Fans of the Leeds International Piano Competition argue that this triennial event, now in its 49^th year, has done more to raise the city’s profile than any other local institution. Supporters of Leeds United would doubtless disagree, but Dame Fanny Waterman’s long-running contest has grown into an influential, internationally renowned affair. Dame Janet Baker awards the prizes. Lang Lang is now the competition’s Global Ambassador along with Honorary Ambassador Aung San Suu Kyi. Waterman, now an improbably spritely 91, is still very much in control of proceedings.

Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd Bird comprises three classics from the Parker canon – the title track, “Donna Lee” and “Now's the Time” – plus six compositions from Bates.

What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing rhythms, in which the translucent, crystalline playing of the American found and told multiple stories.

In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands, the Blue Nile's ravishing sound-pictures generally came in widescreen; Mid Air may be a more intimate, art house affair, but it is no less affecting.

To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George Osborne dreams of. This culminated in the Night Train EP which not only contained guitars but managed the improbable feat of mixing in rap in a non-embarrassing way. Artistically, things were looking good.

Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of the most colourfully explosive playing I've heard for ages. 

Oh boy. More Schubert. Deep breath. I had flashbacks of last month's wall-to-wall Franzi on BBC Radio Three. Nothing's come closer to ending my lifelong love affair with the tubby Austrian than the endless stream of half-finished three-part drinking songs that seemed to become the mainstay of that week-long celebration. Thankfully, last night at the Royal Festival Hall, we weren't getting any old Schubert. We were getting the great final trio of piano sonatas. And it wasn't just any old pianist performing them.

Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. 

De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)

Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal Festival Hall for a recital featuring both composers, each on either side of the interval. Pollini also brought his Steinway-Fabbrini touring piano – a Steinway from the Hamburg factory, titivated inside with extra refinements by the piano technician Angelo Fabbrini.