Alfred Brendel’s death earlier this month came as a shock, but it wasn’t unexpected. His health had gradually deteriorated over the last year or so, and I was fortunate to see him just a few days before he died. I visited him for one of our regular film nights – evenings when we’d eat dinner together, prepared by his partner Maria, and then watch a movie. On this occasion we’d decided to take in the recently-made German documentary about Leni Riefenstahl.

Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.

To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections.

This charmingly eloquent semi-autobiographical show – which first played at the Bush Theatre in 2022 – tells the story of a girl whose life growing up in a council flat is transformed by the arrival of an upright piano. Lylah – like the show’s creator, Anoushka Lucas – is the daughter of an Anglo-Indian father and a French Cameroonian mother, and her subtle, often humorous, exploration of her racial identity becomes intertwined with who she is as a musician.

It was a daring idea to mark Ravel’s 150th birthday year with a single concert packing in all his works for solo piano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet knows them by heart, has bags of charisma and energy, so why not? I could give more than one reason, but the main problem was that while Bavouzet perfectly embodied Scarbo, the monster-Puck of Gaspard de la nuit, and other nocturnal flitters, he seemed careless with Undine and her watery companions, of which there were many.

William Byrd, Arnold Schoenberg and their respective acolytes go cheek by jowl, crash into one another, soothe, infuriate and shine in their very different ways This is all in a typical programme of pianist, conductor, composer and all-round pioneer Karim Said, and last night in the studio of Leighton House, it nearly all worked (when it didn’t, that was the nature of the beast, not the pianist).

“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events offer parallel visions, intended in the case of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (a shared project between the LPO and Australian dance company Circa I regret missing), not so in Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: as that masterpiece begins to be freed of its Soviet-era load, William Kentridge shackles it again on his own brilliant terms.

Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved Icelandic chart-topper had promised Beethoven’s final three sonatas for this concert. His last-minute reversion to the familiar Goldbergs – which he played on 88 occasions around the world last season after a supremely successful DG recording – had disappointed a portion of his vast fan-base.

On paper, it was a standard programme with no stars to explain how this came to be a sellout concert. But packed it was, an audience of all ages which sat with concentrated awe through the spellbinding slow movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto and went wild at the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Both works were groundbreaking at the time, sounding absolutely fresh here with the passion and precision awesomely well balanced by conductor Lio Kuokman.

Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know something about how to play Liszt’s music.