Best Classical Concert You've Ever Attended

I've seen some pretty amazing ones in my days, but the best one I ever saw wins by a mile:

Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Tallinn Chamber Orchestra (Tonu Kalljuste, conductor)

Two works on the program:

Vivaldi: "Beatus Vir"
Pärt: "Te Deum"

I don't even really like baroque music, but they did such a beautiful job of performing it that I bought the CD. Their performance of fellow Estonian Arvo Pärt's work was simply breathtaking. The crowd sat in stunned silence for what must've been a minute afterwards before exploding into rapturous applause.

Dietrich Fischer-Diskau singing Die Winterreise in Carnegie Hall in the eighties.
It was so heartfelt and moving, we had to walk for about a half hour afterward to come down from the emotional high.

The most memorable concert I've attended was three or four years ago in Toronto. The Emerson String Quartet played Shostakovich's 15th quartet. I have no words. The second half of the program was one of Beethoven's late works, but I was so emotionally spent that I could hardly engage with it at all.

As it happens, I would round out my top 3 concerts with two performances of Arvo Part's music. The first was the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir singing the whole of his "Kanon Pokajanen", and the second was the Hilliard Ensemble singing his "Miserere". Both concerts were magnificently moving.

The two most delightful, light-hearted classical concerts I've attended were, first, the Huelgas Ensemble under Paul van Nevel singing a program of avant-garde late medieval works, full of peculiar and playful effects, and second, Ensemble Clement Janequin singing a program of bawdy (and highly virtuosic) French Renaissance chansons. Incredible.

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Mahler IV. Bernard Haitink and Christine Schäfer.
Absolutely sensational!

This may be an ego trip, but it was a concert I sang in, where we did three Glorias- The Vivaldi, a Puccini and the Rutter with the Orange County (ny) Classic Choral Society and a pick up orchestra. It was a high point of my life.

How about this:

Claudio Abbado conducting the La Scala of Milan in a performance of the Verdi Requiem in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus on the Peloponnese in Greece ... one summer's evening in the '80s. That particular theatre is considered the most perfectly preserved architectural structure from ancient Greece. It can accommodate 15,000 souls and the acoustics are so perfect that each one can hear a stage whisper.

I`ve got nothng to compare with that, and in fact I`m primarily a reggae fan.

I did once go to see Julian Lloyd Webber - an Elgar piece as I recall.

I have been a regular at the annual New Year`s Eve concert by Viva (formerly The East of England Orchestra) in Nott`m UK. We can`t get this year, the first one I`ve missed for years but it was always enjoyable.

The highlight of my concert going would be a number of years ago when Herbert Greenberg was the concertmaster of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and he performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61, my favorite piece of classical music. The Beethoven is such a beautiful and amazing work and this was the only live performance I have ever seen and it will remain in my memory forever. I would like to mention a concert in Harrisburg Pa. a number of years back that I saw which featured Vincent Price reciting The Raven by Poe with incidental music accompanyment. The Harrisburg Symphony Orc. also played Schuberts Unfinished Symphony which made for an excellent concert.

Lots of concerts coming to mind, but what popped up first was a Virgil Fox "Heavy Organ" concert with all J.S. Bach music and a light show. I only regret that I wasn't high on one or another illicit substance. I can't remember exactly where I was, but I think it was either Detroit or East Lansing. And I think it happened in the seventies. But I'm sure about the performer and the composer and the light show. If you're not old yet, you might not understand about this memory thing. Please don't snicker!

Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI performing music from their Villancicos y Danzas Criollas CD (17th century music from the Iberian Pennisula and the New World) in The Church of St. Paul, New Yorkon my birthday two years ago :) It was absolutely marvelous - and I've become a huge fan of their work.

Mahler's Second at Davies Hall, San Francisco. Michael Tilson-Thomas conducting. The atmosphere was electric. I've never experienced anything like it, before or since.

I also have vivid memories of MTT doing Mahler 2 at Davies Hall, from 16-17 years ago (with the Ives Psalm 100, if I remember correctly).

And more Mahler, this time his ninth, with Abbado and the Berlin Phil, at the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, London, one summer night in the 90s. I bought the ticket from a tout at a hugely inflated price, and sat behind the orchestra. I could see every nuance of Abbado's conducting, and the sound from where I was sitting was fantastic.

Another highlight was the Keith Jarrett Trio in the Royal Festival Hall in London 2000. I flew all the way back from Taiwan to attend this concert, and I was completely overcome with weeping at the end of it.

The Keith Jarrett Trio are, of course, the Holy Trinity of jazz. Three in one.

Maurizio Pollini in recital at Chicago Symphony Hall, 1993 (?). All Chopin concert. An incredible experience to hear a great master pianist play the music he plays best.

A close second is Earl Wild playing a recital at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 1977/8. An incredible experience that unfortunately I wasn't knowledgeable enough at the time to fully appreciate.

Don't mean to be a message hog, but just remembered one more. All 6 Brandenburg Concertos performed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra members at Ravinia, sometime in the early 90s. What made the performance particularly memorable was that it was one instrument per part, a VERY chamber orchestra performance. (Another memorable thing was the solo violinist in the 5th concerto having to stop the performance mid-way through the first movement because he had an incomplete copy of his part. He very gracefully stopped the performance, explained to the audience what had happened, retrieved the full part and re-started the concerto at the beginning; a nice reminder that musicians and musical organizations are human after all!)

I'm a big Shostakovich #5 fan. I attended a Cleveland Orchestra concert where they played it. One doesn't think of Shostakovich and Cleveland. But the orchestra played brilliantly and nailed every nuance. Spectacular finale. Think the conductor was either Maazel or Dochnanyi.

Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra live performing the Shostakovich 7 *Leningrad* symphony in June 1988. Utterly amazing and terrifying! The brass playing was unbelievable! I'll never forget it.

The Opera North production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Lowry, Salford in 2008 was one of the most memorable occasions of my life: absolutely bewitching, even with a slightly hoarse Oberon. My wife loved it as well.

There have been many high points in the past 40+ years of active concert-going. But the first professional piano recital I attended, featuring (the then young) Vladimir Ashkenazy, playing Beethoven sonatas, in San Diego, around 1967, truly "converted" me. It made me a concert-goer, rather than just a recorded sound listener. And it will always stand out for me, because it changed my life.

So many great concerts but . . . Rostropovich conducting the Shin Nihon Philharmonic in a Shostakovich's 7th. The orchestra played out of their heads, with more passion and energy than I had ever heard them produce prior to that concert.

One university I attended had a concert every Sunday afternoon, none of them would have counted as outstanding but the idea of coming to listen to a group of people (students, profs and people from the community) who in turn come to make music in an intimate way always appealed to me. As a matter of fact it still does appeal to me. The idea of coming out of a snowstorm or even a warm summer's evening to listen to music is fundamental.
(Edited for spelling)

>22 Barton: I only discovered recently that my old university, Salford, held concerts on Monday evenings in Peel Hall. My wife and I went to one the other day and were treated to members of the Marchini Quartet performing piano quartets by Faure and Walton. Excellent acoustics, but there were very few in attendance. Nevertheless, we shall keep our eyes peeled - no pun intended - for the 2010-11 programme.

Where is Salford, sounds English.

24> It is indeed; next door to Manchester, in Lancashire, North-West England.

I’d have to vote for Andres Segovia playing at (then) Orchestra Hall, Chicago, in the 1960s. I wasn’t familiar with classical guitar at the time. It was an eye opening (ear opening?) experience and the most subtle, delicate, melodic music I had heard. The other interesting aspect of the concert was the reverence and quiet of the audience. I still haven’t witnessed anything else like it.

It sounds a little pretentious to me today, but I later described the music to a friend at the time as, “musical lace.”

A very close second was Glenn Gould’s 1964 concert, also at Orchestra Hall, which I got to go to after a friend with piano series season tickets was cancelled out by his date (thank you, whoever you were!).

To this day, his original recording of the Goldberg Variations is my favorite single classical music recording. It also must be a 50% pick of folks in classical music in “ten for a desert island” type surveys.

P.S. #11 "Jordi Savall" - Yes!

I lived in Pittsburgh roughly simultaneous to Mariss Jansons' reign as music director. This was good, in that he regularly programmed a lot of my favorite composers, but not so good, in that I seldom found his conducting exciting or inspiring.

An unexpected exception was the performance of Mahler's 6th symphony, which I believe was actually my last concert attendance before moving away. Utterly devastating, in every sense this symphony is meant to be.

(I later picked up Jansons' recording of this with the LSO, but he seemed to have returned to his old wet-towel self.)

Reviving this dormant topic, I have 2 candidates out of many: Beethoven 9th, in the Musikverein in Vienna, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Orchestra; and the weirdly named but excellent B-Rock Orchestra playing Schubert’s 3rd, 5th and 8th symphonies, in Metz.

Another possible: a performance of the St Matthew Passion, on Maundy Thursday, in the Thomanerkirche in Leipzig. Musically excellent but unbelievably uncomfortable.

I wish I had been older in 1963 for a concert at the Edinburgh Festival with Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. I had never heard, or even heard of, the sitar and found it rather weird but also interesting. I wonder what music they programmed.

A concert that I was old enough to appreciate happened as part of the Northern Encounters Festival in Toronto in 1997, which included several other outstanding concerts. The best of them all, however, was given by the Swedish Radio Choir conducted by Tönu Kaljuste (see the OP above) at Metropolitan United Church on, I recall, a sweltering evening. Kaljuste is a charismatic conductor and the choir was flawless. On the programme were Hindemith's Messe, and Libere me by Ingvar Lidholm, and Arvo Pärt's Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen. The concert ended with a setting from the Kavala by Veljo Tormis. This piece and its performance were electrifying, and at the conclusion the audience simply went wild. Toronto audiences don't do this at classical concerts, but were, I think, encouraged by the members of other performing groups in the audience who were visiting and participating in the festival. I've not heard that last piece since; even if I had the opportunity I'm not sure I would want to because I expect I would be disappointed. Let it live in memory.

I haven't been to many just orchestral concerts, but attend the ballet each year and at least once they are accompanied by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, so it's like getting 2 entertainments for the price of one!

Concerts I've attended: (not necessarily classical)
~ 1999 CSO with Pavorotti
~2005 Haydn Cello Concerto in C with the Symphony with YoYo Ma The final piece was Ravel's Bolero
~2010-2012 (?) Brahm's Requiem
~2012-2013 Gershwin (not classical, I know) with pianist Carol Hong
~2016 Beethoven Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
~ 2016 Andrea Bocelli
~2017 Andrea Bocelli

Ballets in which the CSO has played live:
Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) My all time fav!
Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky)
Giselle (Adame)
Rite of Spring (Stravinsky)--the only one I can say that I entirely detested!
Cinderella-Prokoviev (Prokofiev)
The Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky)
Don Quixote (originated somewhere/Bolshoi) Did not like this one either!
Carmen (Bizet)

ETA: Handel's Messiah multiple times. I have sung in it twice, about 40 years ago. (alto) It was performed both times at the Pontifical College Josephinum.

>2 almigwin: I also heard Fischer-Dieskau in a Schubert recital in the late 70s or early 1980s. It was at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, and the audience was stunned by his performance. It was like everyone was holding their breath when he sang.

>31 kac522: As to Fischer-Dieskau, I thought of going to a performance in Vienna about ten years ago with him as the speaker in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. As luck would have it, I didn’t. Turned out to be his last public performance. I never saw him live. But I did go to a performance (again in Vienna) of Haydn’s The Creation, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting. His last public appearance too, or pretty close to it. I thought he looked tired and frail, but the performance was wonderful.

Not a member of this group but responding to Tess' plea for some activity on it. I love classical music.

Best concert ever was probably in the 1960s when there was a scheme where school students could get tickets to all sorts of classical music events in London for just £1. We had a school chaplain who was interested and he would accompany groups of us to operas, concerts and ballet. I will never forget seeing Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nuereyev dancing together, although I have forgotten which ballet it was.

And then I don't know whether Gilbert and Sullivan can be classed as classical, but a few years back my wife and I were hiking with some friends on the Cornish Coastal Trail and we went to see Pirates of Penzance performed in the beautiful open air theatre at Minack, just outside Penzance, a natural amphitheatre at the top of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Very atmospheric.

My most memorable concert was the Dallas Symphony, July 4, 1973 (?) ... Cotton Bowl, Fair Park, Dallas TX. Highlights: the 1812 Overture complete with cannons (played by a US Marine Regiment) and a massive fireworks display depicting the burning of Moscow; that was the finale, just prior to that, was the Dallas Ballet and Stravinsky's Firebird.

Next most: Jean Pierre-Rampal and the DSO, I think it was 1978? 1979? I had third row seats. He seemed to have had a bit too much wine prior, as his flute seemed a bit sloppy.

Third place: the Four Seasons, or maybe the Mozart clarinet concerto (again, all DSO).

Good times.

2010 outside of Antalya, Turkey. Carmina Burana was performed during the night at Aspendos. A 2000 year old Roman amphitheater in the middle of nowhere. Used only natural amplification and by torchlight. Incredible.

A performance of the St. Matthew Passion by the Handel and Haydn Society in Symphony Hall in Boston in...er, 2016, maybe? What made it so astonishing (H&H is amazing at baroque choral masterworks to begin with) was tenor Joshua Ellicott as the Evangelist. I was in tears at several points. So powerful.

Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eva Ollikainen performing Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.