Concerto

Madness was afoot at the season-opening concert of the talented and intrepid chamber orchestra A Far Cry. Titled “The Lunatic,’’ the program’s four works touched in varying degrees on the idea that beneath placid surfaces lurk dark forces, ready to erupt without warning. They led off with Heinrich Biber’s “Battalia á 10,’’ a musical dramatization of warfare. About half the time it acts like a proper Baroque concerto; the other half contains effects that make it sound amazingly modern.

You can count on one hand the number of significant living composers who are also conductors of international standing. The combination makes for perilous professional juggling but also, in theory, a kind of complete musicianship rarely encountered today. The Finnish-born Esa-Pekka Salonen is one such musician. He returned to the Boston Symphony Orchestra podium Thursday night and led what was easily one of the most artistically rewarding performances of the season. It had been more than 20 years since he last conducted the BSO, for much of which he was leading...

Just about any program of classical music written after his death, in 1750, could be called "Connected by Bach," so pervasive is the master's influence. But the quartet of pieces that Emmanuel Music assembled for its concert Saturday night at Emmanuel Church would have been welcome under any rubric: Bach's own Orchestral Suite No. 4, John Corigliano's "Fancy on a Bach Air," Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, and then, for the second half of the evening, Stravinsky's complete "Pulcinella" ballet.

Sometime in the late 1970s or early '80s, Esa-Pekka Salonen went to hear "Siddharta," an opera about the early life of the Buddha by Danish composer Per Norgard. Salonen no longer remembers what the music sounded like; what stuck with him was how the composer handled the story's crucial dramatic moment, when the title character leaves his past behind. "He becomes the Buddha in maybe the last 30 seconds of the piece or so," Salonen explained recently, speaking by phone from Philadelphia.

It seems odd to call a program with five brand new orchestral pieces commonplace. But somehow it seems apt when talking about the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a group for whom the unexpected has become almost predictable. The five premieres on Friday's concert spoke in vastly disparate languages, each of which BMOP's fine orchestra and music director Gil Rose brought off as though it was a well-honed specialty. Leading off the lengthy program was Geoffrey Gordon's "Shock Diamonds," an exercise in rapidly shifting textures and vivid orchestral effects.

CAMBRIDGE — For its warmly received Boston debut at Sanders Theatre Saturday, the European chamber ensemble Il Giardino Armonico sent a musical love letter to a city with no shortage of admirers: Venice. Produced by the Boston Early Music Festival, the concert focused on composers of the 17th and 18th centuries, from familiar names like the titan Antonio Vivaldi to lesser-known Venetians such as Dario Castello, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Baldassare Galuppi. The mellow acoustics proved ideal for the eight...

New relationships form quickly these days at Symphony Hall. The French conductor Stephane Deneve made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut less than a year ago, filling in for an ailing Sir Colin Davis, and he is back already this week. He will also lead the orchestra in Carnegie Hall next month and will make additional appearances at Tanglewood, leading a Saturday night program with Yo-Yo Ma and participating in the orchestra's annual Tanglewood on Parade gala concert. Given how quickly this season was recast after James Levine's...

Virtuosity, in its traditional sense, is musical performance at its most outgoing; the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Saturday concert — “Double Trouble,’’ a quartet of double concerti — revealed a plethora of extroverted strategies. The plurality of styles was a showcase for the flexibility of conductor Gil Rose’s group, switching channels with ease, burnished and rhythmically rigorous in a program marked by wide-ranging gregariousness. Harold Meltzer’s 2004 “Full Faith and Credit’’ for two bassoons and strings was inspired...

Even Google was celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday yesterday. The second "o" in the search engine's name sported a white wig, while a staff full of musical notes floated off to the right. Emmanuel Music has been celebrating Mozart's birthday with special concerts and performances for 35 years. For this special anniversay the group is presenting pianist Russell Sherman in the cycle of Mozart's piano sonatas in five concerts, with complementary chamber music, as well as concert performances of "The Magic Flute.

CAMBRIDGE — Among Boston’s burgeoning ecosystem of younger, entrepreneurial classical music groups, the Discovery Ensemble and its director, Courtney Lewis, have carved out a niche by cultivating a certain brash suavity, an insistent flamboyance that pulls the listener into their dapper conspiracy. Their program at Sanders Theatre on Friday was an ideal vehicle — music regarding the grand tradition with casual confidence, and even a little insouciance. The result was smart, flattering tailoring.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra resumes its subscription season this week after a break for its youth programs as well as its annual set of concerts at Carnegie Hall. This year's New York visit included a well-received performance of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," presented alongside a raft of standard repertoire. That the BSO could not find a place on any of its three Carnegie programs to introduce the one truly newsworthy work of its entire season - Harbison's Sixth Symphony - is sad and rather baffling.

New relationships form quickly these days at Symphony Hall. The French conductor Stephane Deneve made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut less than a year ago, filling in for an ailing Sir Colin Davis, and he is back already this week. He will also lead the orchestra in Carnegie Hall next month and will make additional appearances at Tanglewood, leading a Saturday night program with Yo-Yo Ma and participating in the orchestra's annual Tanglewood on Parade gala concert. Given how quickly this season was recast after James Levine's resignation, one can't...

Just about any program of classical music written after his death, in 1750, could be called "Connected by Bach," so pervasive is the master's influence. But the quartet of pieces that Emmanuel Music assembled for its concert Saturday night at Emmanuel Church would have been welcome under any rubric: Bach's own Orchestral Suite No. 4, John Corigliano's "Fancy on a Bach Air," Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, and then, for the second half of the evening, Stravinsky's complete "Pulcinella" ballet.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project called its program of five "unexpected concertos" at Jordan Hall Friday "Strange Bedfellows. " None (well, almost none) of the music induced slumber, however. Created for an odd array of solo instruments (viola, electric guitar, theremin, mandolin, French horn) accompanied by instrumental ensembles of various size and composition, the works prodded at the frontiers of traditional concerto form. Electronic and acoustic sounds engaged in conversation - sometimes in rancorous argument - across the centuries, forcing us to rethink this...

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, conductor At: Symphony Hall, Thursday night (repeats today and Tuesday) Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe. Schumann's Violin Concerto had a hard time making its way into the world and was practically snuffed out at birth. Written at the close of his active career and just before his descent into madness, it was essentially viewed by the composer's wife Clara, by Brahms, and by the violinist Joseph Joachim through the lens of Schumann's tragic end and deemed an inferior piece.

Nudging its recent archives open a little further, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has released a download-only version of "On Willows and Birches," a concerto by John Williams for the orchestra's former principal harpist, Ann Hobson Pilot. The recording was made at Symphony Hall on Oct. 3, 2009, not long after Pilot and the orchestra premiered the 16-minute piece on opening night of the 2009-10 season. (It was also played at Carnegie Hall.) Former assistant conductor Shi-Yeon Sung leads the BSO in the recording, though James Levine had conducted the premiere.

The Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra has been developing a college audience, so the demographics of its public must be the envy of many other musical institutions. Founding music director Scott Yoo draws his players from the cream of young musicians on the Eastern seaboard. Some of the current group must have been in kindergarten when Metamorphosen was founded a decade ago. Many in the Jordan Hall audience Saturday night were the same age as the performers, creating a lively dynamic.

"Hands Across the Seas," the title of Boston Musica Viva's season finale on Friday, referred to the varied cultural ancestries of the four programmed composers; music director Richard Pittman mused that their only shared trait was that "they're very true to their roots. " But each also adopted the polished new-music Esperanto in which the group is so fluent. Chen Yi's quartet "Qi" echoes Chinese music, but the difficult-to-translate "force" of the title comes in bright modernist torrents.

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday’s Globe. Even by recent Boston Symphony Orchestra standards, this week’s program required some major administrative improvisation, after both conductor (James Levine) and soloist (Maurizio Pollini) withdrew. The Mozart-Schoenberg pairing these two had devised looked extremely promising, but it was also the kind of program that would have required its original personnel to be fully realized. So the BSO made the logical choice and started from scratch with this week’s repertoire.