Who wouldn't wish to have been a fly on the wall during those pre-recording days when composers and their friends played piano-duet arrangements of the great orchestral works? Any notion that we don't need such reductions anymore was swept aside by Antoine Françoise and Robin Green in the fourth concert of an untrumpeted but brilliantly conceived piano-duo series matching transcriptions of 20th-century Viennese masterworks with Mozart and/or Schubert and five world premieres.

Wim Henderickx: Symphony No. 1 At the Edge of the World, Empty Mind, Groove! Royal Flemish Philharmonic/Edo de Waart and Martyn Brabbins (Royal Flemish Philharmonic)

An auspicious debut with the Royal Philharmonic for Vasily Petrenko. Just watching him conduct, it is clear that he is a natural communicator, always giving a clear, generous beat and never missing a cue. No surprise, then, that the orchestra was on his wavelength from the start last night in Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") Symphony, reflecting back all his dynamism and focus. That immediacy was balanced by careful planning on Petrenko’s part, with tempo choices finely calibrated for dramatic power and structural coherence.

I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.

"It’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony". So said William Walton of Mahler’s Third, all six movements and a hundred minutes of it. Jakub Hrůša conducted the Philharmonia last night on fine if hardly infallible form in a performance notable for its restraint in a work remarkable for the excess which raised Walton’s eyebrow.

Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)

The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.

The few ensemble lapses and moments of insecurity during the first half of this concert had nothing to do with Richard Farnes’s conducting, or with the playing of an augmented Orchestra of Opera North. It’s in rude health; Farnes has refined and deepened the orchestra’s string sound, and the winds and brass are world-class.

Four years ago, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic embarked on a two-year project to play all the Mahler symphonic works over a couple of seasons. It was an ambitious project but it was one which, then, had hall staff dusting down the House Full signs and the queues for returns forming well before the first note was due to played.

Performances of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony are rare, at least in Scotland. The programme note for this series of concerts by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra records that the orchestra’s only previous performance was in 1978. Those I spoke to in the audience in the Usher Hall could not recall a performance by Scotland’s other symphony orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (or SNO as it was previously), since way before that.