With Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden in for Esa Pekka Salonen on this week’s subscription concerts, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra dusted off two war horses of symphonic virtuosity Saturday night at Symphony Center.

Violinist Christian Tetzlaff ripped into the Brahms Violin Concerto, its juicy double-stops ringing in octaves through the hall.  Though his tone weakened in the middle range, Tetzlaff danced in the upper register; the orchestra’s rich string passages kept the soloist grounded.  The middle adagio is a palette cleanser, almost lost between towering bookend movements.  The melody, introduced by Eugene Izotov’s oboe, is a lullaby not unlike that other famous Brahms tune.  Hardly soothing the audience to sleep, Tetzlaff turned inward with playing that sang, albeit intimately.  Galloping into the finale, Tetzlaff shrugged off every finger-twisting lick with ease, and drove the orchestra to a triumphant conclusion.

The Merit School’s Gottlieb Hall was the perfect setting for Sunday’s performance of the Avalon String Quartet; the intimate space cradled the Avalon’s lush and dynamic readings of three late works of Romantic giants.

The Quartet began with Schubert’s "Quartettsatz" in C minor, a single movement distillation of all the agitation, sweetness, and tension that the composer was capable of writing.  The Avalon employed aggressive and sensitive playing equally; the Quartet’s cohesion was quickly evident.

A palpable energy buzzed through the Orchestra Hall lobby Thursday night as a lively crowd gathered to see Hubbard Street Dance Chicago perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conductor Carlos Kalmar.  Strangely enough, the orchestra occupied the stage for all but twenty minutes of the dance-themed, two-hour concert.

Three dances from Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo opened the concert with strumming strings, emulating a Spanish guitar.  The violins buzzed with a fury of staccato in “Dance of Terror,” while Eugene Izotov’s subtle oboe sounded particularly mysterious as it chased the horn in “Dance of the Game of Love.”  The “Ritual Fire Dance” sent even more energy through the captivated audience leading up to Hubbard.  That energy, though, was diminished while the front half of the stage was cleared in a mini intermission, detaching Falla from the rest of the concert.

Guitarist brothers Sérgio and Odair Assad seem to turn up in every big-name, cross-cultural musical collaboration these days; one look at their two-page bio confirms their versatility and popularity.  The Brazilian-born strummers of Lebanese descent explored their musical heritage in a new collaborative program, De Volta As Raizes (Back to Our Roots) at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall Thursday evening.

The Assads began the program with music by Astor Piazzolla, the great Argentinean tango fusionist, to establish the evening’s theme.  The music to follow would not be pure folk music of Brazil or Lebanon, but compositions inspired by the mingling of both traditions in northeastern Brazil, reflecting the blend of Arab populations and dynamic Brazilian ethnic makeup at the end of the 19th Century when the Assad’s grandfather arrived from Lebanon.