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For the first time in its 165-year subscription series, a female conductor leads a Vienna Philharmonic subscription concert. 

The Budapest Festival Orchestra travel up the Danube, bringing Brahms back to Vienna with affectionate, passionate performances of the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. 

The Estonian Festival Orchestra revels in Dvořák and Tchaikovsky on the Vienna leg of its European tour with Paavo Järvi. 

Erich Korngold and Arnold Schoenberg – Viennese emigrés in Hollywood – formed the unlikely pairing in the Ukrainian conductor's Konzerthaus programme. 

The grand finale of the Oslo Philharmonic's Sibelius cycle at the Wiener Konzerthaus ends with a grand finale – the famous Swan Hymn of the Fifth Symphony.

Bleak landscapes in the Fourth Symphony as the Oslo Philharmonic’s Sibelius cycle continues at the Wiener Konzerthaus.

An auspicious opening to the Oslo Philharmonic's Sibelius cycle in Vienna, closing with an especially fine Seventh where the music seems to grow organically. 

Pageantry abounds as the popular mezzo-soprano turns the Konzerthaus Wien into a sort of classical music, multisensory varieté.

Kavakos’ restless approach was haunting, and during the cadenza he pared back his sound till it was nearly transparent, stopping breaths as we all leaned in. 

Argerich sprinted through technical runs with her characteristic articulation and breathtaking technique, and made Prokofiev's Third seem like child’s play.

Christiane Karg is the resplendent soprano in a wonderful performance of Mahler's Fourth at the Konzerthaus.

...the perpetuum mobile character building to a raucously joyous finale that elicited genuine, generous applause.

Despite some fascinating, impressive and often beautiful moments, the consistent refusal to give the audience time to applaud, pause and digest what they had just heard turned the evening into a wash of death songs.

Grimaud married incredible precision and rigour with moving sensitivity and ease. She led the listener clearly through the score without dropping a detail, but never gave the feeling that she was micro-managing.

Hannigan plays with expectations, opening with a single spotlight after a complete stage blackout to dramatic effect, and I am pretty sure she was rocking slippers on stage. 

After Jan Lisiecki gave an immaculate interpretation of a perennial Mozart piano concerto, Sebastian Weigle revelled in the brassy bravura of a symphony which remains virtually unknown in the city where it was composed over a hundred years ago.

After a 34 year hiatus from the Konzerthaus stage, the Toronto Symphony gave a knockout performance that had everything in spades

This Lenten concert given by Currentzis and MusicAeterna at Vienna’s Konzerthaus was certainly solemn and atmospheric – the auditorium was shrouded in darkness from beginning to end.

Bronfman attacked the concerto with alacrity and a capacity to draw sound from the piano which was breathtaking.

One repressed, one who struggled, and one who got away: Jurowski, Andsnes and the Russian State Symphony delight with varied programme of Russian composers at the Konzerthaus.

Music-making in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt/Terezín continues to fascinate, baffle and inspire us.

In the ballad, a lovelorn maiden is finally reunited with her dead lover, who immediately tries to trick her into a midnight wedding at a graveyard after dragging her through muddy swamps filled with ghosts and howling animals. 

The Ravel G major piano concerto is in fact a mind-bogglingly virtuosic pianistic endeavour requiring fingers of steel and trills of satin.

Attention to delivery, effective interpretation and intelligent programming is what make the duo such a consistently beloved force in concert.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra poured out wave upon wave of euphoric depth, melancholy and sateen-like ensemble with vigor, heart and delightful ability under the guidance of their innately musical founder and conductor.  

Bach is music for the soul, and when excellent musicians are performing it, it cannot fail to be beautiful. Thanks to the considerable strengths of the many involved, there is really no better way to spend a weekend in Lent than lamenting through a Bach Passion in the Konzerthaus. 

A meaty programme of Brahms from the Wiener Philharmoniker and Daniele Gatti.  

Just when we were all having so much fun with the Symphoniker, mum and dad came home and ruined the party.

Giving the audience closer access to performers may be a key to the survival of an ever-more-elitist entertainment form

In yesterday’s matinee concert at the Konzerthaus, the Wiener KammerOrchester, Stefan Vladar and Thomas Quasthoff presented music by Mozart, Prokofiev and Poulenc in a family-friendly format. 

Though Jordan and the Wiener Symphoniker have been happy bedfellows many times before, this concert marked the beginning of a new stage in their relationship. 

Musical magic has more to do with chemistry than it does with mathematics, and this evening fell considerably short of magical despite a devil’s share of ability, talent, competence and energy

A percussion concerto tribute to natural disasters and a dark snapshot of post-Stalinist Russia make for a compelling programme from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Krzysztof Urbański and soloist Martin Grubinger. 

Van Zweden steps in for an indisposed Nézet-Séguin, his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in a powerful but mainly extrovert performance of Bruckner's 8th Symphony.

The opening concert of the Wiener Konzerthaus in 1913 featured a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with a celebratory prelude written by Richard Strauss. To mark its 100 year birthday, this Sunday morning the Vienna Philharmonic, led by the eminently engaging Gustavo Dudamel, performed Beethoven’s Ninth as well, but this time with a “Prolog” written by living composer Aribert Reimann.

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.

Rudolf Buchbinder is a name now synonymous with classical piano interpretation. He has over 100 recordings in his discography, and his recent series of complete Beethoven sonatas the world over has given him an authority of nearly biblical proportions.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder are not performed often, and one reason involves simple logistics. Not only is a professional orchestra of gigantic proportions required, but also five soloists with Wagnerian voices, a narrator, an eight-part mixed chorus, three four-part male choirs, and a conductor crazy enough to try to keep some 400 musicians from going off the rails.

You know that it is really warm in the hall when a special announcement before the concert is made apologizing to all the ladies in the house that the men in the orchestra will be playing without their suit jackets due to the heat. We in the audience, fanning ourselves incessantly, were only too happy to be forgiving, as the orchestra must have been fairly melting under the lights.

György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc was banned by the Soviet government for the crime of getting too fancy with colouring on dominant chords. Though by no means overly dissonant, especially as compared to Ligeti’s later works, the last few minutes of this work do become ever so slightly crunchy.

Entering a standing-room-only hall on Tuesday evening in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, Leonidas Kavakos calmly made his way to center stage, hugged the concert master, smiled at the orchestra and then cued the beginning of Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G major, which he both played and conducted.

With the business situation in the recording industry being what it is, studio recordings of operas are more or less ruled out. The positive side of this is that the general public gets the chance to be part of concerts that are recorded and enjoy the tension such an event creates more often.

Those who attended Jonas Kaufmann’s Vienna Wagner debut and were wondering why his Parsifal was beautiful but rather underwhelming in volume, were given the answer on the stage of the Konzerthaus two days later, when he announced himself as “still ill after a severe cold”.

The great jazz composer Bob Brookmeyer used to instruct his students that they should never write a solo section in their composition until it was absolutely inevitable that a solo should take place.

An aesthetic of tradition whose past appears as its present and vice versa, that resists or smudges the shifts of meaning which occur through time, informs music-making in Austria ranging from the waltzes performed by the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day to the more idiosyncratic impulses of Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Cornelius Meister has long been a champion of young Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, not only as chief conductor of the RSO Wien but also in Heidelberg, where he was Generalmusikdirektor from 2005 until earlier this year.

Grigory Sokolov’s annual visit to the Konzerthaus – always in December, always half-lit, always a lengthy affair – is an object of cultish appreciation for the Viennese, who are drawn to mystique like moths to a flame.

Counting this present concert performance, public outings for Jaromir Weinberger’s 1937 opera Wallenstein may possibly have reached double digits, and such reception details, or indeed any information about the opera beyond a basic synopsis, would have made a welcome addition to the programme.

The Wiener Symphoniker has suffered recently from more late conductor cancellations than most orchestras, and things reached a peak last season when their chief conductor Fabio Luisi pulled out of a string of engagements in order to substitute for James Levine at the Met.

For a description of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s formidable and eloquent pianism I find myself drawn to the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s G sharp minor Prelude, given in this concert as an encore.