise of redemption make for odd conceptual bedfellows, not least of all in a Vienna Philharmonic programme which here saw Messiaen’s L’Ascension sandwiched between the Schumann and Tchaikovsky treatments of Byron’s Manfred.

Any performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 is always eagerly awaited, but this one was especially, featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra performing on period instruments, directed from the lead violin by their artistic director Richard Tognetti, with one of the best English collegiate choirs, the choir of Clare College, Cambridge.

The Pastoral Symphony is perhaps an optimistic choice for January in Manchester, but for a short while all memory of the deluge outside evaporated in the Bridgewater Hall.Olivier Messiaen’s suite L’Ascension opened the concert with serene, otherworldly modality in a masterfully sculpted brass chorale.