As Steven Isserlis announced just before the final work, in more senses than one, of a five-day revelation, the 79 year old Fauré’s last letter told his wife that “at the moment I am well, very well, despite the little bout of fatigue which is caused by the end of the Quartet. I am happy with everything, and I should like everyone to be happy all around me, and everywhere”.

Earlier this year, Steven Isserlis curated a revelatory Sheffield Chamber Music Festival spotlighting Saint-Saëns, with plentiful Fauré towards the end. Now it’s the younger composer’s turn, marking his death 100 years ago on 4 November 1924, but his mentor has more than a look-in over five concerts featuring six bright stars, "Team Fauré".

"I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness... I wish my music could show as much diversity." Gabriel Fauré, who wrote those words and is indisputably one of the greatest of French composers, died 100 years ago, on 4 November 1924. His avowed aim was to elevate his listeners “as far as possible above what is.”

Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf earlier this year, posturing moodily as an Italian film director. The London Handel Festival’s specially commissioned Aci by the River seemed to have found the ideal form in which to explore this tale of thwarted desire for modern audiences; a dark tale of #MeToo woe in an alienated urban setting.

Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.

Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.

Wonders never ceased in Elisabeth Leonskaja’s return to the Wigmore Hall. Not only did she play Schubert’s last three sonatas with all repeats and the full range of a unique power undiminished in a 78-year old alongside a never too overstated pathos, radiance and delicacy; just before receiving the Wigmore Hall Medal (presentation by John Gilhooly pictured below), she also gave us more revelations in the compressed world of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19.

If Angela Hewitt’s recital last night at the Wigmore Hall was a meal, it would have been two light, fresh – but nourishing – courses, followed by a big suetty pudding, splendidly cooked but sitting slightly heavy on the stomach.

All five finalists in the Leeds International Piano Competition, at which Pavel Kolesnikov was one of the jurors, should have been given tickets, transport and accommodation to hear his Wigmore recital the evening after the prizegiving. Not that supreme imagination can be taught, but to witness the degree of physical ease (and freeflowing concert wear) that allows all the miracles to happen would be a good lesson to so many tension-racked pianists, including some of Kolesnikov’s peers.

A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first half by rising to the challenge of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” - a title he suggests, in his series of first-rate online essays about the sonatas, might be replaced more appropriately with “Titanic”?