This greatest of symphonies starts with what’s plausibly described as arrhythmia of the heart, so it shouldn’t have been surprising to find my own racing as Vladimir Jurowski drove a line through the peaks, troughs and convalescences of its massive first movement. There were more shocks to the system throughout, but all of them came from an interpretation so staggeringly well prepared that every texture sounded newly conceived.

Manchester Collective’s string orchestra programme, opening last night at the Royal Northern College of Music and touring to the South Bank, Leeds and Liverpool, is notable chiefly for the world premiere of will o wisp, by Oliver Leith, a remarkable piece of writing for the medium.

GoldMund, Anna Veit: Mehr Oder Weniger Lametta – arrangements of Tchaikovsky, Bach, Humperdinck, Martin Luther, John Rutter (Solo Musica)

There is no mistaking Christian Gerhaher. His voice is a light, agile baritone, and it is utterly distinctive. He is a very verbal singer, and is as happy delivering his lines in a toneless parlando as he is full voice. But when he does increase the colour, a burnished, slightly nasal tone appears, rich but still light. Emotions are always controlled, and the passion will often build gradually but steadily.

There are conductors, and then again there are choral conductors. I sang under David Willcocks in Tallis’s 40-part "Spem in alium" and remember vividly that long-armed semaphoring that he later applied so notably with the Bach Choir.

The elation in the queue was palpable as people stood laughing and chatting in the November cold waiting for the doors of the Jazz Café to open for the latest crowd-funded event organised by Through the Noise. This 13th Noisenight – which brings major classical soloists to nightclubs – was a chance to see Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Harry Baker at a key moment in Through the Noise’s history, the start of its first national tour.  

Half a century ago, Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time felt inescapable. For a youth-choir singer in the London of that period, his wartime “modern oratorio” supplied a reference-point of ambition and achievement to which our exasperated elders always seemed eager to refer – and to defer.

Later, if it never quite vanished, Tippett’s epic updating of the sound-world of Messiah and the Bach Passions to dramatise 20th-century tyranny, persecution and revolt slipped into relative neglect.

This collaboration between two young and exciting ensembles, the choir Sansara and the United Strings of Europe, had its heart in a good place.

If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.

A dream pairing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and early-keyboard wizard Kristian Bezuidenhout marked St Cecilia’s Day at the Wigmore Hall with a programme that celebrated music made not in the Black Forest but beside the Thames.