Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra, H 337

With Petr Popelka on the podium, the Czech Philharmonic provides a memorable commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.

The Czech Philharmonic offers a heartfelt tribute to some of the nation's most admired composers with help from contemporary stars.

Hans Keller's mischievous essay on “Phoney Professions” lists  both viola players (“it’s just a big violin”) and conductors among its targets. This performance refuted that, as surely as it delighted everyone else.

Is there any instrument more bittersweet than the viola? The violin does the acrobatics, the cello is more conventionally beautiful, but the viola sits in the middle of the orchestral palette like no other instrument. Neither high nor low, it’s perfectly placed to embody the contradictory and the conflicted, ideal for a sense of desire denied or of fulfilment deferred.

A few nights after the Berliner Philharmoniker brought us Janáček’s late masterpiece, the Glagolitic Mass, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conductor Tugan Sokhiev took the stage with his other great work from the same year, 1926: the Sinfonietta, Op. 60, which originally appeared with the modifier “Military”.