Where did all the music come from?

Weeks can go by when there isn’t a single classical music concert that really grabs my attention. Then suddenly there are so many that difficult choices have to be made. March is going to be one of those months. There are top orchestras, big names, great music, and sometimes a combination of all three, on offer.

The choice at the Bozar in Brussels this week includes the world-renowned Budapest Festival Orchestra, which is acting as a cultural flagship during Hungary’s EU presidency. For a different Hungarian flavour, there’s also an evening of Liszt’s music and words focusing on his musical settings of poets as well as his own writing.

Another name to jump out of the March offerings is Russian violinist Vadim Repin, who in 1989 became the youngest-ever winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. He’s playing Sibelius’s violin concerto this Friday and then Grieg, Elgar and Franck sonatas later in the month.

Always keen to hear chamber music, I noticed that there are two well-known quartets playing in Belgium this month: the Pavel Haas quartet in Ghent and the Hagen Quartett in Brussels.

And this selection doesn’t even include the Bozar gala concerts, whose programmes always have big musical names. The March concert boasts Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra dell' Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Boris Berezovsky playing Liszt’s concerto for piano and orchestra No. 1. The only downside to this series is the number of “VIPs” who are there as much for the networking as the music (cue more chatter, coughing and mobile phones than usual).

While the Bozar is the venue for a large proportion of the classical music concerts in Brussels, there are of course other places and a good selection can be found here. That said, when there’s a bumper crop of offerings like there is in March, the incentive to go hunting elsewhere is limited.