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The Pittsburgh Symphony flanks Khachaturian’s flamboyant Violin Concerto with a Brahms symphony and a recent piece from Sean Shepherd. 

With Andris Nelsons about to debut as Kapellmeister at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a collaboration with his Boston Symphony was inaugurated in style. 

It can be difficult to focus on the music at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a venue “serving art and alcohol” on Bleecker Street in New York. During any of their widely varied avant-garde and new music sets, you will hear forks clinking against plates and see waiters striding across the space to deliver drinks to the audience members, seated around tables or at the bar.

As Proms debuts go, this would be difficult to beat. The newly formed National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA) were fresh – literally, certainly no sign of fatigue – from an intensive two-week training residency followed by a tour which included the tall order of taking Tchaikovsky to Russia.

Regular concert-goers are used to hearing the harp on a church altar or mixed in with a large symphony, barely audible above the mass of strings, bass and brass. But the St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble put the harp center stage, in an evening of 20th-century French music, no less.