Many orchestral concerts leaven two or three established classics with something new or unusual. The LSO reversed that formula at the Barbican last night, with three pieces written since 2000 offset by just one familiar item, Sibelius’s Third Symphony. The result was invigorating, challenging – and very enjoyable.

Helping to build the careers of superb young singers is what Wigmore Hall has done for decades: I still remember Olaf Bär’s debut in the hall in 1983, having won the Walther Gruner Lieder competition, and also Matthias Goerne’s in 1997.

This powerful, austere collaboration between Les Arts Florissants and the Amala Dianor Company – presented as part of Dance Umbrella – excavated all the violence, grief and transcendence of the events surrounding Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.

Manchester Camerata have had a ten-year association with composer-conductor Jack Sheen. For this short programme, one of the free Walter Carroll Lunchtime Concert series at the Martin Harris Centre in the University of Manchester, he and they created a partial re-enactment of the January 1914 inaugural concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris. To works by Stravinsky, Delage and Ravel were added two UK premieres, by Sheen himself and by Isabella Gellis. 

Dennis Russell Davies and his musicians from the Czech Republic’s second city began a UK tour last night with an enterprising programme and a large and appreciative audience in Manchester.

Freddy Kempf as piano soloist was an undoubted part of the attraction, but he was not there to play a conventional concerto but to join the bouncing Czechs in their love of jazz idioms.

Forty years ago, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was born, and I heard Handel’s Solomon in concert for the first time. Charles Mackerras’s sprightly performance convinced me it was a masterpiece. Now I’m not so sure, despite the presence of two national singing treasures, Nardus Williams and Helen Charlston, and great double choruses superbly delivered by 32 vibrant voices under the ever-reliable guidance of John Butt. 

Never mind the permutations (anything up to eight hands on the two pianos); feel the unwavering quality of the eight pianists and the 13 works, each perfect in their proper place across two and a half hours of more or less continuous music. Above all, applaud the artistic directors of the London Piano Festival, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, for choosing so unerringly how and with whom to celebrate this spectacular 10th anniversary. 

Echo Vocal Ensemble have their genesis in Genesis. Sarah Latto’s group were initially formed by a cohort of the Genesis Sixteen young artists’ programme – and she has turned them into one of the most innovative vocal groups around. The programme at Union Chapel on Sunday night was a good example of their approach, with eclectic repertoire, new commissions, improvisation, a smattering of classics – and a loose-limbed dancer adding a visual element.

One miracle of musical performance is that a work you’ve loved for years can be revealed as never before in an outstanding interpretation. That happened to me last week at the New Ross Piano Festival when 22-year-old pianist Magdalene Cho turned us upside down in Bach’s Sixth Partita. It happened again last night when Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra hit 1788 with one of the three symphonic masterpieces Mozart composed in a single summer, the 39th.

Even in the 21st century, it may not take that long for an outlandish literary experiment to jump genres and become an established musical classic. In 2008, I enthusiastically reviewed a strange, poetic, almost Beckett-like novella by the writer and music critic Paul Griffiths.

His let me tell you reconfigures the 483 words that the hapless Ophelia speaks in Hamlet into a haunting, melancholy first-person testament of love, sorrow and (in Griffiths’s version, if not Shakespeare’s) dogged survival.