Returning to LSO St Luke’s, formerly a beacon in the darkness of semi-lockdown for the lucky few allowed to feast upon the London Symphony Orchestra from the gallery, felt the same, yet different, like so much since most of the rules were relaxed. Players were now closer together, sharing stands; the sound felt denser too (it’s bound to be loud in such a space, however handsome).

I’ve always loved the sound of two-piano music: the amazing range of available textures, the interplay of parts and the sense of collaboration between soloists.

As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously.

The joint enterprise of soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Manchester Camerata, in recording publicly all Mozart’s piano concertos alongside his opera overtures – with the project theme “Mozart, made in Manchester” – was rudely interrupted after 2019 by you-know-what. 

First came the difficult decision: whether to experience performances by great musicians whose work I already knew in the second, Exmoor-based weekend of the Two Moors Festival, or to go for enticing programmes by others whom I’d never experienced live around Dartmoor.

This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.

Two suns, two moons, two Philharmonia leaders sharing a front desk, two aspirational giants among Richard Strauss's symphonic poems bringing the number of players, in the second half, to 134. Who’d have thought we’d be witnessing such phenomena when, contrary to what the orchestra’s CEO claimed at the start and the unmasked half of a packed audience seemed to think, we haven’t even reached the “post-Covid era”.

Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night.

Christian Gerhaher and a string ensemble led by Isabelle Faust presented here a programme of works with a nocturnal theme. Gerhaher’s voice is an instrument of husky shadings and dark hues, so the night theme seemed wholly appropriate.

Is there any composer alive who writes more luminously bittersweet elegies than Mark-Anthony Turnage? Taking key lines from memorialising poets through the ages as inspiration, he knows that instrumental phrases must sing, sometimes to invisible words, as well as dance if they’re to pierce the heart.