National feeling – in music, as anywhere else – depends on choice, not blood. This BBC Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican to mark the centenary of Poland’s rebirth as a nation never felt remotely like a feast of aural jingoism.

The Italian pianist Federico Colli, 30, best known so far as winner of the 2012 Leeds International Piano Competition, last night arrived for his Wigmore Hall debut sporting an emerald-green cravat, but the sonic colours he magicked out of the piano quickly put its gleam in the shade. He is an artist developing at an impressive rate, and one of whom I think we’ll be hearing a great deal more in years ahead.

The latest instalment of the Americana ’18 series at St John’s Smith Square last Friday saw the Dmitri Ensemble and conductor Graham Ross present a survey of American minimalist music for string ensemble. In a brilliantly conceived programme, the ensemble found fresh energy and propulsion in these classic works, but also a subtlety and humanity in a style that can be mechanistic.

Sir Mark Elder’s first concert in the Hallé Thursday series for 2018-19 was on clearly mapped Hallé territory – Richard Strauss and Elgar. They have a reputation, and a tradition, of playing these composers’ music very well. They’ve already recorded Elgar's Second Symphony and, judging by the microphones around the platform, they’re doing the same right now with Strauss’s Don Quixote.

Presenting the last Mozart symphonies as a three-act opera for orchestra, as Richard Tognetti and his febrile fellow Australians did on Monday, was always going to be a supreme challenge. It worked, as Boyd Tonkin reported here. Since then, the Barbican's grandiosely-named "International Associate Ensemble" has opened up the repertoire, synchronising with film (on Tuesday) and ending its mini-residency with the kind of vibrant rattlebag for which it's rightly celebrated.

Here it comes - get a grip. The tears have started flowing in the trio "Quid sum miser" and 12 minutes later, as the tenor embarks on his "Ingemisco" solo, you have to stop the shakes turning into noisy sobbing. The composer then lets you off the hook for a bit, but only transcendent beauty in singing and playing can achieve quite this effect in Verdi's Requiem.

Think Glastonbury, not Salzburg. It struck me at Milton Court last night that the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s ebullient, rock’n’roll Mozart would go down a storm at the sort of music festival renowned for canvas more than canapes.

Kings Place takes a broad and "curated" approach to season programming, and events often have to fit into very nebulous and abstract themes. This concert by the London Sinfonietta was part of a strand called "Time Unwrapped" and sought to explore the role of time in music.

You can always depend on Handel to turn verbal dross into musical gold. The chasm between lumbering doggerel and soaring sound can seldom have yawned wider, though, that in several numbers from the third, English version of The Triumph of Time and Truth. “Melancholy is a folly, Wave all sorrow until tomorrow,” poor Mhairi Lawson had to sing, like some game trouper in a village panto scripted by the vicar after one too many cream sherries.

Single adjectives by way of description always sell masterpieces short, and especially the ambiguous symphonies forged in blood, sweat and tears during the Stalin years. The Barbican's advance blurb hit one aspect of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony - "startlingly buoyant" - and another in Prokofiev's Sixth - "contemplative".