Five hours of mystic puzzles: Ives Ensemble perform Feldman's String Quartet II

The Dutch Ives Ensemble in surefooted programming and performance of substantive works by Cassandra Miller and Joanna Baillie. 

Felix Meritis, located in central Amsterdam, is west Europe's oldest concert building. One of its concert series for fall 2011 is "News from the Front - 250 years of 'modern' music", offering performances by three renowned ensembles: the Van Swieten Society, the Ives Ensemble and the Asko Chamber Choir.

Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge is paired with Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte, a journey from agony to transcendence in which the agony proves the more honest companion.

From Three Screaming Popes to Pictures at an Exhibition, a pair of works inspired by paintings frame a violin concerto by Béla Bartók at London's Southbank Centre. 

With a spring in his step, Evgeny Kissin returns to Barbican Hall and gives well-wrought accounts of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.