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Southbank Centre's The Rest is Noise festival continued its focus on politics and spirituality with Henryck Górecki's popular Third Symphony, coupled with Krzysztof Penderecki's lesser-known Violin Concerto – but it was the latter work which fared better.

The Southbank’s The Rest is Noise continues to draw the crowds, although the promise of Steve Reich himself can’t have made this concert too hard to sell. Reich’s own contribution to this evening, the culmination of a weekend of music and events entitled “Superpower”, was limited to some clapping and letting go of a microphone.

Introduced by Southbank Centre’s artistic director, Jude Kelly, this latest instalment of The Rest is Noise festival felt like one of those events that rarely finds its way into the concert diary. A packed hall witnessed one of those feats of sheer physical, intellectual and emotional energy that you are unlikely to forget.

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it”. These are Morton Feldman’s own words on his Patterns in a Chromatic Field. And they are a concise and accurate description of what occurs during the piece. Patterns... is one of Feldman’s later works, composed in 1981.

It is pleasing to see concerts of music by living composers well attended, and such was the case at “A Timeless Beauty”, part of the Southbank Centre’s year-long celebration of contemporary music The Rest is Noise. This concert’s theme was “Politics and Spirituality”, and looked to the former Soviet Union for inspiration.Two composers on the programme provided contrasting examples.

No exploration of the relationship between spirituality and 20th-century music can delve to any sorts of depth without discovering the figure of Olivier Messiaen, the religiously-influenced composer par excellence in a century characterised by the emancipation of art from religion.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra certainly pulled out all the stops with a Rest is Noise programme that, in theory, should have scared the horses half to death. A concert of three large orchestral works from height of the 1960/70s avant garde, and featuring composers from behind the Iron Curtain to boot, is a very rare beast indeed.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s return to the London Philharmonic, of which he is the Guest Principal Conductor, was as usual greeted with a full and enthusiastic concert hall. His strengths in the French repertoire and choral music made him the perfect conductor for an evening of music by Dutilleux and Shostakovich, whose Tout un monde lointain and Symphony no.

On Friday, 25 October, the São Paulo Symphony presented an energetic and polished performance at the Southbank Centre. Part of the “The Rest is Noise Festival” focused on 20th century music, this programme took the turbulent 1960s as its theme.

Karlheinz Stockhausen has done rather well out of this weekend’s instalment of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival, with his music featuring in all three of the concerts as well as the mouthwatering additional event “Breakfast with Stockhausen”.

After the epic grandeur, sweep and immersive quality of Gesang der Jünglinge at this summer’s Proms, this performance as part of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival had a lot to live up to. In many ways, however, this far less ostentatious outing overseen by Sound Intermedia got even closer to the work’s disturbing essence.

Peter Grimes may deserve the place it has gained in the operatic canon, but it’s not a work without problems.

This Sunday, pianist Karim Said returned to the Southbank Centre to put Arnold Schoenberg under the microscope for a third and last time. Performing as part of the International Piano Series 2012/13 and the cataclysmic Rest is Noise festival, Said’s concerts have focused on the genesis of the Second Viennese School.

Among the brilliant programming of The Rest is Noise festival in London, there was one concert this year that stood above all the others for me: the European première of Shostakovich’s opera prologue Orango. First discovered in an archive in 2004 by scholar Olga Digonskaya, Orango was never finished by Shostakovich, and indeed only a piano score remained.

The fascinating Rest is Noise festival at Southbank Centre has now reached its mid-point, with the focus on music created out of oppression and war.

Tonight’s concert was a prime example of the solid programming of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival. The concert, titled “Music from Dark Times”, included pieces by Webern, Berg, Bartók and Martinů, written between 1934 and 1941, which were indeed dark times for all these composers.

Tonight’s The Rest is Noise concert, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas and Yefim Bronfman, took on one of 20th-century music’s biggest questions. Anyone who has been following this huge concert series – or indeed the accompanying BBC documentary The Sound and the Fury – will no doubt be acquainted by now with Arnold Schoenberg and his angry, radical ways.

The inter-war years produced some of the most dynamic and popular choral works that have been composed since the 18th century. Tonight’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, conducted by Hans Graf, combined two very different results of this flowering. Both masterpieces in their own way, they unexpectedly complemented each other and made for an entertaining concert.

An International Piano Series event, Karim Said’s recital this Sunday was also part of the Southbank Centre’s Berlin in the ’20s and ’30s weekend, a mini-series within the larger series (super-series, perhaps) which is the year-long Rest is Noise festival. He presented a short series of works by Arnold Schoenberg and his composition students Anton von Webern and Hanns Eisler.

When we think of America, Dvořák and Milhaud are not among the first set of composers to come to mind, but it turns out they deserve to be among the second.

One of the most well-known pieces of the twentieth-century classical repertoire is of course Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.

Venturing into the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival continues its journey through a brambly thicket of 20th-century music. Sunday’s programme focused on the output of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer who famously engendered riotous uproar at the Paris Opera House in 1913 with his savage ballet Le sacre du printemps.

The works of Anton Webern – famously described by Stravinksy as “dazzling diamonds” – have been “unwrapped” as part of The Rest is Noise festival this month. This was a timely project, as the output of this Second Viennese School composer has often been misrepresented due to its considerable (and problematic) impact on 20th- and 21st-century music.

Billed as “The soundtrack of the 20th century”, The Rest is Noise season of 2013 has now commenced at the Southbank Centre. Concert programmes scheduled throughout January have focused on the Second Viennese School and its infamous break with western tonality.

You are sitting in the choir stalls of the Royal Festival Hall, watching the ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal address you, his back to an enormous sea of empty, grey, imposing seats. He is delivering a vivid narrative account of a day in the life of a young aristocratic Jewish boy in early 20th-century Vienna.

A pub quiz question for you, dear reader: with which work did 20th century music begin? The rest is noise, Alex Ross's history of 20th century music, opens with Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome, focusing particularly on its final bars. As Princess Salome is crushed under the shields of King Herod's guard, the music turns to what Ross describes as "...a tumult... a howl... a shriek...