My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the secret for years. Importantly, that includes the East Lothian audiences, who have been attending the festival in bigger numbers than ever, ensuring that the festival has sold out almost every concert in its biggest venue, St Mary’s Church, Haddington, and packed out many other smaller ones, too. 

Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of generals. This week I was able to see, and hear, exactly what that means. A few days ago, in Scotland, I marvelled at flautist Adam Walker’s agility and versatility in his outstanding performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Lammermuir Festival.

If you were a devotee of Dmitri Shostakovich whose only opportunity to attend some live performances marking this year’s 50th anniversary of his death was spending the weekend of 21 - 25 August at the Presteigne Festival, you probably wouldn’t have felt short-changed.

One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters explained during a drive to the absurdly picturesque church and castle at Crichton (fit setting for a Netflix epic, let alone a blood-soaked bel canto opera), venues and resources do set some limits to works that can be presented to the standards he demands.

My final visit to the Proms for this year was a Sunday double-header of the RPO playing Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams at 11am and an evening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gipps, Grieg and Bliss.

It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-sagas. Assume their inspiration came from Wagner’s Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. But Sibelius, Mahler and Richard Strauss took very different paths on the route to obliteration. That’s only one of many things that helps to make Hannu Lintu’s three-year exploration of Sibelius in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries so fascinating.

Manchester Camerata is enhancing its reputation for pioneering with three performances featuring Nick Martin’s new Violin Concerto, which it has commissioned, two of them in art galleries rather than conventional music venues.

Every year, the Royal Albert Hall proves complicit in the magic of the quietest utterances if, as Barenboim put it, you let the audience come to you and don’t try too hard. Pekka Kuusisto is the ultimate communicator, the ideal guide for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Stitching "classical" string music with numbers from a Sámi singer, Katarina Barruk, though, didn’t quite come off.

Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked two of Irish National Opera’s Vivaldi specials in the Linbury Theatre – one a major award winner – and the best Messiah I’ve ever heard in the Wigmore Hall. Their first Prom was pure celebration, and how they filled the Royal Albert Hall, both collectively and solo-wise, in the revised Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast.

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than seven of them this year, three on Saturdays and four on Sundays. And yet, strangely, for this programme, mainly consisting of works for concert band, it did genuinely seem like the right time of day.