Success at Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Competition is such a major feather in the cap for ambitious young soloists that it tends to be one of the international competitions whose streamed performances are genuinely worth catching up on after the event. Gramophone’s 2023 Young Artist of the Year, violinist Stella Chen, is the perfect example, having taken the QEC’s top prize in 2019. The 2024 QEC was in fact the first violin year since 2019, and this time it was won by Ukrainian Dmytro Udovychenko. You can find his finals performance online, of Escaich’s Variations litaniques and Shostakovich’s Concerto No 1 in A minor, Op 77, with the Belgian National Orchestra under Antony Hermus. But perhaps even more interesting is the concluding gala concert staged a week later, now on ARTE: a chance to hear how the three highest-ranking laureates play when there’s nobody filling in a scoresheet, before a public that knows which way the judges’ votes eventually landed.

Accompanying the three violinists at this gala concert is the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège under Nuno Coelho, and first up it’s the Sibelius Concerto from American third prize winner Elli Choi. Of the three, she’s the one who looks visibly thrilled to be on that stage, and there’s no question that this adds to the viewing pleasure. Hers is not a romantic reading. Occasionally it feels as though the score is asking for more ease and elasticity to her phrasing than we’re given – her final dance has a hardness that makes you think more of a spry granite fairy than a supple mountain will-o’-the-wisp. But then, why not? Particularly when she serves up some serious tonal pleasures along the way – some fantastic, woody-textured folkiness around 4'00" in the first movement; low-register strength and depth which she draws on to full, husky-toned effect for the Adagio; then fast-bowed, bridge-rattling drama and rhythmic power for the finale – and the orchestra sounds fully on board with her vision, serving up a similar mix of textual woodiness and dark might, and fabulously chiselled definition.

Second prize winner American violinist Joshua Brown brings a brimful of airborne momentum, technique and feeling to the Mendelssohn Concerto. His cadenza is compellingly voiced and paced, its climactic top note teasingly, indulgently held. Perhaps the most ear-pricking moment of his nimble finale – supported with lovely orchestral sprightliness and welly – is the sudden joyous brightening and blossoming out from everyone as they turn to gallop down the final home straight; and if you didn’t already know that Brown had also taken the Audience Prize (which I didn’t as I first listened), you’d guess it from the applause.

Udovychenko then brings a clean, focused, controlled sound to the Brahms Concerto. Interestingly, this is the least technically polished of the three performances, but it’s nevertheless very accomplished. The final Rondo is perfectly pitched with its brightly celebratory, full-throttle warmth and rhythmic snap.

Perhaps the most fun part of this concert, though, is the joint encore from all three finalists – a three-violin arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla turca’, which sees them turn some impressively polished virtuosity and tight chamber partnering to the service of a zanily comic organised chaos of atonalities, polytonalities, ragtime and wicked Turkish inflections. One wonders how they found the time or the remaining brainpower to put it together so brilliantly. That they did probably tells you all you need to know about the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

Back at the 2019 edition, one competitor who turned heads regardless of being placed fifth was Hungarian violinist Júlia Pusker. Currently a 2023-24 ECHO (European Concert Hall Organisation) Rising Star, she was back in Belgium this past September, in the Liège Salle Philharmonique with the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal, playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto for the orchestra’s season-opening concert – its last with its current musical director Gergely Madaras, before Lionel Bringuier takes the reins (2025-26).

Pusker’s reading is mellow-toned, elegantly poetic, silkily flexible of technique and metre, abounding in portamento colour, with an aching mournfulness to the minor-key interludes and just the occasional fiery acceleration, all to loving, admiration-filled support from the orchestra and Madaras. Her sound really is exquisite at points – milked particularly sweetly teasingly over her string of trills in the first movement (bar 205 onwards), stretching them out just enough to tantalise. With playing like this, it’s perhaps inevitable that the Larghetto is her performance’s high point. The only shame is that it would pack more of a punch if it weren’t so similar to what she’s already given for the Allegro ma non troppo. But even if she does turn out to be just a bit too unrelentingly tastefully dreamy for you, don’t leave without listening to her encore: Kurtág’s ‘Doloroso’ (1992) from Signs, Games and Messages, from whose simple, hushed motif’s development she spins such a range of tone, colour and contrasting voices that you could hear a pin drop in the hall. It’s no less bewitching viewed remotely.

There’s a similar pin-drop atmosphere to the 2024 Tsinandali Festival chamber programme from Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk and colleagues (medici.tv). First up is Brahms’s Clarinet Trio in A minor with clarinettist Pierre Génisson, and it’s a riveting start: gorgeous slender lyric grace and curve from Isserlis and Génisson, after which Isserlis initiates the first storm, throwing himself at his cello, his portamento newly wildly vocal, and an excitingly tactile-sounding grip between bow and string – on to which Génisson grips his own newly wilded tones. The Adagio conversation is wonderfully closely sensitive: Denk leans lovingly into those chords that push slightly at the edges of tonality, while Génisson’s tone has a magical, Mozartian sweetness and clarity. In their Andantino grazioso, enjoyment is all over Isserlis’s face as they add an extra swinging push to its lilt. Then an Allegro of wildness, passion, flair, tenderness and volatility – one of those supreme chamber performances over which the music sounds so alive and liberated that you could forget it’s attached to three different people and their physical instruments.

You’d think that their Brahms couldn’t be topped but then comes Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat, Op 44, Denk and Isserlis now joined by violinists Joshua Bell and Irène Duval and viola player Blythe Teh Engstroem. This is an ad hoc group of artists only in the sense that it’s not a permanent entity, and their familiarity with each other shows in their dancingly fleet-footed, sunnily radiant reading. Duval blends with confident pleasure into Bell’s bright elegance. Engstroem and Isserlis meet tones beautifully in their lower-register dialogue. Schumann’s folk influence is particularly strongly audible, but all in the rhythm and spirit – there’s nothing of the camp fire about this polished playing. Their second-movement march is thoughtfully mysterious rather than funereal; there’s a very lovely airy, gauzy timbre and texture to its dreamy interludes. Their finale pizzicato has a merrily throwaway ping. The whole thing feels light years away from the heavy late-romantic playing this work often prompts in musicians.

Finally to Berlin for Alisa Weilerstein as soloist in the Sinfonia concertante Prokofiev completed for Rostropovich in 1952, the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by another guest, Lahav Shani – himself soon to have a more permanent foot in the German musical landscape as Principal Conductor of the Munich Philharmonic (2025‑26). From Weilerstein this is exciting, big-boned, tonally penetrating, lyrical and virtuosic playing. The Berliners’ partnering meanwhile is richly polished and wide, and rhythmically vital. Shani is clearly enjoying the score’s opportunities for spring and jazz swing. When the music becomes dangerous, machinistic, it’s edge-of-the-seat stuff from everyone. Their Allegro giusto gets a mid-work ‘brava!’ and applause. Before the concert continues with Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, Weilerstein calms the Philharmonie’s waters back down again with the more heavens-touched lyrical warmth of the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No 3 in C. Add the standard of the Digital Concert Hall’s audio and video quality, and supporting filmed interviews with both Weilerstein and Shani, and if you’re planning a single date with an online concert this month, this one is the Rolls‑Royce choice.

The events

Queen Elisabeth Competition Gala Concert arte.tv

Beethoven Violin Concerto (Pusker; Liège RPO / Madaras) medici.tv

Brahms Clarinet Trio Schumann Piano Quintet (Génisson, Bell, Duval, Engstroem, Isserlis, Denk) medici.tv

Prokofiev Sinfonia concertante, etc (Weilerstein; BPO / Shani) digitalconcerthall.com