Celebrating the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein is compulsory in the United States, optional elsewhere. I confess to approaching the penultimate concert of the 2018 Lanaudière Festival on Saturday night with a touch of oh-please-not-him-again skepticism. I left with my respect for Bernstein the composer renewed.

When I spoke to Jean-Philippe Tremblay a few weeks ago, there were 20 tickets left for Le Fantôme de l’Opéra.

KRAKOW – Krzysztof Penderecki could not say for sure which of his many works is the most performed. “This is a question for my publisher more than for me,” he commented in his spacious and traditionally appointed home in the outskirts of the second city of Poland.

“Only at Lanaudière” would not be strictly accurate. After all, Kent Nagano and the OSM will perform Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion on July 20 at the Salzburg Festival.

Chamber orchestras have long relied on transcriptions to shore up their limited repertory. Jean-Marie Zeitouni and I Musici de Montréal brought their season to a close on Thursday in Bourgie Hall with a program dominated by such works.

The repertoire for string quartet and orchestra is larger than one might suppose, even if Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro is the only such work we hear with any regularity. Now Samy Moussa has made a valuable contribution, called simply Concerto pour quatuor à cordes et orchestre, which had its world premiere Friday night under auspices of the Orchestre Métropolitain.

Oh, dear. You know you are in trouble when the offbeat item in an OSM program is Weber’s Overture to Der Freischütz.

The biggest item was the Piano Sonata No. 3 of young Brahms (whose Scherzo Op. 4, lest we forget, Liszt calmly sight-read from an untidy manuscript when the budding German composer paid him a visit in Weimar). Lasting more than 40 minutes, it is symphonic in bottom-to-top use of the keyboard as well as its emotional scope.

Les Violons du Roy venture far and often from their historical core of baroque and classical repertoire. On Friday the Quebec City squad opened its Montreal operations (and the Bourgie Hall season) with a program of four works from the 20th century, one from the 21st and a 19th-century score that most music lovers would classify as timeless.