For so many days a year, Cheltenham's Regency symmetry and conservative values totter and buckle as they veer dangerously towards relative festive liberalism. As I sliced into one of the four annual beanfeasts, the Cheltenham Music Festival, it struck me how well lopsided, sometimes painful bendings of a classical framework by Schumann and Brahms sat with a battery of volatile percussion celebrating Steve Reich's 75th birthday. Even the adventure served up by trebles over in Norman and medieval Tewkesbury glimpsed a beast in the jungle.

It takes a lot to humanise the hideous late-Victorian glitter of Drapers' Hall, but the City of London Festival's latest cornucopia knew how. Ornithologist-composer David Lumsdaine's soundscape greeted us with Australian birds fluttering invisibly around Corinthian gilt. Then it was down to business with the Nash Ensemble's small band of personable generals. They gave us high-toned Grieg and Dvořák, cheerful homespun songs with sophisticated twists by Grainger, Vaughan Williams and Delius to make the austere central portrait of Victoria inwardly smile, and a jungly new Sextet by Brett Dean, core composer of the festival's Antipodean theme.

Ghosts legendary and personal dog the nostalgic footsteps of Elgar's utterly characteristic late Piano Quintet - though who knew the old man had as much red blood in him as last night's world-class team managed to squeeze out? And circumstantial ghosts have often niggled during the little portion of the Wigmore Hall's century-and-a-decade history I've witnessed, namely the spectre of sweltering at the back behind rows of nodding heads seemingly as old as the hall itself. But there are also the noble spirits of great performances, and heaven knows this sedate old venue has seen a few of those. I've already heard one such this year, and yesterday provided another.

The Wigmore Hall was full to capacity last night, its crowd gathered to pay homage to a great musician at the end of his career, and to discover the talents of a great musician at the very beginning of his. While Alfred Deller might have been the pioneer, breaking ground and awakening audiences to new possibilities, it was in the hands of James Bowman that the countertenor voice was revealed as more than an oddity or novelty, a thing of uniquely expressive and vulnerable beauty. Sharing his farewell recital with young Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, Bowman offered us an evening which both gazed nostalgically back and looked ahead to the exciting future of early music.

Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.

Their record label describes them rather laboriously as “a Baroque super-group of four superstar Baroque instrumentalists”, but the Retrospect Trio don’t need any fancy titles to prove their quality. Bringing together violinists Sophie Gent and Matthew Truscott (leader of the OAE) and Jonathan Manson on bass viol (principal cello of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) under the direction of young harpsichordist Matthew Halls, this ensemble is all about unshowy musicianship. Joined last night by soprano Julia Doyle they offered up some of the best Purcell London is likely to see this year – with performances from Mark Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia, not to mention Scholl, Jaroussky and Ensemble Artaserse still fresh in the ears, that’s saying something.

This is the second Sunday in a month that I've sat in the Wigmore Hall and been plunged into an evening of ferocious concentration from the very first bars. Mid-January saw violinist Leonidas Kavakos and his phenomenal pianist Enrico Pace carving out the grim memorial that is Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, ultimately softened by radiant Schubert. Last night Kavakos's peer Thomas Zehetmair accented the lead in late Beethoven, and since only Shostakovich's last quartet followed, this time there was to be no more human gilding of a very alien lily.