"Well, Kissin's the star of the show,"  opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on Josef Suk's Scherzo fantastique, the extended lollipop lilt of which could quickly pall in lesser hands.

Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere.

The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

As experienced Wagnerian Jiří Bělohlávek came on to launch the BBCSO's new season in mid-air with the Tristan Prelude, I wondered whether the world's finest interpreter of Isolde's serving maid Brangäne, lustrous mezzo Sarah Connolly, was waiting to up her game, and her range, and tackle the Liebestod. Sadly not: that remained, as often in concert, Music Minus One. Connolly was there for a different kind of game-upping - a noble attempt to enter the charmed circle that's developed around the memory of the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with husband Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.

This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and his dauntless band of Philharmonia players have been wrestling with heroes. After a celebration of Wagner's Tristan, the legend-making shifted further north last night. Here was Sibelius first as the plain-singing, well-loved bard of Finnish endurance and then as the startlingly original creator of a musical alter ego in the shape of mythical adventurer Lemminkäinen. Salonen's edge-of-seat interpretation made two things startlingly clear: that the four movements of the misnamed Lemminkäinen Suite can constitute as radical a symphony as any of Sibelius's numbered seven, and that this surging orchestral tidal wave is as iconoclastic a work in its own rugged way as Wagner's opera.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.

No, not some crazy remake of an Eighties soap featuring various members of the Bach family (though I wouldn’t put it past certain channel programmers to come up with the idea), but the Academy of Ancient Music’s (AAM) new series of concerts, which in a nutshell gives them the chance to perform lots of Johann Sebastian, with two bookend concerts covering the befores and the afters, as it were. Bound to get the crowds in and looks nice on the posters.

From primeval baying to a very human song in excelsis, Mahler's Third Symphony cries out for Olympian interpretation. That I've found in recent years with Abbado in Lucerne and the Albert Hall, Bělohlávek at the Barbican and Salonen on the South Bank. Since Vladimir Jurowski always demonstrates fresh thinking, and sometimes a burning intensity to match, the first performance of his London Philharmonic's new season was bound to be at least as challenging.