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Give the Austrian body politic a victim complex to nurse, and it will gladly let off xenophobic steam. By now this well-oiled masquerade is possessed with Pavlovian inevitability. So nothing unusual then, when populist indignation about perceived Austrian vulnerability to the ongoing Greek crisis rapidly descended into ugly national stereotyping.Measured relatively, this has been a mild outbreak.

Counting this present concert performance, public outings for Jaromir Weinberger’s 1937 opera Wallenstein may possibly have reached double digits, and such reception details, or indeed any information about the opera beyond a basic synopsis, would have made a welcome addition to the programme.

Born in 1920 to a Venetian bandmaster, Bruno Maderna became famous during his formative years as a violin prodigy and was told by his grandfather that he could gravitate to the mafia later in life and God would still look kindly on one who played the violin so wonderfully.

An aesthetic of tradition whose past appears as its present and vice versa, that resists or smudges the shifts of meaning which occur through time, informs music-making in Austria ranging from the waltzes performed by the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day to the more idiosyncratic impulses of Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism).

Having only heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard on disc for the last few years it was curious to experience something rather different in the flesh, by way perhaps of that phenomenon, so often invoked as to be meaningless, of the artist for whom two concerts are never the same.

Cornelius Meister has long been a champion of young Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, not only as chief conductor of the RSO Wien but also in Heidelberg, where he was Generalmusikdirektor from 2005 until earlier this year.

Over the 60 years of its existence, the Vienna Kammeroper has commissioned chamber operas by Maxwell Davies, Henze and Glass and made figures including Reimann and Birtwistle better known to the Viennese.

Grigory Sokolov’s annual visit to the Konzerthaus – always in December, always half-lit, always a lengthy affair – is an object of cultish appreciation for the Viennese, who are drawn to mystique like moths to a flame.

Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.

At this Mozart Saal recital the latest addition to the bumf which routinely overfills concert programmes was a flyer for an autumn sale at Austria’s main Steinway dealership, drawing one’s attention a fraction more than usual to the unremarkable fact that like the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, Ingolf Wunder is a Steinway artist.

The Klangforum Wien has had its own row of subscription concerts at the Konzerthaus for the past 22 seasons, and a constant during that time has been the regular programming of Austrian composers.

Following a string of misses, the Theater an der Wien emerges from its recent dry patch with a new production of Puccini’s triptych which offers a winning cast, the best playing heard at the house in months, and a smart production.

With sub-Ionesco doggerel for a libretto, a patchy score and a disjointed plot, it takes deft stage direction for farce and satire to blend credibly in Le grand macabre, Ligeti’s 1977 operatic spoof on doom-laden prophesizing.

Featuring seven concerts programmed according to nationality, the Klangforum Wien’s 22nd Konzerthaus subscription series, titled Europa, global, wants us to listen with socially conscious ears. The aim is to determine how globalization’s impact on cultural identity has influenced the musical avant-garde, defined conveniently as the music the Klangforum chooses to play.

Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria which make the title character a returning war veteran, preferably one returning from a juicy topical war, are nothing new, and director Claus Guth doesn’t stretch the well-worn conceit much further in this listlessly vague staging for the Theater an der Wien.

The risen Christ and a dramatic figure who resists the Christian promise of redemption make for odd conceptual bedfellows, not least of all in a Vienna Philharmonic programme which here saw Messiaen’s L’Ascension sandwiched between the Schumann and Tchaikovsky treatments of Byron’s Manfred.

The position of Composer in Residence at the Grafenegg festival may as well be called Composer-Conductor in Residence, as the appointments of Tan Dun, HK Gruber, and now James MacMillan have established a tradition whereby the lucky candidates are not only required to be intimately involved with the programming and preparation of their music, but also to stand in front of an orchestra and lead the

The success of Grafenegg, a relative newcomer to the Austrian summer festival scene, lies in the timing: held in the last week of August and first week of September, the festival has become an additional tour date for international orchestras engaged at the BBC Proms and Salzburg and Lucerne festivals, as well as a stop for German orchestras looking to take their first concert of the new season on

There is a famous scene in the noir classic The Third Man in which Joseph Cotten returns to his hotel and is swiftly bundled into a cab that speeds off recklessly through the streets of Vienna.

Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw can claim the most enduring historical connection with Mahler’s symphonies of any orchestra due to their erstwhile principal conductor Willem Mengelberg, who invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct the Third and Fourth Symphonies in 1903 and 1904 respectively and after the composer’s death became one of his chief disciples.

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.

The Vienna Philharmonic has received a mixed reception at the Proms in recent years, but this programme of Beethoven and Bruckner with Murray Perahia and Bernard Haitink, which was performed in Salzburg this weekend and tours to London next week, will be sure to be met with critical approval.There were however moments during the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.

Giulio Cesare, an opera populated with manipulative characters that only interact with each other when shared interests are at stake, is a receptive vessel for a scornful indictment of imperialism and the dubious alliances it forges.

Written in 1819 and belonging to the opera seria chapter of Rossini’s career, the florid score of La donna del lago doesn’t so much respond to as resist its unabashedly romantic libretto.

Established in 1987 by Leonard Bernstein, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra last year joined the exclusive club of youth orchestras to have performed at the Salzburg Festival and was immediately invited back for a return appearance this season.

Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.

The venerable Viennese tradition of airing dirty operatic laundry in public found an unlikely proponent this season in the form of the Theater an der Wien’s mild-mannered director Roland Geyer, who, unhappy with William Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann in March, abruptly sacked the American director and announced he would devise a new staging himself a matter of months before the sec

Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.

Lars Vogt’s unorthodox pianism knocks at Glenn Gould’s door without ever daring to fully enter his outlandish realm, and since there can only be one Glenn Gould that is perhaps just as well. In addition to the counterintuitive articulation and other Gouldian stylings his performances offer masterful soft playing and, when convincingly maintained, a taut sense of drama.

A first impression of Quartett, a 2011 chamber opera composed by Luca Francesconi and staged by Àlex Ollé (of the innovative Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus), may be that it presents an unapologetically modernist take on the Liaisons dangereuses story which will impenetrably hang together as some fearsomely Teutonic total artwork.

Deborah Warner’s new production of La Traviata for the Wiener Festwochen is dotted with dramatic ideas to much the same extent as flowers are strewn and champagne is uncorked in the Act I ‘Brindisi’ (drinking song), which is to say sparingly.

The Ensemble Resonanz is a Hamburg-based contemporary chamber orchestra committed to finding bridges to modernism amid works from centuries past, and to that end this concert featured Helmut Lachenmann set alongside Mozart, and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles rescored by Manuel Hidalgo.

The husband and wife team of acclaimed concert violinist Lisa Batiashvili and solo oboist François Leleux forms the backbone of this as-yet-unnamed chamber group, which performs as often as busy individual schedules permit. For some the main draw of an ensemble of like this might be hearing the music buffeted around by strong personalities.

The Wiener Symphoniker has suffered recently from more late conductor cancellations than most orchestras, and things reached a peak last season when their chief conductor Fabio Luisi pulled out of a string of engagements in order to substitute for James Levine at the Met.

How to stage The Abduction from the Seraglio in Vienna, a city not exactly known for its sensitivity towards its Turkish minority? Mozart’s opera doesn’t, it should be said, contain nearly as much politically incorrect embarrassment as the rhetoric of some of Austria’s modern-day political parties, but the abusive boor Osmin and the Western women enslaved by his short-fused ganglord are images whi

Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet has riled and infuriated ever since its 1868 première, though for many it is merely an object of derision: one 1869 correspondent to the satirical magazine Punch admits not having seen the work but nevertheless disparages it as ‘Omelette’, a musical ‘burlesque’, and pillories Thomas’s fondness for drinking songs with the lines ‘To drink or not to drink? That is now the que

For a description of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s formidable and eloquent pianism I find myself drawn to the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s G sharp minor Prelude, given in this concert as an encore.

Peter Serkin is a pianist of Brendelian demeanour whose interpretations of the classics are full of striking rhetorical contrasts: controlled but unpredictable dynamic extremes, always urgent and occasionally strident rhythmic expression, and a keyboard manner which is aloof one minute, playful the next.

Tirolian composer Thomas Larcher has always struck me as a musician in the mold of that great Austrian stylistic dabbler, Ernst Krenek. A great deal of the twentieth-century finds itself reflected in Krenek, who rode the wave of numerous landmark ‘-isms’, a master of all (and his twelve-tone opera Karl V, the first full-length instance of operatic serialism, is a masterpiece) and exemplar of none.

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 isn’t often that the Musikverein programmes Webern, the most underperformed of Vienna’s major musical sons, alongside a Liebestod from Bayreuth’s reigning Isolde, but then this was no ordinary Musikverein concert.

A fair amount of Bruckner gets performed in Vienna, but it’s rare to hear a Bruckner Mass and even rarer to hear one programmed alongside a piece like Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna.

Joshua Rifkin’s theory that Bach had no ‘choir’ in the modern sense may have gradually inched its way towards acceptance, but for all the heated discussion his research has generated, one-per-part Passions are rarer than one might suppose.

Director William Friedkin doesn’t put a dramaturgical foot wrong in his Theater an der Wien production of The Tales of Hoffmann and yet doesn’t challenge, or even engage with, any of the opera’s Romantic positions.

They are sadly few in number, but some things in this St. John Passion I can report in mildly positive terms would include Stephen Layton’s hand-selected choir Polyphony, whose members dealt with Bach’s demanding vocal lines capably and sang in clear, idiomatic German; bass-baritone Neal Davies (a perfectly respectable if not overly engaging Christ); and Derek Welton’s robustly s

This opening concert to Vienna OsterKlang festival was a reproduction of sorts: on 5th April 1803 a slate of Beethoven works including the first and second symphonies, the third piano concerto and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge was performed in this very theatre.

The German Requiem is an unbudgeable fixture on the Viennese musical calendar, and yet selections from Brahms’ more obscure choral output are seldom programmed, with chorus directors typically citing the unfeasible ratio of rehearsal to running time for complicated works like Nänie (which is less than 15 minutes long).

On Saturday, Vienna’s Volksoper will premiere a double bill with a twist: Pagliacci will not be paired with Cavalleria Rusticana, but rather Hans Werner Henze’s first opera, Das Wundertheater.

Leipzig routinely honours its native son with performances of Parsifal scheduled on and around Good Friday, which tempts a state of ritualized enactment best confined to the opera itself. (Vienna maintains the same tradition and is a magnet for self-appointed enforcers of the Bayreuth applause customs and their confrontational silencing of the ‘transgressors’.