The Tokyo String Quartet in musical farewells of Schubert, Haydn, and Bartók at 92Y

More than 40 years ago, violist Kazuhide Isomura got together with three other Japanese students at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and formed the Tokyo String Quartet. After touring the globe for upward of 4,000 performances, more than 40 for Music Toronto, with 40 albums and nearly 40 years of teaching at Yale, last night, Mr Isomura played his final Music Toronto concert.

Bartók used folk music to find his own voice as a composer of classical music. He roamed the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East to rediscover models of what was really music to his ears, much in the same spirit as Picasso and others searched out models of primitive representations to refresh what we see.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra presented a versatile and truly international menu to its audience last week in a thrice-programmed concert titled “Heavenly Schubert” although it was Shostakovich who proved the strongest draw. 

Arguably the highest-profile visiting orchestra of the season, Riccardo Chailly brought his Leipzig orchestra to Birmingham for a duo of 20th-century Russian works. The large audience was not disappointed, Rachmaninov’s second symphony in particular shining in a magnificent performance.

In an era in which orchestras are supposed to have lost their distinctive 20th-century sounds, the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig is one that retains its characteristic dark hue, with fascinating wind timbres that simply refuse to blend into a homogenised whole. And yet there is refinement and virtuosity to match the world’s best orchestras.

An evening of French music, the notes from Debussy, Ravel and Dutilleux lingered in the sticky summer air long after the concert finished.Making their BBC Proms debut, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (BBC SSO) and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, conducted by Donald Runnicles with chorus-master Christopher Bell, took command of the stage.