Venue: Lotte Concert Hall, Seoul

Vivid, full-bodied Tchaikovsky, passionate without losing its grammar, on a persuasive night for the KBS Symphony Orchestra.

A pair of piano concertos envelop a concert aria as Yunchan Lim opens his Mozart project with poise and nerve in Seoul. 

That last movement proves the evening’s true point of reckoning in the Seoul Philharmonic's performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at Lotte Concert Hall. 

In Myung-whun Chung’s first concert as the orchestra’s tenth Music Director, Leonidas Kavakos’ account of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is built on exposure rather than varnish. 

In a notoriously tricky acoustic, the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov make the Lotte Concert hall feel like theirs in a programme of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.

As a pre‑tour snapshot, this concert proves was unambiguous: an orchestra intent on renewing the canon in the language of now rather than sealing it behind glass. 

Propulsive Prokofiev from pianist Dmitry Shishkin between Ravel’s hypnotic minimalism and Schoenberg’s late-Romantic complexity. 

Fragmentation to ritual: this was no Rite of Spring of two halves but a single, vast architectural crescendo.