CMS invites audiences to this petite slice of heaven (the venue seats about a hundred people) for various events, from Inside Chamber Music lectures (with Bruce Adolphe) to concerts and masterclasses. Thursday’s Rose Studio Concert, hosted and curated by oboist James Austin Smith, was an enchanting, hour-long holiday.

Angela Hewitt — esteemed as one of today’s master interpreters of J. S. Bach, having recorded and performed the Baroque master’s complete ouvre for ten fingers to great acclaim in recent years, has embarked on her next chapter, The Mozart Odyssey, a survey of Mozart’s piano concertos around the globe. Hewitt began her latest concert in Kaufman Auditorium at 92NY with Mozart’s Phantasia, beautifully paced and technically graceful, adding her own flare to the written ornaments — as an opera in miniature.

Someday this inflamed election season will be something to reflect upon, and one of my fondest memories of the period will be the soothing balm applied by MasterVoices’ effervescent concert presentation of Strike Up the Band, the satirical operetta from 1927 with a score by George and Ira Gershwin and an antiwar Marx Brothers-style book by George S. Kaufman.

Trifonov’s swap of Barber with Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli raised the question of what story this unusual program was telling, especially, after experiencing the Sturm und Drang of the curtain-raiser. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, a posthumously published work, dating from 1865 when the composer was a 25 year old student, was a fascinating concert opener.

Mahler’s Third, which clocked roughly an hour-and-three-quarters this evening and requires women’s chorus, children’s chorus, alto soloist, and orchestral heft including eight horns, is more seldom programmed than his Second, or Bruckner’s Seventh (a mere hour-and-ten-minutes). But, Nézet-Séguin commands this monumental epic assuredly, not wasting a drop of the legendary Philadelphia institution inherited from legendary maestros such as Stokowski and Ormandy. And Mahler’s Third is as Mahlerian as his symphonies come — a broad canvas on which he depicts and explores “nature,” and the human experience, in the broadest sense.

Silent Light, the new, immersive opera by composer Paola Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek, based upon the 2007 Dutch film Stellet Licht, transports us to a Northern Mexican Mennonite community in this captivating parable of love, duty, temptation, and the role of women in society.

The American Classical Orchestra opened their 40th season on a joyful note. Under the baton of Artistic Director Thomas Crawford, Wednesday’s concert at Alice Tully Hall celebrated the audience as much as the venerable period-instrument ensemble itself. Serving up one of classical music’s great crowd-pleasers, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Crawford combined a light, breezy touch with heartfelt investment in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Sylvan Winds concluded their forty-fifth season as one of New York’s premiere woodwind quintets with a convivial, festive concert at Merkin Concert Hall. Joined by a mixture of friends and former ensemble members, the evening featured fresh new works, as well as beloved classics, and expanded into veritable wind ensemble works with thirteen players. A “baker’s duodecet?”