The “Turning Point” in Colin Matthews’ so-named orchestral piece is a change of attitude, a sudden seriousness of purpose, a great effort of will to stop moving and take stock of where it - whatever it is - is going. That Matthews did actually stop mid-composition because, precisely as the piece tells us, he wasn’t sure he was enjoying the ride anymore is one of those extra-musical bits of information that perhaps holds the key to understanding the motivation behind it. Matthews says the piece wasn’t/isn’t about anything, that it’s an abstract and there’s an end of it.

Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas Dausgaard, and completely flummoxed when he and Jian Wang, a cellist with the biggest yet most streamlined sound I’ve ever heard, made total sense of the only overblown monster on the programme, Bloch’s "Hebraic Rhapsody" Schelomo.

Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.

Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)

Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony.

Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of the most colourfully explosive playing I've heard for ages. 

Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man in the Moon, did what she’s famous for doing. She cancelled. Acting with award-winning panache, the Barbican then found a substitute artist who’s recently become even rarer, the violinist Maxim Vengerov. 

Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.

Miserere: Choral Music by James MacMillan The Sixteen/Christophers (Choro)

At last, a bag of sweets! In earlier concerts from Vladimir Jurowski’s LPO series Prokofiev: Man of the People? much time was spent  consuming the composer’s flat soufflés, experimental rock cakes, or the fancy dish that was really haddock. Interesting for the brain, maybe, but the diet on occasion has been hard on the stomach. Not that any of this impinged on audience numbers: the season has definitely proved Jurowski’s happy lock on the London Philharmonic’s audiences. They will follow their artistic guru and Principal Conductor almost anywhere.