The OAE make Haydn and Mozart fly at St John's Smith Square, plus November's best classical concerts

Having led the orchestra in the two symphonies, Podger stepped centre-stage for two violin concertos by Mozart. They’re both early works, not among his greatest, but Podger made them shine, animating the rhythms by ever-so-slightly anticipating the beat, and cutting the last note of each phrase short. Nothing was formulaic; you could never guess when she would ornament a note with a touch of vibrato, and when she would leave it plain.

In Mozart’s so-called “Turkish” concerto, she went further, slipping her own witty mini-cadenzas in before each reprise of the melody in the last movement. And in the slow movement, she proved once again that to make Mozart’s lyrical lines glow you don’t have to lard them with thick-throated expressivity: treat them lightly and with dancing grace, and they will glow by themselves. Ivan Hewett

The OAE and Choir of Trinity College Cambridge perform Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on 22 December at Saint John’s Smith Square 020 3879 9555

LSO/Pappano, Barbican ★★★★★

If proof were still needed that Antonio Pappano is one of the hardest-working of major conductors, his schedule this weekend would have supplied it. Twenty-four hours after his latest Rossini marathon at Covent Garden, steering a four-hour performance of Semiramide, Pappano was at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra for a different sort of challenge. Billed as “Total Liszt”, this concert found him equally at home in a programme entirely devoted to one of the most misunderstood geniuses of 19th-century music.

Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony certainly remains under-appreciated, eluding orchestras and audience alike. Pappano proved the ideal guide, not least in sustaining the argument of the long first movement, a portrait of Faust’s restlessness. But from the unusually mellow quality he drew from the LSO at the start to the stirring blaze with male voices (the men of the London Symphony Choir and tenor Brenden Gunnell) in the finale, Pappano was alert to the score’s beauties. With its intimate halo of sound, the Gretchen movement is difficult to shape – Liszt was ahead of his time – yet Pappano managed it. This work became a veritable source book for Wagner, Liszt’s eventual father-in-law; none of those connections was lost on Pappano, an experienced Wagnerian, and the apotheosis might almost have been Faust entering Valhalla.

The concert had opened with Sposalizio from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage in an orchestration by the contemporary Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. Inspired by Raphael’s painting The Marriage of the Virgin Mary, this is a strikingly shy work whose originality is heightened by Sciarrino’s use of instruments beyond Liszt’s experience. Even if the original piano piece remains preferable, this version might almost qualify as an additional Liszt tone poem.

Liszt’s pianistic voice was heard authentically enough in his Totentanz, that “Dance of Death” in the composer’s diabolical style that sometimes gives him a bad name. It may be a shallow score, but no one could have been disappointed by Alice Sara Ott’s delivery of the solo part. Very much the protagonist in the dialogue with orchestra, she displayed staggering power while sustaining tonal depth. Her rock-solid technique, mixing spitfire virtuosity with extreme delicacy, allowed her to shape the work into something more than merely a showpiece. However, her encore of Chopin’s posthumous C sharp minor Nocturne, its trills almost whispered, brought heart to this segment of the evening, while neatly reminding us of Liszt’s friendship with his fellow composer. John Allison

Next LSO concerts: www.lso.co.uk

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Hall ★★★★☆

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is undoubtedly one of the world’s great orchestras. But last night belonged to Mariss Jansons, their chief conductor of some 14 years. He’s one of the few conductors who inspires reverence, but for a moment last week he became the most reviled, thanks to an off-the-cuff remark in this newspaper about women conductors not being his “cup of tea”. Well he’s no longer my cup of tea, was the retort from many understandably angry musicians – not all of them women.

But he was quick to make amends, issuing a statement admitting that “it was undiplomatic, unnecessary and counterproductive for me to point out that I’m not yet accustomed to seeing women on the conducting platform. Every one of my female colleagues and every young woman wishing to become a conductor can be assured of my support, for we all work in pursuit of a common goal: to excite people for the art form we love so dearly – music.” 

After last night’s concert, Jansons reinforced the point in the acceptance speech he gave on the Barbican platform, surrounded by his orchestra, after accepting the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. He spoke of the importance of nurturing the conductors of the future, adding pointedly ‘whether they are boys or girls’.  On stage with him was Mitsuko Uchida, herself a Gold Medal winner, who tried to conjure in words the quality she most admires in Jansons, and kept being driven back to the same word – “intensity”.

There was plenty of that quality in the concert we’d just heard, which began with Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. It is often described as the most serene and intimate of Beethoven’s concertos, but there were moments in this performance when it seemed the most urgent. Jansons can sometimes be too Olympian and refined for my taste, but on this occasion the music-making crackled with tension, especially in the slow movement, where the strings flung off their minatory phrases with startling force.

Seated at the piano was Yefim Bronfman, a pianist normally called on for the  barn-storming virtuosity of pieces such as Prokofiev’s third concerto. That massive assertiveness was a boon in this piece, as it gave a full rounded quality to his tone in even the most inward moments, and a grandeur to the assertive ones. The old saying that true gentleness can only spring from strength proved true here.

Then came Prokofiev’s “war” symphony, the Fifth. Some would say that giving a sharp and even vulgar edge to this symphony’s sound is key to catching its peculiar mix of triumphalism, bleak tragedy and gleeful high spirits. Jansons showed he takes a different view. He wanted a more spacious reading of the piece, one that brought out its underlying nobility as well as its hectic energy, and thanks to the superb playing of the orchestra, he got it.  

Basel Chamber Orchestra  and Stephen Hough, Cadogan Hall, London ★★★☆☆

Not every concert by a little-known European chamber orchestra sets one’s pulse racing in anticipation. But this one seemed promising. The Basel chamber plays with the sharp, tangy colours and springy rhythms typical of so-called “period-instrument” orchestras, very apt for Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony and the two pieces by Mendelssohn on the programme. Plus there was the attraction of much-admired British pianist Stephen Hough, and on the podium the hugely distinguished Swiss musician Heinz Holliger.

Holliger seized the musical world’s attention half-a-century ago as a virtuoso oboist, and has since carved out two parallel careers as a modernist composer and conductor. The fourth piece on the programme was one of his own, a mini-concerto for violin and string orchestra named Meta Arca.

So, much to look forward to, but the reality fell frustratingly short of expectations. Things got off to an unfortunate start, with a strangely over-elaborate performance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. True, Mendelssohn puts hardly any tempo directions in the score, and it’s surely right that conductors should introduce some flexibility of their own, to mirror the sudden storms and mysterious calms of those Scottish seas that so fascinated the composer.

The problem was that Holliger’s surges and pullings-back were so numerous he lost sight of the music’s basic tempo. This was an issue in Schubert’s symphony too, but the real problem here was Holliger’s insistence on observing all of Schubert’s many repeats. This was very “authentic”, no doubt, and one or two audience members around me were in raptures at finally hearing the “director’s cut” of this very well-known piece. But rather more were looking at their watches – 21st -century audiences just don’t listen with 19th-century ears.

All this showed Holliger is a curious mix of spontaneous impassioned musician and pedantic intellectual, the latter often getting in the way of the former. Fortunately there was much to enjoy in between the frustrations. Stephen Hough threw off the lightning-fast passagework of Mendelssohn’s 1st Piano Concerto with elfin lightness, softening the onrush with little yearning tempo fluctuations – a remarkable feat of virtuosity. And Holliger’s own piece turned out to be a witty and affectionate homage to half-a-dozen previous leaders (ie principal 1st violinist) of the orchestra. Daniel Bard, the present incumbent of the role, brilliantly summoned up the personalities of his predecessors – romantic, impetuous, folky – while the orchestra echoed his rhapsodic musings, with a musicality no less impressive. Ivan Hewett

The Basel Chamber Orchestra’s new recording of symphonies by Haydn and Kraus is released on Alpha Classics.

Halle Orchestra, Bridgewater Hall ★★★★☆

“If you’ve gone too far, there’s only one thing to do – go further.” The Hallé’s conductor Mark Elder had clearly taken Jean Cocteau’s advice to heart, when he planned this concert. There was too much of everything; too much crazy emotionalism, too much penitential anguish, too much orgiastic frenzy. The composers of these delights were those three giants of musical romanticism, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Verdi.

The trouble with programming this sort of music is that you absolutely have to ensure the performances go off the Richter scale. There’s no point in an orgy that goes off at half-cock, so to speak. Would the Hallé orchestra and choir manage to sustain a pitch of crazed intensity for two hours? The early signs were good. The overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser began with just the right slow, doleful weight. You could picture the pilgrims dragging their weary feet.

When the big theme appeared in full glory, it sounded properly noble rather than merely loud (all hail to the Hallé’s trombone section). Then, when we were whisked off to the carnal delights of the Venus in her stronghold of the Venusberg, the orchestral sound melted into air, and the solos from the orchestral leader Lyn Fletcher had a delicious fluttering ecstasy.

It would have been wonderful, had it ended where the overture normally ends. But Elder chose to lead straight into the so-called Venusberg music, which Wagner added to please the Parisian’s taste for ballet music, at the opera’s Paris premiere. Here, the performance should give the impression of ever-increasing excitement, but this one didn’t quite pull that off. One began to feel at a certain point that Wagner was protesting too much.

The following piece, Strauss’s tone-poem Don Juan, confirmed that the bacillus of frenzy just isn’t in this orchestra’s blood-stream. The opening didn’t leap off the page like a gazelle, the way it can in some performances. But I shouldn’t carp, because the moments of fulsome romantic expressivity glowed magnificently, and Stephane Rancourt gave the romantic oboe theme a drowsy seductiveness.

The best was reserved for the end, in Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces, where frenzy has no place. The Hallé Choir revealed the subtle musical intricacy as well as the tender heart of the Ave Maria, and the moment in the final Te Deum where they blazed forth, more in hope than in real assurance of the hereafter, was overwhelming. Ivan Hewett

Hear this concert for 30 days on the BBC iPlayer: bbc.co.uk/radio3

London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican ★★★★☆

The centenary of Leonard Bernstein will be upon us in 2018, and the musical world can hardly wait to celebrate. The LSO didn’t bother to wait – on Sunday night, the orchestra launched its Bernstein tribute series, even though the anniversary year is still some eight weeks away. They invited the ideal conductor to launch the series: Marin Alsop, who studied with Bernstein for some years, and knows his music inside-out.

Here, she conducted two of his later pieces, the single-movement flute concerto Halil from 1981, and the 3rd Symphony from 1963. In between came the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony, in a performance that was searching and intense but not ideally balanced.

The two Bernstein pieces are rarities, for reasons that became clear as the evening progressed. Halil, a memorial piece for an Israeli flautist killed while undertaking military service, seemed pulled in too many stylistically directions. The irregular dance in praise of the Almighty, and moments of nocturnal panic were all moving in their way, the big-hearted melody that could have been plucked out of a Bernstein musical even more so. But even the eloquent advocacy of flautist Adam Walker and Marin Alsop’s brilliantly paced performance couldn’t quell the impression of a piece that didn’t know its own mind, musically speaking.

In Kaddish (the title means sanctification in Aramaic) Bernstein turned these unresolved tensions to good use, by using them to dramatise his own agonised doubts about faith. In words written by Bernstein himself, we hear a narrator (the dignified and moving Claire Bloom) trying to invoke and praise the deity. He doesn’t respond, and she becomes scornful and angry. Eventually, she comes to realise that God needs her as much as she needs him, and makes her peace with him.

Alsop made sure we picked up the numerous musical references that help to make the score so intriguing. There were ingenious orchestral fugues, there were more dancing pieces that crossed jazz with a feeling of something ancient. Even the anguished expressionism of Alban Berg flitted across the music in the final movement. Soprano Laura Claycomb made a beautiful but somewhat under-powered sound in the Lullaby, but the Tiffin Boys Choir and the LSO Chorus more than made up for her in the moments of protest or praise. In all the performers did the music proud, and yet the parts stubbornly refused to cohere into a convincing whole. Ivan Hewett

The LSO’s Bernstein season continues on November 8 with the Symphony no 1 “Jeremiah”. Tickets: 020 7638 8891

BBC Symphony Orchestra/Storgårds, Barbican, London ★★★★☆

At 91, Betsy Jolas has long been the doyenne of French composers. But she has never shown any sign of resting on those laurels, and seems to be working as hard as ever. She even came to the Barbican for the British premiere of her Histoires vraies, the centrepiece of this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert.

A composer who studied with both Milhaud and Messiaen yet has equally been open to transatlantic currents (her parents were famous Americans in Paris), she writes music that is as hard to pin down as it satisfying to hear.

In this new 20-minute “concertante suite for piano, trumpet and orchestra”, some of the “true stories” of the title are the everyday sounds we normally try to edit out  of our environment. Thus a clattering banality started up in the orchestra even before the conductor John Storgårds and soloists Roger Muraro and Håkan Hardenberger arrived on the stage.

The modest-sized orchestra is percussion-heavy, and the piano interacts not only with the trumpet but with its orchestral cousins, especially the harp. Hardenberger’s molten trumpet tone lent warmth and also supplied bluesy accents.

Histoires vraies, premiered 18 months ago in Monte Carlo, is testimony to Jolas’s compositional vitality. Though she died in 1918, the pioneering French composer Lili Boulanger belongs to the generation just before Jolas. She was only 24 at her death, and it was fitting that this concert opened with a pair of her most powerful pieces, composed almost exactly a century ago.

Storgårds and the BBCSO brought ebullient, shimmering energy to D’un matin de printemps, and sustained the inner tension under washes of sound in D’un soir triste.

For complete contrast, the programme switched in its second half to the Austro-German tradition. No composer is more steeped in that than Mahler, but this performance was striking for the way in which Storgårds articulated that. His account of the Fourth Symphony opened with unusual lightness and clarity of texture, showing the music’s classical roots.

Storgårds was also clear-sighted about where the music was heading, so he never held back when it came to the expressionistic outbursts – here the textures were raw and exposed – and he never shirked the emotional depths of the middle movements. The soprano Susanna Hurrell brought freshly glinting tone to the finale and its child’s vision of heaven, sung with such sincerity that it, too, felt like a “true story”. JA

Hear this again on the BBC iPlayer. Next BBCSO concert at the Barbican is on November 7. Details: bbc.co.uk/symphonyorchestra

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Bakels Guildhall, Portsmouth  ★★★★☆

‎No other regional British orchestras – few London ones, for that matter – offer more interesting programming than the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Mostly this is thanks to the BSO’s music director, Kirill Karabits, whose Ukrainian roots inform some of his programmes – though not all, since a few weeks ago he imaginatively paired Weber and Hindemith clarinet concertos. Even though Karabits had handed the podium over to Kees Bakels for the orchestra’s latest concerts, that questing spirit was still felt here in a rare airing of Vassily Kalinnikov’s Symphony No 1 in G minor.

A tragic figure, Kalinnikov died in Yalta in 1901 just two days short of his 35th birthday. He had gone to the Crimea for his health, and much of his music was composed there. The First Symphony’s glorious melodies are representative of his style, with the opening movement’s melancholy first subject giving way to something even more haunting. The orchestra responded with warmth, as well as lightness and delicacy, even if the tonal blend was sometimes less than ideal – perhaps equally the fault of the Portsmouth Guildhall’s acoustics and the conductor’s slightly generalised approach. Bakels seemed more interested in the big tunes than in the material that links them.

The slow movement’s distinctive sonorities begin right at the start, where a tinkling harp acquires the halo of high strings. The finale is unusual for reworking themes from the first movement, but since they are so irresistible it is good to revisit them. Somewhat akin to the landscapes of the painter Isaak Levitan, this music conjures up a gentle Russian scene.

Given under the banner of “Russian Masters”, the concert had opened with Glinka, the “father of Russian music”. Bakels’s safety-first approach made the overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila sound slightly tame. His podium manner – sometimes recalling a ragged bird of prey – did little for the flow of the waltz from Glinka’s other opera, A Life for the Tsar, though he drew effective soft playing from the orchestra.

It was the young Czech pianist Lukáš Vondráček, who really raised the temperature of this concert. Bringing both weight and poetry to Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, he never confused powerful virtuosity with undue heaviness. His patrician style evoked not so much a Russian Brahms as Anton Rubinstein himself, whose Fourth Piano Concerto, sharing the same tonality of D minor, might be heard as a musical ancestor of Rachmaninov’s masterpiece. Yet Rachmaninov’s originality, especially in his distinctive bell-like sonorities, blazed through unmistakably. John Allison

More BSO concerts in Exeter, Poole and Portsmouth. Details: bsolive.com

The Emerson Quartet, St John Smith's Square ★★★★☆

The Emerson Quartet, now celebrating its 39th year, is among the world’s most distinguished string quartets. It has become a byword for polished, immaculate perfection, with a perfectly drilled attack – which isn’t the best sort of reputation to have, especially in music where a refined surface hides unruly depths. We expect that surface to be ruffled. We want a sense of strain, a sense of pushing against limits.

Beethoven’s last string quartets, which the Emerson is now playing across two concerts, are the locus classicus of that sort of music. They are always beautifully wrought, and sometimes have a courtly elegance that belies the image of Beethoven the visionary. But, as this concert reminded us, they are also full of astonishingly radical moments, like the wild Bacchanale of the Scherzo of the last quartet, or the moment in the C sharp minor quartet where the players have to make a weird, glassy sound by playing on their instruments’ bridge. It’s the kind of effect we expect from a 20th-century avant-gardiste.

On Tuesday night, the Emersons refused to exaggerate these moments. The scherzo of the last quartet certainly got pretty wild, and Philip Setzer, the violinist who happened to be leading that performance, threw caution to the winds. But the sound never became ugly, and that glassy moment in the C sharp minor was only hinted at. It typified the way everything in these performances had a classical poise, even if the actual sound was robust and rich and far from classical. All the players cultivate a luxurious vibrato, and the total sound can be intimidatingly massive. It’s all very far from the leaner, lighter sound younger quartets aim for.

All this means that the Emersons, as well as being distinguished, are somewhat out of fashion (perhaps those things always go together). But there were things to treasure in these performance that went beyond fashion.

Take the quietly ecstatic duet of the variation movement in the C sharp minor quartet, or the very beginning of the E flat major quartet. The latter’s opening chords were flung off with an aggressive, hard-edged attack that seemed wrong, but it soon became clear that the players wanted to keep softness in reserve, to point up the moment when the music eases into a sunny new key. Often in the past, the Emerson’s honed perfection has left me cold; on this occasion they infused it with real heart. Ivan Hewett

The Emerson Quartet plays more late Beethoven tonight at St John’s Smith Square, London SW1 020 3879 9555 The quartet’s latest album Chaconnes and Fantasias: Music of Britten and Purcell is out now on Decca Gold