Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Serenade in C minor for wind, K388 (K384a)

A superb evening of vivid and involving performances of Mozart, Vasks and Shostakovich, showcasing the very best of this South Coast orchestra.

Musicians from the Chicago Symphony showed their mettle as chamber players in a Mozart serenade and a Brahms sextet.

A night of winter music from the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin – a quaint concert to bring in the Christmas Festivities

In Strauss 150th anniversary year, it seems natural to pair him with his beloved Mozart. Strauss was just 20 years old when he composed his Suite in B flat for 13 wind instruments – in the same key, although a different combination of winds, as Mozart’s famous ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade.

With so much of the chamber repertoire focused on strings and piano, it was a refreshing choice by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to open their season with some of the great works for winds.

The two masses in this intriguing and very enjoyable programme made a thought-provoking contrast. Stravinsky was anxious that his mass be cold – indeed, as the bass singer Simon Scott Plummer’s useful programme notes told us, he wanted the music ‘very cold, absolutely cold, that will appeal directly to the spirit.

“My Sixth seems to be yet another hard nut, one that our critics' feeble little teeth cannot crack”. It will “propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.”. So wrote Mahler in letters to the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg and the Austrian writer and musicologist Richard Specht respectively.

Bei Mozart zeigten sich die Qualitäten des Ensembles: eine ausgezeichnete Darbietung, virtuos, oftmals dramatisch und spannungsreich, zumal im Hauptthema des Eingangssatzes.