Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | 3 Pieces for string quartet

Richard Tognetti’s absorbing programme mixed Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Stravinsky and Adès, played impressively and with characteristic exuberance and finesse by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The title of the latest programme by the Australian Chamber Orchestra is simply: Goldberg Variations. While Bernard Labadie’s ingenious arrangement of JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string orchestra takes up all of the second half of the programme, the first half was no less interesting.

Experiments in music and ideas brought together by the London Sinfonietta and guests at a special concert all about space and time.

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

Oxford becomes much quieter outside of the university terms, and this was reflected in audience numbers for Saturday’s concert. Although the evening did not pan out as expected, those who were in the Sheldonian still came away having heard some brilliant performances.

Venturing into the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival continues its journey through a brambly thicket of 20th-century music. Sunday’s programme focused on the output of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer who famously engendered riotous uproar at the Paris Opera House in 1913 with his savage ballet Le sacre du printemps.

Before last night I had reserved judgement on John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music (1982), which I knew from CD but hadn’t previously heard live. It was an effect-piece, I thought, so while it had left me a little cold in recorded form, I was open to the possibility that this enormous, ecstatic major-key pile-up would blow me away in the concert hall.