Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (complete ballet) Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi, with James Ehnes (violin) (Chandos)

A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.

Exactly what constitutes “the End of Time” in Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet? Not surely “the end of days” but rather the end of measured time; music unfettered, music of the spheres, music without frontiers.

For seasonal fare that’s also profound, few pre-Christmas weekends in London can ever have been richer than this one. Hearts battered by John Adams’ nativity oratorio El Niño last night, one hoped for more soothing medicine this afternoon in the naïve and sentimental music of Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, first performed some 145 years earlier.

John Adams’ millennial conflagration of musical poems about childbirth, destruction and the divine made manifest not only served as a seasonal farewell and a transcendent epilogue to the Southbank’s year of 20^th-century music The Rest is Noise; it also stood pure and proud as a masterpiece.

It was a bright idea which, thanks to careful programming, has delivered – among other special events – two rich concerts in the Tower of London’s unexpectedly welcoming Tudor church, courtesy of the enterprising Spitalfields Music Winter Festival. Bach left behind an exquisite volume, the “Little Organ Book”, designed to contain 164 chorale preludes. He completed only 46; organist William Whitehead decided to commission composers to fill in the gaps, basing their inspirations on (hopefully) the music and/or the meaning of the words in the original chorales.

When you're young, you think that liking Elgar is a habit you'll grow into later in life, like buying a set of golf clubs or following The Archers in detail. As I shuffle into middle age, I find that I'm beginning to love this music more and more. I've given up making excuses to younger, hipper friends. Richard Farnes' intense account of Elgar's disconcerting Second Symphony was a great performance, one in which intense dynamism served to accentuate the score's lingering, fin de siècle nostalgia.

It was ironic, yet seasonal, that the BBC Philharmonic’s conductor-composer H K Gruber, who is said to be a descendant of the man who wrote “Silent Night” (Franz Xaver Gruber), should take centre stage with a rip-roaring, roof-raising percussion work that guaranteed exactly the opposite effect. At the same time Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena went back to his roots to bring us a riot of dance music – flamenco, waltz, Latin American, Malambo, Charleston and even a cowboy ballet.

Britten: Saint Nicolas, Hymn to St Cecilia, Rejoice in the Lamb Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Choir of Kings College Cambridge, Britten Sinfonia/Stephen Cleobury (Kings College)