Middle-period Mahler can be hair-raising enough under normal circumstances. In this performance of the Fifth Symphony, the angst and intensity dials had been turned up to 11. Every orchestral colour shone with greater intensity, and each change in dynamics registered with piercing clarity. Which could only mean that this year's freshly reconstituted National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain were giving their first concert of the season.

When you're young, you think that liking Elgar is a habit you'll grow into later in life, like buying a set of golf clubs or following The Archers in detail. As I shuffle into middle age, I find that I'm beginning to love this music more and more. I've given up making excuses to younger, hipper friends. Richard Farnes' intense account of Elgar's disconcerting Second Symphony was a great performance, one in which intense dynamism served to accentuate the score's lingering, fin de siècle nostalgia.

Newcomers to this ongoing Ring cycle would be wrong to imagine that a series of semi-staged concert performances represent a downsizing, a half-hearted stab at Wagner production. The decision to perform the operas in Leeds’s vast Town Hall was made in part for practical reasons, namely that the Grand Theatre’s orchestra pit is too small to accommodate the large forces required. One or two minor niggles aside, Opera North’s approach has been a consistent triumph.

Staging Britten’s third opera in the round in a small performance space of the Howard Assembly Room makes complete sense. Albert Herring’s supporting cast of village grotesques are that little bit more oppressive when they’re singing yards away from your face. The effect is nicely claustrophobic too – after this, you somehow can’t imagine seeing this opera in a conventionally-sized opera house. And it means the audience get close to the great Dame Josephine Barstow, who as Lady Billows will be a draw for many.

Holst? Yes. Britten? Maybe. But John Adams? Programming Adams’ Guide to Strange Places as the extended opener in this National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain concert made complete sense after a few minutes; conductor John Wilson’s strengths as an interpreter of Hollywood film scores and British light music made him ideally suited to unpick the thornier metrical complexities of the Adams work. Wilson’s beat is disarmingly precise, every gear change spelt out with refreshing precision.

Ah, Goth. It’s a difficult genre to take in any way seriously unless you’re feeling under-appreciated while going through puberty. Then again, like heavy metal, maybe it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, more an enjoyably melodramatic way of roaring angst at the universe through fantasy metaphor. Officers probably couldn’t give a damn one way or the other and almost certainly wouldn’t welcome the term – but that’s what their music is entirely run through with, and rather fine it is too.

Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells always feels like a valedictory late work, a composer’s eloquent, melancholy adieu both to pre-revolutionary Russia and to the fulsome late-romantic style which had served him so well. Happily, Rachmaninov’s career didn’t finish in 1913, and his last few decades in exile resulted, sporadically, in some stunning pieces – the Paganini Rhapsody and the Symphonic Dances among them.

And so, after 30 years, Chumbawamba are no more. Leeds’s finest issued an eloquent statement on their website back in July, confessing that “the rest of our lives got in the way and we couldn’t commit the time and enthusiasm that the band demanded… being already involved in the stuff of life that wasn’t the band.” Many musicians keep going to embarrassing effect long past their sell-by dates, but this lot are still brilliantly accomplished performers – witty, energetic, engaging and sublimely musical, with a capella harmonies which make the hairs on your neck tingle.

It’s not easy bringing the Mississippi delta to Leeds city centre – yet here its hanging moss and tea-coloured waters fill out every inch of the expansive Quarry stage. Indeed, all that’s missing from Francis O’Connor’s remarkable set is a hungry alligator or two, though in the drama for which it provides a backdrop – Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about death, desire and deceit – the human characters are capable of inflicting quite enough damage on themselves.

Charm, politeness and glittering repartee are clearly not considered important qualities for the Yorkshire-based policepersons who work alongside DCI Banks. TV coppers are rarely a barrel of laughs but for this bunch, spitting, snarling and glaring are their default modes of communication. Banks himself, played by Stephen Tompkinson as though he's lugging an invisible York Minster around on his shoulders, has assembled his characterisation of the doleful detective from a mixture of gloom, depression and disgruntlement.