Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's loose-limbed three-part Andersen homage has long floated in a limbo somewhere below the more curvaceous forms of Dvořák's Rusalka and Sibelius's The Oceanides, and not just because of unfavourable historical circumstances (the composer withdrew the work after its 1905 premiere, and it did not resurface until 1984).

Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.

A legend on the operatic stage, Sir John Tomlinson (CBE) has sung with all the major British opera companies, made countless recordings, and for sixteen years was a fixture at Bayreuth, where he performed leading roles in each of Wagner's epic works. Throughout his career he has worked regularly with English National Opera and with The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where in 2008 he created the title role in Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur.

What do visiting German performers add to the Edinburgh International Festival's Auld (Scotland-France) Alliance thread? Simple: when they communicate as superbly as soprano Diana Damrau and Jonathan Nott's Bambergers, the music-making works at the highest level. The fact that Damrau enlisted French harpist Xavier de Maistre for one of the most singular song recitals I've ever heard, and that the symphony concert set Messiaenic pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its centre, simply gave us more for our money in a cavalcade of light to illuminate the grey tail-end of the festival.

Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of London's most atmospheric venue and the even more intangible visions of twins Timothy and Stephan Quay. Their film around Bartók's Solo Violin Sonata, though defying intellectual analysis and easy correspondence with the musical ideas, is pure choreographic poetry.

The world tour that the Proms offer this year touches down in no more fascinating musical country than Hungary, with three of its great composers, Liszt, Bartók and Kodály brought into the Albert Hall last night by the ever-stimulating Vladimir Jurowski with his hot gypsy band, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

It was partly as penance for having missed the previous evening's Czech festival that I arena-prommed for last night's Moravian finale, to be happily strafed by the nine extra trumpets of Janáček's Sinfonietta.

It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience to consider it within a rather different narrative; in lieu of an arc of Germanic development, moving from Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Jurowski instead framed it with Hungarian works from Bartók and Ligeti. While the dialogue between these three exploratory pieces may have been more oblique, Jurowski’s highly coloured reading of the Mahler remained briskly direct.

"You have to start somewhere," remarked Debussy drily at the 1910 premiere of young Stravinsky's Firebird ballet. Even so, that was far more of a somewhere than the ultra-nationalistic Hungarian tone poem Kossuth, first major orchestral flourish of Béla Bartók, the Russian's senior by one year. In choosing it to launch Infernal Dance, the Philharmonia's 2011 celebration not of Stravinsky (as the title weirdly implies) but Bartók, principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen showed how far his main Magyar travelled to works like the hyper-percussive First Piano Concerto and the ballet-pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, a work strident and fresh enough to serve as potential soundtrack to the so-called life of a latter-day wreck like Anna Nicole Smith.

Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas.