Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op.4

Continuing their Carnegie Hall mini-residency, Klaus Mäkelä and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra dive into late Romantic works by Schoenberg and Mahler.

Alice Coote imbues every word of Mahler’s deeply affecting song-cycle with expressive intensity. Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra struggle to match that achievement in Brahms and Schoenberg.

What do you get for the composer who made – and also kind of broke – everything? Arnold Schoenberg’s well-documented phobia of the number 13 aside, he could not have asked for a superior tribute in his 150th anniversary year.

The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra opens the Istanbul Music Festival featuring a showstopping, all-singing, all-conducting Gershwin finale. 

The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual visit has long been one of the highlights of the Carnegie Hall season and do not disappoint in this year's visit, with Christian Thielemann. 

In her first appearance with the orchestra this season, Nathalie Stutzmann offers overly tentative readings of Verklärte Nacht and Siegfried Idyll, alongside perfunctory excerpts from Don Giovanni.

Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno is the rarity in an imaginative chamber recital dedicated to nocturnal music and transfiguration.   

Verklärte Nacht sounded gorgeous in the outstanding surroundings of the Palacio di Carlo V, with the ensemble capturing the grace of the original sextet.

Karina Canellakis steps in for Esa-Pekka Salonen to make an accomplished debut in Munich. 

The London Philharmonic strikes a somber note as Edward Gardner explores themes of resurrection and transfiguration in the Royal Festival Hall. 

Concert life returns to Sydney with a programme of Mendelssohn and Schoenberg by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Superb performances of Schoenberg and Brahms make the Berliner Philharmoniker's thrilling season-opener with Kirill Petrenko a concert to remember. 

Alisa Weilerstein and Trondheim Soloists have an eye on the calories in three great Romantic string sextets by Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky.

Rafael Payare and the Ulster Orchestra present a programme of music that looks both backwards and forwards from composers who were musical visionaries.

In the second of the two concerts this week to open the Philharmonia's season, Salonen excels in the Schoenberg, while leaving space for debate in the Bruckner.

A gorgeous programme of Wagner, Strauss and Schoenberg and fragments in sextet arrangements

Dame Mitsuko Uchida again brought out her outstanding musicality and special charisma in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

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. 

Vilde Frang galvanises the English Chamber Orchestra, with the slow movement of Bach's E major violin concerto proving the highlight of the evening.

Royal Northern Sinfonia hide a feast of quirky, inventive string writing by Shostakovich, Stranvinsky, Mozart and Schoenberg behind a sedate title.

The Venezuelan maestro conducts a programme of early 20th-century works with the BBC Philharmonic .

Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker, an ensemble he knows very well, in two Romantic masterpieces that were not always considered as such.

New harp of the Turku Concert Hall had its first outing in a concert with a diverse program featuring a duet with flute and harp and Schoenberg’s sinister Verklärte Nacht.  

Despite being nestled in London’s Red Lion Square, Conway Hall somehow captures the atmosphere of your old-fashioned village hall. Yet it has a most tempting Sunday Concert series offering, on the evidence of this evening’s fare from the London Mozart Players Chamber Ensemble, an excellent standard of performances. 

Psappha and The Hebrides Ensembles celebrate 25 years of music-making with a new commission, a tribute to Maxwell Davies and Schoenberg’s soulful  Verklärte Nacht.

Spot on progamming makes for an uplifting experience with the Nash Ensemble in Mahler, Schoenberg and Schubert in Wigmore Hall.

Playing in a premier Western venue with violin virtuoso Gil Shaham, the Eastern orchestra seems not quite ready for prime time.

Both Mahler and Schoenberg found musical inspiration through poetry, and the fruit of their efforts yielded two of the most fascinating pieces of music in the canon.

Joyful Haydn and intense Schoenberg from Julia Fischer and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, joined by Oliver Schnyder for some energetic Mendelssohn.

Swedish soprano Miah Persson dominates the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s enterprising Romantic Lieder program conducted by Kent Nagano.

Detailed, transparent readings from the London Sinfonietta brought out the modernist in early Schoenberg, but passion and atmosphere were lacking.

The Hebrides Ensemble delight a Queen's Hall audience with novel takes on Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat.

A stunning collaboration between Hampson and Amsterdam Sinfonietta at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, with works by Schoenberg, Wolf, Schubert and Barber.

Royal Northern Sinfonia play chamber music by Beethoven, Schoenberg, Martinů and Dvořák in a programme travelling from passionate despair to playful high spirits.

The overriding theme of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s season finale concert appeared to be night, teaming Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain with the raging force and violence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

When the nights get longer and the temperatures begin to drop, one of the best ways to cozy up is with a good concert of chamber music. I Musici de Montréal and conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni presented “The Night Transfigured”, a program of works inspired by night to warm audiences at Bourgie Hall on Friday evening.

Like most performing arts organizations have already done, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra have realized that classical music is not tremendously popular among young people.

The Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle came to Paris last weekend for an eclectic program: Mozart’s final three symphonies on Saturday night, and the decadence of Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky on Sunday afternoon.

A concert programme can resemble a puzzle; searching for links and contrasts often results in a more enjoyable, unified experience. I therefore strove to arrive in sufficient time for a careful reading of the programme notes for this performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at Usher Hall, part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

For the last concert of her Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, Renée Fleming assembled one of the least coherent concept programmes imaginable. Billed as “Vienna: Window to Modernity”, it was never clear what was specifically Viennese about the music on show, nor what was particularly modern, nor what windows had to do with anything.

Sitting in the majestic Carnegie Hall, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra almost looked dwarfed by the sheer size of the stage. Cristi Andrews Cohen’s voice echoed as she recited the poem by Richard Dehmel. But then soft hums emanated from the strings, incessant but quiet at first, slowing building to a larger, richer sound that enveloped the hall.

An introductory reading by local writer Philip Pullman was an appropriate introduction to the “Dusk to Dawn” concert, one of the last in this year’s Oxford Chamber Music Festival (themed “Fairytales and Fantasy”). The collision of a light-hearted surface with darker undertones was not just in Pullman’s retelling of the Grimm stories, but pervaded Artistic Director Priya Mitchell’s programming.

Previously, for me, the term “Chamber Orchestra” has meant an ordinary orchestra, only smaller: apart from the sound being somewhat thinned out and consequently cleaner, I don't expect a fundamentally different experience. Or, didn't, that is, until last night at Cadogan Hall, where I saw the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the first time.

It's not always that Schoenberg is out-weirded in a concert programme. More often, his is the eyebrow-raiser, the tougher music on display, which takes more effort to enjoy.

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.

It was the first time I'd been fully clothed in this venue. Prior to its 2008 reinvention, Dovecot Studios was the oldest of Edinburgh's six Victorian swimming pools. Now a tapestry studio and exhibition space, it doubles as a resonant chamber music venue. The musicians occupied the shallow end, amply lit by bright Edinburgh skies through the lengthy cupola.

The composers Debussy, Dvořák, Schoenberg and Elgar and aren’t often associated with each other, but they featured together in the first of three concerts in Carnegie Hall with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The works on the program, it turned out, all dated from the 1890s and all were program music.