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The Philharmonia Orchestra delivers electrifiying readings of two very different late Romantic classics, in a thrilling concert, marred only by a pedestrian intepretation of Mozart's Violin Concerto no. 3.

Silences felt like the pillars in Lorin Maazel's reading of Sibelius' Symphony No.2 and the results were astonishing.

The day after Lorin Maazel conducted the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem last month, an estimated 140,000 fans read the blog post he wrote entitled “When Will We Stop the Slaughter”.

Lorin Maazel and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra have a very close relationship. In fact, if they were a married couple they would have celebrated their golden anniversary in 2012, having survived and lived to tell the tale of a 50-year collaboration.

The Vienna Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel brought a superb performance of Bruckner’s mighty Eighth Symphony to the penultimate night of the Proms, after a selection of Bach organ works from Klaus Sonnleitner.Clichés abound in writing about Bruckner symphonies. One which cannot be escaped, however, is the necessity for an absolutely solid grasp of long structure.

I often think of Lorin Maazel as the American equivalent of Sir Colin Davis – they are both in their eighties and they both deliver steady, reliable interpretations that let the music speak for itself. Maazel’s return performance with the New York Philharmonic on Saturday re-affirmed my view.

Johannes Brahms was a Romantic with a capital R. Born six years after Beethoven’s death, Brahms was so determined to continue the composer’s colossal musical legacy that he labored over his First Symphony (often nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth”) for over a decade. He spent nearly as much time laboring over his Piano Concerto no.

If the graphic design of a concert programme can be said to shape our expectations of the event then the Philharmonia Orchestra’s 2012/13 booklet, on which the press verdict “blazing originality” is encircled by red-hot flames, had perhaps set its sights rather high. Thursday’s concert, however, did not disappoint.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is a monumental piece of music: literally, architecturally and aesthetically. It is a literal monument because of its creation for Coventry Cathedral, that architectural testament to the creative and destructive powers of man.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's latest tour has included three dates at New York's Carnegie Hall: a concert of Sibelius symphonies, another of late Mozart and truncated Wagner, and this one of waltzes, polkas, and Richard Strauss.The second half, dedicated to the music of Johann Strauss II, predictably came off best.

Throngs of the well-dressed faithful came for their periodic worship of the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday night. Lorin Maazel led the players in a backwards tour of three Sibelius symphonies, beginning with the single-movement Seventh, moving on to the inimitable Fifth, and ending with the more traditional First.

Lorin Maazel, a former director of the New York Philharmonic, brought his exacting music-making back to the podium for a nine-day guest appearance. A wizard of baton technique – even the back of his head communicates what he wants the orchestra to do – his performances leave little room for spontaneity and generally contain odd interpretive choices. Today was no exception.

It takes any orchestra plenty of confidence and daring to embark on a single-work programme. There isn’t much chance for redemption should something go amiss. Then again, the length of Mahler’s third symphony and its demands on physical and emotional stamina don’t leave the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Lorin Maazel much choice.

The songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth’s Magic Horn") form the basis for so much of Mahler’s music that it pays to hear some of them alongside a symphony (in the case the well-known Fifth Symphony, in the latest of the Philharmonia/Maazel collaborations). The performances of six of the songs by Sarah Connolly and Matthias Goerne gave a clear idea of the emotional power that they contain.

“My Sixth seems to be yet another hard nut, one that our critics' feeble little teeth cannot crack”. It will “propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.”. So wrote Mahler in letters to the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg and the Austrian writer and musicologist Richard Specht respectively.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to have been at the first performance of today’s well-known master works. Bach’s St John Passion, for example, or Beethoven’s Eroica and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – and Mahler’s second symphony, the Resurrection.