The Borodin Quartet has been playing for over 70 years, and in the early days collaborated closely with Dmitri Shostakovich. None of the players from then are in the line-up now, of course, but the group has worked hard to maintain its distinctive identity and performance traditions, even as the players change. And they have a good claim to continuity: Valentin Berlinsky, the legendary cellist who was with the quartet almost from the start, was still playing with them up until 2007.

American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton has a wonderful, characterful voice, with apparently effortless and even tone production and control. She seems to be able to spin out a quiet phrase – and just hold it for ever.

For a BBC Radio 3 lunchtime's hour of music, cellist Steven Isserlis's latest collaboration with that most individual of pianists Olli Mustonen went astonishingly deep. The surprises were equal in its two halves - the first a through-conceived programme of shortish late Schumann pieces plus a Schumann homage composed by Mustonen the composer for Isserlis and poetically embedded in the sequence; the second an interpretation of Prokofiev's late Sonata for Cello and Piano which scotched with high, focused drama the usual claims that this is a light and simple work.

Papa Haydn might have been tickled to see his early intermezzo, La Canterina, pack out the Wigmore Hall on a Monday night. A night for connoisseurs, then, but Classical Opera has form when it comes to refreshing classical repertoire with the elixir of vocal youth. And with a line-up boasting Susanna Hurrell, Rachel Kelly, Kitty Whately and Robert Murray, this was no exception.

Medieval to Modern – Jeremy Denk’s Wigmore Hall recital took us on a whistle-stop tour of Western music, beginning with Machaut in the mid-14th century and ending with Ligeti at the end of the 20th. The programme was made up of 25 short works, each by a different composer and arranged in broadly chronological order, resulting in a series of startling contrasts, but punctuated with equally surprising, and often very revealing, continuities.

They dreamed the impossible dream in 1970, turning aspects of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha. But Purcell, Eccles and the lively dramatist Thomas D'Urfey - anyone know his hit song "The Fart"? - got there first nearly 300 years earlier when the Knight of the Woeful Countenance trod the boards at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal in a seven-hour entertainment.

Happy returns of various kinds last night at the Wigmore Hall, where hall regulars the Brook Street Band (violins Rachel Harris and Farran Scott, cellist Tatty Theo and harpsichordist Carolyn Gibley) took to the stage along with a number of musical friends for a 20th birthday celebration concert. An all-Handel programme paid tribute to the composer whose London address gives the group its name, expanding outwards from the opening intimacy of trio sonatas and suites to finish with soprano and baritone cantata Apollo e Dafne.

If you needed further proof of the intelligence, the thoughtfulness of Daniil Trifonov’s musicianship, the programme for his four-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall would go a long way towards providing it. How many young soloists of Trifonov’s standing would choose to turn song-accompanist for an evening of lieder? And how many, having done so, would deliver so generous and self-effacing a performance?

This programme looked like a non-starter on paper, a long sequence of short Bartók dance settings, followed by a second half that was dominated by works for children from Bartók and Kurtág. But it worked, largely thanks to Cédric Tiberghien’s conviction in these short works and his ability to make imposing and decisive statements with a minimum of musical material.

A quick plot summary might be required here, because how this programme of Schubert, Pergolesi and Webern came into being was far from obvious. Two young soloists, one a violinist in her late twenties, one a singer in her early thirties, both born in Swabia (part of Bavaria), share the same agent and wanted to do a project together. So they are currently on an eight-date concert tour of five European countries. Their company for this journey is a team including some of the elite and most experienced European players of chamber music. And the consequences were...