Performer: Jan Vogler

Jaap van Zweden and the Hong Kong Phil excel in Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony and give an atmospheric reading of the Sea Interludes by Britten, but cellist Jan Vogler struggles to settle in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. 

Intrepid chamber musicians braved wild weather to deliver a stirring performance of Schubert's String Quintet in C major, alongside early works from Prokofiev and Debussy.

The "original instrument" Dresden Festival Orchestra transformed conventional notions of what Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert are all about.

Rihm is probably Germany’s most famous living composer, and he has a reputation for cerebral intellectualism in his music. That’s admirable, but it doesn’t make him approachable. 

Prophecies and apocalyptic visions were on the programme as part of the London Philharmonic's Be Moved season.

Dreams and anxieties, religious and otherwise, were the dominant themes at Thursday night’s New York Philharmonic performance. The concert program worked backwards in time, starting with Phantasmata by composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse (completed in 1985), followed by Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo (1916), and finishing with Brahms’ Symphony no. 1 (published in 1877).