This weekend's classical highlights comprise an eloquent tribute to a 20th-century master, entertaining cabaret songs from Weimar-era Berlin and some sublime Bruckner choral music recorded by an Edinburgh choir.

This month, we’ve some virtuoso pianola, Bruckner and Chopin get downsized, and there’s some full-fat Mahler. Rare American orchestral works rub shoulders with Mozart, and a Russian conductor gives his final performance. A British pianist tackles Ravel, and a Danish accordion player seeks Slavic inspiration. Brass players from San Francisco take on contemporary music, and Trio Mediaeval revive 13th-century polyphony from Worcester. And a young Norwegian brings Grieg to vivid life.

Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out?

This month’s reviews have a heavy late-romantic bias: chamber music by Dvořák, fascinating and idiosyncratic Mahler from Bernstein and Tennstedt, and some superb recordings of Bruckner, Sibelius and Rachmaninov (or Rachmaninoff, as Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra prefer to call him). The more offbeat items include an eclectic piano recital, two quirky ballet scores from the Soviet Union and contemporary orchestral music from France inspired by the cosmos. As usual, click on the links to purchase these items on Amazon.

The career of Simon Russell Beale (b. 1961) needs little introduction.

Heading up this month's classical selection is a 16-CD budget box set of the complete works of Frédéric Chopin, issued to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the consumptive Pole's birth. Plus we review a rare piano concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a disc of even rarer string orchestra works by the post-war Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, a fresh coupling of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets, a new version of Bruckner's mighty Eighth from the French-Canadian wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin and two sets of historic recordings conducted by "Glorious John" Barbirolli.

We Brucknerians aren't easy to please. Few musical partnerships get the official seal of approval. Horenstein and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Wand and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic, Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic. These are among the handful of collaborations that have gained a place in my Brucknerian pantheon. Last night’s performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, however, saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra and their French-Canadian guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin catapult themselves into these exalted ranks.