It was melody versus the machine last night as Sakari Oramo’s six voyages around the Nielsen symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra hit the high noon of the 1920s. The fallout from the First World War found three composers scarred but fighting fit. Prokofiev seemed less than his essential insouciant self in a Third Piano Concerto of more than usual bizarreries, and it was twice through the human meat grinder for the Viennese of Ravel’s La Valse and his Spanish proletarians in Boléro.

Ives: Symphonies nos 1 and 2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)

Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Shock and Shakespeare were the two forces that powered a typically thoughtful programme from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I said as much in a pre-performance talk where the links weren’t hard to find: that also means coming clean at the start about my involvement. But the world needs to know about this one.

A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.

The question with Moscow City Ballet is: should I judge them on what they are, or on what they claim to be? The touring company, a self-supporting private enterprise, takes productions of classic ballets (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake et al) round provincial theatres in this and a few other countries. By the standards of pure classical ballet, the product they peddle is decidedly second-, if not third-rate: the dancers come from the fringes of the classical scene in Russia and the Ukraine and the choreography is simple, and even then often poorly executed.

In one way, it makes sense to give your London comeback concert in the venue where you made your European debut 44 years ago. Yet the Royal Festival Hall is a mighty big place for a violin-and-piano recital. Kyung Wha Chung had no problem nearly filling it last night with an audience including whole Korean families, but might have wished she hadn’t in the ailment-ridden dead of winter; her look could have killed a coughing child ("go and get a glass of water" is what I think I heard her say, from my very distant seat).

The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow Pages and a prolific composer of much else besides. But why this piece? There’s a bit of a connection with  “Strawberry Fields Forever”, that iconic Beatles single, and his piece Tahiti was released on CD and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit Ensemble 10/10.

It’s one of the ironies of life and art that Prokofiev’s tenderest and most romantic opera was composed at a time when he was abandoning his wife in favour of a Moscow literature student half his age. Betrothal in a Monastery is a setting in Russian of an opera libretto by Sheridan about the attempt of a Spanish grandee to marry off his young daughter to an elderly fish merchant. Like most comic operas, and some not so comic, it’s set in Seville; the wife Prokofiev was walking out on was Spanish.