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Cellist Sol Gabetta founded the Solsberg Festival to make music with like-minded people in a historically significant space and arranges programmes by, and with, select musicians.

Lars Vogt and Royal Northern Sinfonia deliver Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 with swaggering self-confidence, and heroic chorus singing.

Radu Lupu produces Mozart so sublime as to delight the angels, Saraste and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra give us a lesson in poise, balance and blended sound.

In this second Mariinsky concert Kristóf Baráti was a fine but miscast soloist in Stravinsky’s violin concerto, with rich narrative pickings from Rimsky-Korsakov and his illustrious pupil.

Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno conducts a triple-bill programme of Russian music at the Zurich opera house, featuring the gifted Latvian violinist, Baiba Skride. 

A strangely mixed programme, in which soprano Elizabeth Watts and Kyra Humphreys directing Royal Northern Sinfonia displayed great musicanship and a tremendous range of emotion.

Three concertos and a symphony; three soloists and an ever-expanding chamber orchestra; the SCO in Stravinsky, Mozart and Beethoven.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

The Scottish Ensemble launched their 2011/12 season with a programme of Mendelssohn and Stravinsky. On the face of it the pairing looked rather unlikely, but as Artistic Director Jonathan Morton explained to us, both composers were full of energy and invention, and each searching out new musical direction in their own times.