Two more contrasting pianists than Yuja Wang and Martin Helmchen would be hard to find. To move within 24 hours from the glittering assault of Wang’s technique to the restrained, almost introverted, Helmchen is an exercise in extremes, and one that left me yearning, Goldilocks-style, for a soloist neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. Dvořák’s Piano Concerto may have been a sober affair, but the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski bid farewell to their Southbank season in a blaze of Central European passion and music by Suk and Janáček.

Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of the most colourfully explosive playing I've heard for ages. 

“I don’t want to be a Cyclops,” Pierre Boulez said in 2010, faced with the prospect of conducting a Chicago concert with only one working eye. Eye troubles, alas, have continued to bedevil the octogenarian giant of contemporary music, which is why his current engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra – there’s also a tour to Paris and Brussels this week, and a second Barbican engagement next Tuesday - have fallen into the hands of a younger composer-conductor of advanced habits, the admirable Hungarian Peter Eötvös.

How incredibly heartening that this latest edition of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion, focusing on the music of the contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, sold out days in advance. Including an introduction to Pärt's music by the BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Dorian Supin's documentary film about the composer, 24 Preludes for a Fugue, a freestage event by the BBC SO Family Orchestra performing a new work inspired by Pärt's music, and three concerts, Saturday's day-long exploration provided an embarrassment of riches.

Medtner: Arabesques, Dithyrambs, Elegies and other short piano works Hamish Milne (Hyperion)

This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).

Oh boy. More Schubert. Deep breath. I had flashbacks of last month's wall-to-wall Franzi on BBC Radio Three. Nothing's come closer to ending my lifelong love affair with the tubby Austrian than the endless stream of half-finished three-part drinking songs that seemed to become the mainstay of that week-long celebration. Thankfully, last night at the Royal Festival Hall, we weren't getting any old Schubert. We were getting the great final trio of piano sonatas. And it wasn't just any old pianist performing them.

John Adams: Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)

A mischievous part of me firmly believes that from the mountain of dubious art works produced in the world since the 1980s, the most dubious of all have been the percussion concertos. I know I’m being somewhat harsh, for I’ve thrilled along with most audiences to James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – far and away the best piece ever premiered by Evelyn Glennie, instigator of this percussion avalanche. But these ears have also been witness to enough trivial and meretricious concoctions to feel at least some trepidation before the launch of another percussion world premiere.

Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year.