Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Violin Sonata no. 1 in G major, Op.78

In their duo debut at Carnegie Hall, violinist and pianist offered a dialogue of many contrasts.

They may seem like an odd pairing, but Wang and Kavakos defy the naysayers yet again, warming into a fascinating recital in Vienna.

An enthralling afternoon on London's Southbank as Lawrence Power and Pavel Kolesnikov perform all Brahms' sonatas for violin and viola. 

Maxim Vengerov and Polina Osetinskaya’s marathon of Brahms sonatas showed off the composer at his most lyrical and dramatic. 

Passion and intensity in a recital of Brahms' chamber music in Lucerne.

It is not often that a United Nations Messenger of Peace gives a concert in Sydney. Yet this is what happened on Sunday when violinist Midori Gotō played a recital with pianist Özgür Aydin. 

Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play all three of Brahms' sonatas for violin and piano in one evening, without ever looking at each other. They did not seem to need to.

Other than the gigantic Salle des Combins, a semi-permanent white tent seating a couple of thousand, the major venue for the Verbier Festival is the local église, perched higher up the mountains than the main square. Marked by a tall bell-tower shaped like a cross, the hall is prowlike, dark, and claustrophobic, enlivened only by coloured slits of light coming from behind the audience.

Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart: four insurmountable composers, each a titan of classical music in his own right. Every one of these composers would normally dominate a position of focus in a classical concert programme. It is rare, therefore, to see these composers side by side in a concert, simply due to a need for variety and not a heavy-handed evening filled with canonical works.

Last Sunday, Pekka Kuusisto performed in Siuntio, a Finnish town not so far from Helsinki, as part of the Lux Musicae Festival, together with pianist Joonas Ahonen and hornist Hervé Joulain. In the penumbra of the candles and the gentle lights of a beautiful church from the 1400s, the first notes of Brahms’ Violin Sonata in G major resounded. Kuusisto’s sound is all about the power of simplicity.

One of the delights of instrumental recitals is their unpredictability. There is an element of challenge that all types have in common, however.