This week, Maxim Vengerov guests with the Polish Baltic Symphony Orchestra as part of the Vengerov Festival in Gdansk. The Orchestra’s season-opening concert, heard on September 12 at the Filharmonie Gdansk, features Maxim performing Britten’s Violin Concerto—in the composer’s centennial year—under the baton of Ernst van Tiel. Maxim previously performed the concerto this summer at the Ravinia Festival (in a highly-anticipated and much-lauded return to the United States), of which performance the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Given performances as vital as this, Britten’s shamefully neglected concerto will not languish in obscurity much longer.”

Maxim Vengerov’s fall season begins with the Vengerov Festival, a series of concerts and masterclasses. Last experienced in June in Tokyo, the Vengerov Festival travels to Gdansk, a Polish city on the Baltic coast. As part of the public activities, Vengerov will give a concert with the International Menuhin Orchestra at the Polish Philharmonic Gdansk on September 8. The concert will feature Maxim as both violinist and conductor with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5.

On September 12, Vengerov joins the Polish Baltic Symphony Orchestra for their season-opening concert at the same concert hall. Under conductor Ernst van Tiel, he will perform Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto (a work he previously played this summer at the Ravinia Festival to great acclaim). The program will also include Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.

Mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina begins her jubilee season with a concert at the Constantine Palace as part of the G20 Leaders’ Summit. Held this year in Borodina’s native St. Petersburg, the conference is the world’s leading international cooperation forum, leading discussions on international economic and financial issues held from September 5 – 6, 2013. Borodina will perform at a private concert on September 5.

Held annually on Lincoln Center Plaza, the Metropolitan Opera’s Summer HD Festival concludes this year on Monday, September 2, with a screening of Verdi’s Aida, starring Olga Borodina under the baton of Fabio Luisi.

Of the 2012 performances, which also starred Liudmyla Monastyrska and Roberto Alagna, the New York Times wrote, “the combined fervor” of Borodina and Luisi “made for an electrically charged and energetic performance.” The Times added that  Borodina’s “astonishingly powerful, almost masculine low notes seem to come out of an instrument different from that of the rest of her range… her final plea for peace was heart wrenching.”

Following an acclaimed appearance with the Istanbul Music Festival earlier this summer, Maxim Vengerov returns to Turkey for a concert in Bodrum with the D-Marin Turgutreis International Classical Music Festival. Under the baton of Rengim Gökmen, Vengerov guests with the Presidential Symphony Orchestra for Tchaikovsky’s much-loved Violin Concerto. For more information, click here.