Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale): suite

A concept album of a programme which might not quite have cohered, but whose components were never less than lovely.

Enrique Mazzola conducts an intriguing combination of a French work and a Russian work with a French title focusing on turn-of-the-century France.

Marc-André Hamelin, Martin Fröst and Anthony Marwood join forces at Wigmore Hall in a great selection of mainly 20th century classics by Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók and Poulenc.

Despite the frequency with which the two composers are compared, Thomas Adès’ music seldom sounds very much like that of Benjamin Britten. But Adès has an uncanny knack of performing Britten’s music in such a way that it resembles his own.

As part of the City of London Festival 2013, the Nash Ensemble delivered a varied mixture of works loosely connected by the ubiquitous Britten theme. This hotchpotch-style approach has worked very well indeed for the Nash for nearly 50 years, and tonight’s concert was no exception.

When Stravinsky brought his radical ballet Petrushka to Vienna in 1912, the composer recounts in his autobiography, the orchestra was full of complaints about the demands of the score. Disillusioned by this, Stravinsky found comfort from the unlikely figure of the man who raised and lowered the stage curtains. “Don’t let’s be downhearted”, he said, “I’ve been here for 55 years...

The Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam’s foremost modern classical music venue, opened the music season with a day dedicated to percussion. The first concert included Stravinsky’s Suite from L’histoire du soldat (1918) and Varèse’s Ionisation (1929-31) and Hyperprism (1922-23).

Red, white and blue bunting, with matching lighting, adorned the balconies of Cheltenham Town Hall, setting a patriotic scene for a concert of music from the year that World War I ended. Television presenter Julia Somerville opened the evening sat at a vintage newsdesk with her own careful research, for which she can be highly commended.

At first glance, Beethoven isn’t an obvious composer to match up with Ravel and Stravinsky, but Northern Sinfonia’s concert this evening with guest conductor Thierry Fischer did draw out a few surprising parallels.