A program of two beautifully balanced works ended the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s season at the Orpheum.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, the Phoenix Chamber Choir took on a challenging a task, programming the Canadian premiere of contemporary British composer Joby Talbot’s hourlong a cappella choral work Path of Miracles as its season ender.

It was what you’d call a compromise. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra program over the weekend gave us the almost-never-played Second Piano Concerto in G Major by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, but we also had to sit through a remainder of a program that was little more than clichés.

The trick to Richard Strauss’s heady one-act work Salome, with its libretto based on Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, is to let the music work its macabre magic.

On paper, the Fröst Trio’s BACH (Beyond All Clarinet History) project looked like a sure winner. How can you lose when you’ve got three of Scandinavia’s finest musicians, the immortal works of the great Johann Sebastian, and a sheaf of new, Bach–inspired pieces?

Is there a better singer than Portuguese fado star Mariza in the world today?

Opportunities to hear Louis Andriessen’s music don’t come around all that often in Vancouver—rarer still are programs of his full string quartets.

The content was about as original as the title, Fine French Fantasies. The only cliché they skipped in a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra program over the weekend was Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, and it was a mercy that they spared us that much.

A few hundred people opted out of the Sunday sunshine and headed for the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, where countertenor David Daniels and the English Concert chamber orchestra kicked off their North American tour.

A dozen local composers were featured in musica intima's Cultural Olympiad–sponsored choral roundup at home.

It’s not often you associate opera with cage matches, but that’s exactly the first impression the brash, metallic Rigoletto set makes.

On March 1 at the Vancouver Playhouse, the young Chinese-born DaXun Zhang made as strong a case as any for the double bass as a solo instrument, in a program that highlighted the wide range of the supersized fiddle.

It was a major puzzle as to why February 19 was the first time violist Yuri Bashmet had been to Vancouver, with or without his chamber string orchestra, the Moscow Soloists.

Audience members at the Canadian Music Centre’s Sound-Tracks concert were reminded of the displeasures of vacationing with toddlers, as three or four kids in the audience at the Rocky Mountaineer Station took turns alternately screaming, fussing, shoving, and generally running amok.

The 10 young operatic voices heard on February 8 at the Vancouver Playhouse were on the whole pretty good, and some of them exceptionally good.