One could hardly dream of a better concert to open the season than one featuring Maxim Vengerov as the guest soloist in Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major.
William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants (or The blooming arts – a reference to an opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier) visited the Hungarian capital to perform Handel’s Messiah in the exceptional acoustics of the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall.
The choice of repertoire for Trio Dali’s second programme on their current Australian tour was excellent. The members of the Trio are almost as young as Felix Mendelssohn was when he composed his Piano Trio no. 2 in C minor, Op.66, the opening number.
Take an overture from the Classical period, add a Romantic concerto and finish with a major work from the 20th century – a tried and proven concoction for a balanced orchestral concert. If these works follow a chronological order and become increasingly longer, so much the better.
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.
Both guest artists of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concerts this week appeared in Australia for the first time: the octogenarian Christoph von Dohnányi and the versatile violinist, less than half his age, Carolin Widmann. The great German conductor must feel a certain pride in his ancestry, as he kept the Hungarian spelling of his surname.
It takes artistic courage to devote almost a whole concert to music associated with cinema, but then Richard Tognetti, the artistic director and concert master of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, never lacked creative thinking or musical audacity.
The Sydney Symphony invited a Big Band, the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra with its leader, Wynton Marsalis to join forces for a week, and in this concert, the delighted audience quickly realised that ‘all you gotta do is swing’.
Both composers whose music was performed in Garrick Ohlsson’s Sydney solo concert were motivated by other artists, namely painters, thus an originally visual experience became audial in the resulting compositions.
