Leonard Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti enjoyed a relatively trouble-free gestation, at least compared to his other stage works. Its seven short scenes last around 50 minutes, Bernstein providing his own libretto and completing much of this acerbic, occasionally bitter study of a marriage in crisis whilst on his own honeymoon in 1951.

It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020.

It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair.

Mendelssohn: Symphonies 1-5, Overtures, A Midsummer Night’s Dream London Symphony Orchestra/Sir John Eliot Gardiner (LSO Live)

When the biggest laugh in Bernstein’s Candide goes to a narrator’s mention of how nationalism was sweeping through Europe, you may have a problem. Still, the Bernstein Centenary has been among the best of all possible anniversary celebrations this year and at the LSO Candide - the great man’s bonkers operetta-ish take on Voltaire, a flawed masterpiece with a succession of glorious tunes and snappy lyrics - could have been its apex. At times, it was.

If there's anyone on this godforsaken planet who is fully entitled to emote their way through a mash-up of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World”, it's Barbra Streisand, right? This, after all, is the woman who was able to deliver “Life on Mars” as a Vegas showstopper, complete with the pronunciation “from Eye-beetser to the Norfolk Broads” and make it into a thing of wonder. This is the woman who has personified camp sincerity for decades, for whom no orchestra is too big, and no crescendo too grandiose. She is, quite often, beyond good and evil, musically speaking.

Bernstein: The Complete Naxos Recordings Marin Alsop (conductor) (Naxos)

There must be something of a beauty parade going on in Liverpool now that Vasily Petrenko has called time on his tenure at Philharmonic Hall.  After all, someone will need to step into his shoes from 2021 after he departs for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was refreshing, therefore, to welcome Anu Tali to conduct the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, making her debut with the orchestra.

Bernstein: Wonderful Town Danielle de Niese, Alysha Umphress, Nathan Gunn, London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)

Crazy days are here again – many of us are lucky not to have been born when the last collectve insanity blitzed the world – and nothing in Shostakovich seems too outlandish for reality. On the other hand, there's a growing movement to liberate his symphonic arguments from rhetoric and context.