New York City and Montréal communed in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday night when Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal concluded their second US tour, under the baton of their maestro of 25 years, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. C'était magnifique.

All of this music is in the DNA of the Vienna Philharmonic, and to hear them play it is to better understand what it is about: expression. Their timbre is bright, their pitch is heightened, and their tremolos wide and dug in. But, what really comes through is the sheer joy each player exudes through their playing. This is a fearless orchestra. They go for broke.

Chamber Music Society’s recent concert focusing on the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré — lifelong friends and colleagues — was a time-traveler’s feast. The menu was a deftly curated series of these French doyens’ most rewarding and characteristic recipes.

In the presence of a master, you think about ancestors and legacies — what you might call “ghosts.” The audience in Carnegie Hall understood what John Williams meant as he greeted this “iconic room,” with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the “ghosts within the walls that fly around and sing and dance.”

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center explored the essence of French chamber music over the centuries in Sacred and Profane, circulating flute and stings, harp and piano, with a touch of French Baroque, a taste of 1950s modernism, and a healthy dose of early 20th-century favorites by Debussy and Ravel.

If music is either Song or Dance, Inon Barnatan’s solo recital at the 92NY Kaufman Hall — a full-throated essay the pianist called Symphonic Dances — teetered on the border between them, and proved that greatness lies in the balance between them.

CadenzaNYC’s February 2024 Classical Music Guide to New York City. What’s Playing on concert stages across the city this February.

Antonin Dvořák’s long neglected Requiem, Op. 89, received a rare performance at Carnegie Hall, courtesy of the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leon Botstein. Featuring the Bard Festival Chorale, and a quartet of superb vocal soloists, these sizable and expert forces made a strong case for this grand Requiem mass to be rescued from the shadows of the warhorses by Mozart and Verdi, and for that matter, the composer’s own Stabat Mater.

The Cleveland Orchestra, in the second of two concerts as part of Carnegie Hall’s festival Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, revived this avant garde masterpiece, contrasted ingeniously with Anton Webern’s 1928 Symphonie, Op. 21. Composed under threatening political scrutiny under Stalin’s regime, yet during a period when he cleverly evolved a language that defied obvious interpretation, the Fifth Symphony is one of Prokofiev’s most gratifying creations. Welser-Möst’s generous and thoughtful rendering brought New York’s audience to its feet.

Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall fell under the charm of Elia Cecino, an Italian pianist of prodigious virtuosity, at Tuesday’s matinee, witnessing his auspicious New York debut. In a rich program, at once searching and revealing, Cecino carved a distinctive niche on the concert stage. At the precocious age of twenty-two, Cecino embodies the archetype of young hero — teeming with desire and ambition — but also an old soul, wise beyond his years.

Jakub Hrůša conducted the New York Philharmonic this week in a program that featured violin soloist Hilary Hahn being awarded the Avery Fisher Prize. The hall (and lobby, where the NY Phil concerts can now be seen and heard) was impressively full on Saturday night — the last of three concerts featuring this busy superstar of the violin world as she joins the Philharmonic as Artist-in-Residence for the 2023-24 season.

Chornobyldorf — receiving its US Premiere as part of the tenth season of the Prototype Festival — is described by its creators as an Archeological Opera. Permeating the cavernous blackbox Ellen Stewart Theater at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, this ambitious multimedia work indeed expands the definition of opera.

New York’s American Modern Opera Company, under the leadership of Julia Bullock, has devised a version — greatly abridged and reduced in forces — they call El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered. The orchestra, under Reid’s graceful baton, performed with electric precision, sending Adams’ rich tonal harmonies and nervous rhythmic patterns spinning around the cathedral, as if channeling the elements in the air and stone. The Choir of Trinity of Wall Street sounded glorious, and with projected supertitles providing translation, the text was always clear