Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal

Nikita Boris-Glebsky, Narek Hakhnazaryan and Georgy Tchaidze are joined in Vienna by a trio of percussionists to unlock the secrets behind Shostakovich's enigmatic final symphony. 

Brad Mehldau’s song cycle is a disappointment, the texts selected under the rubric of “desire” proving a major concern.

They whistle, they compose, they parody and they certainly can play. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Amarcord Wien are kings of their realm.

Michael Schade and Justus Zeyen perform songs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Josef Marx, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf in Vienna's Konzerthaus.

Simon Keenlyside and Graham Johnson's concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus featured songs by Schoenberg and his pupil Hanns Eisler, as well as Britten, Wolf, Schubert and Brahms. These consummate artists made a difficult program seem easy to perform and even easier to listen to.

The evening began on a fun note: Juliane Banse’s voice rang out in a pre-recorded message, reminding the audience that as far as she knew, cell phones and classical music did not generally mix. After a community chuckle, the audience applauded Banse, Bo Skovhus and Helmut Deutsch onto the stage, and then settled back into its seats for an evening of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch.

If this first song recital of the season is any indication of the level we can expect at the Konzerthaus, lovers of Lieder are in for a real treat. Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber set the bar very high last night in a hefty program including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and a dozen other songs, a set of Fauré, and the world première of a song cycle by Jörg Widmann.

It’s never an easy thing to jump in for a concert, especially not when there is a historical instrument involved. The sign on the door of the Wiener Konzerthaus upon our arrival Monday evening, explaining that Vanessa Wagner had to cancel her part as pianist at the last minute and would be replaced by Gérard Wyss, did not bode well.

Give the Austrian body politic a victim complex to nurse, and it will gladly let off xenophobic steam. By now this well-oiled masquerade is possessed with Pavlovian inevitability. So nothing unusual then, when populist indignation about perceived Austrian vulnerability to the ongoing Greek crisis rapidly descended into ugly national stereotyping.Measured relatively, this has been a mild outbreak.

Having only heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard on disc for the last few years it was curious to experience something rather different in the flesh, by way perhaps of that phenomenon, so often invoked as to be meaningless, of the artist for whom two concerts are never the same.

At this Mozart Saal recital the latest addition to the bumf which routinely overfills concert programmes was a flyer for an autumn sale at Austria’s main Steinway dealership, drawing one’s attention a fraction more than usual to the unremarkable fact that like the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, Ingolf Wunder is a Steinway artist.

The Klangforum Wien has had its own row of subscription concerts at the Konzerthaus for the past 22 seasons, and a constant during that time has been the regular programming of Austrian composers.

Featuring seven concerts programmed according to nationality, the Klangforum Wien’s 22nd Konzerthaus subscription series, titled Europa, global, wants us to listen with socially conscious ears. The aim is to determine how globalization’s impact on cultural identity has influenced the musical avant-garde, defined conveniently as the music the Klangforum chooses to play.

Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.

Lars Vogt’s unorthodox pianism knocks at Glenn Gould’s door without ever daring to fully enter his outlandish realm, and since there can only be one Glenn Gould that is perhaps just as well. In addition to the counterintuitive articulation and other Gouldian stylings his performances offer masterful soft playing and, when convincingly maintained, a taut sense of drama.

The Ensemble Resonanz is a Hamburg-based contemporary chamber orchestra committed to finding bridges to modernism amid works from centuries past, and to that end this concert featured Helmut Lachenmann set alongside Mozart, and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles rescored by Manuel Hidalgo.

The husband and wife team of acclaimed concert violinist Lisa Batiashvili and solo oboist François Leleux forms the backbone of this as-yet-unnamed chamber group, which performs as often as busy individual schedules permit. For some the main draw of an ensemble of like this might be hearing the music buffeted around by strong personalities.

Peter Serkin is a pianist of Brendelian demeanour whose interpretations of the classics are full of striking rhetorical contrasts: controlled but unpredictable dynamic extremes, always urgent and occasionally strident rhythmic expression, and a keyboard manner which is aloof one minute, playful the next.

Regarded as one of the best young string quartets around today, the Quatuor Ebène have made a name for themselves with their homogeneity of sound, in equal parts vibrant and mellifluous, and the powerful immediacy of their playing.

Martin Grubinger may be regarded as one of the world’s most exciting percussion virtuosi, but for my money his greatest strengths are pianistic: the rich density of timbre he gets from his instruments (which are mainly the marimba and xylophone), the gift for turning an eloquent phrase, and the seamless legato that comes from sensitive touch and a finely-tuned ear for decay.

The Klangforum Wien is such a disciplined ensemble that for them ever to be remotely fazed or challenged by a piece, even those works with Ferneyhough-like unfulfillable demands, is scarcely imaginable.

Two of the world’s most sought-after opera singers giving Lieder recitals on the same night. The kind of painful choice which Viennese musical institutions and their chaotic schedules throw up all too regularly. I went for Nina Stemme over Jonas Kaufmann on the basis that she gives fewer solo recitals, despite harbouring reservations about how her big voice would fare in this repertoire.

On 19th November 1714 the Habsburg court in Vienna celebrated the nameday of Holy Roman Empress Elisabeth Christine with an operatic pastiche, L'Atenaïde, for which three court composers (Marc'Antonio Ziani, Antonio Negri und Antonio Caldara) each wrote an act.

String quartets don’t come much more ‘period’ than the Quatuor Mosaïques, even if their ideas of historical authenticity are more flexible than the ensemble which brought them together (Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien).

Wenn Musikträume in Poeticall Musicke to be sung to the Lyra viol wahr werden, dann ist „come again” innig-ernster Wunsch, diese Sinnlichkeit schnell wieder in Erfüllung gehen zu lassen.

Wiener Festwochenzeit ist Experimentierzeit: das Experiment des doppelten Konzertabends gelingt.

Das Huelgas Ensemble unter Paul Van Nevel präsentiert einen berückend schönen Konzertabend mit Musik aus dem hugenottischen Umfeld des 16. Jahrhunderts.