Their oaky, cultured and selectively scary-wild playing seemed to cast long autumn shadows over a sparse but intent audience. This is the kind of rare programme top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his cellist sister Tanja and friends like to work on when they get time to play together. There was Haydn for starters, but not the kind of jolly curtainraiser we're usually given; Dvořák, but not the blithe American; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae, the only great quartet of the 20th century yet to be widely acclaimed as such, with strange, authentic ideas in every bar and a slow movement to match any in Beethoven's late masterpieces.

As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Cuts in state subsidy do not end quality. They improve it.

If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a tough new gift to him and the Britten Sinfonia, James MacMillan's latest teeming-with-life concerto.

Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas.

It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted protégés of El Sistema, the Venezuelan phenomenon which has launched a thousand youth-and-music projects worldwide. On that occasion the Royal Festival Hall was less than a quarter full, but we happy few all stood instantaneously for a work I'd never heard before (Estévez's Cantata Criolla, due for a comeback now).

The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well, old hat - like a man rapidly losing his edge.

Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Elgar and Delius are two geniuses who only ever composed themselves - the first drawing heavily on psychology and physiognomy, the second drenching his country visions in painful nostalgia. So it made good sense to have man and nature side by side in Sir Andrew Davis's latest enterprising concert. Oh, and there was a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society's Elgar Bursary too, though this was only "new" music by the old guard. I suspect that the BBC Symphony players could have done without Edwin Roxburgh's Concerto for Orchestra in a heavy programme, resplendently though they tackled it, and so could I.

I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double quick time lest someone from classical music pins them down for long enough to inform them how rubbish