2014 is the 250^th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s baroque giant and maverick. To say that the UK celebrations have been muted is to put in generously, reconfirming a national trend that has long sidelined this repertoire in favour of more familiar Italian and German contemporaries. So it was especially good to see the Wigmore Hall full for an anniversary concert from instrumental ensemble Les Paladins and soprano Sandrine Piau.

French soprano Sandrine Piau, born in 1965 in a south-western suburb of Paris, has an agile, supple voice. It soars, so critics reach readily for all those bird metaphors: nightingale, sparrow, "she leaves the earth on wings of song" and so on. She has worked regularly with more or less the entire pantheon of baroque and early music specialists: William Christie, René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Christophe Rousset, Emmanuelle Haïm, Sigiswald Kuijken, Gustav Leonhardt, Ivor Bolton, Ton Koopman, Marc Minkowski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

For the first night of its 114th season, the dear old Wiggy welcomed back its regulars after the summer break. A starry occasion like this recital by Joyce DiDonato and Sir Antonio Pappano gets booked out virtually exclusively by those patrons and members, so it was an evening with a lot of air-kissing and greeting across the familiar rows of red seats. 

No man is a prophet in his own land – except possibly the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski. In the UK he shot to fame upon winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001 and at home he has become a national hero, his efforts rebooting the country’s classical music scene and inspiring the building of a new full-scale concert hall in Skopje – even though he is still a mere 35. He is also celebrated there as a popular songwriter. That, though, is a strand he left outside the Wigmore Hall, offering a programme that contained as much dark introspection as it did extroversion.

The mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender, who will be 75 on Thursday 3 July, was unsurpassed for dramatic impact and presence in roles such as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, during a singing career which spanned from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s.

Her command of the long lines of Mahler's songs, and the immediacy and understanding she brought to Lieder generally placed her in the very top flight of interpreters alongside Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier and Christa Ludwig.

Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. 

The rapid rise of Dutch baritone Henk Neven is easy to explain. He is blessed with instant charm and the voice, still attractively youthful in his late 30s, emerges full-toned from his slight frame with a faint, fast vibrato that lends it a distinctive tang. The Neven sound is sturdy rather than flexible, which may help explain why the first half of his Wigmore Hall recital was more satisfying than the second.

Under what circumstances can Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the most (over)played of the 15, sound both as harrowing as it possibly can be and absolutely fresh? Well, the context helps: hearing it at the breaking heart of the fourth concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle gave it extra resonance with the works on either side of it. But above all this is a team that plays with a degree of nuance, weight, beauty and commitment that I’ve never heard even the composer’s preferred foursome, the Borodin Quartet, surpass either live or in their numerous recordings.

For those of us who’d held fast to the generalisation that Michael Tippett went awry after 1962, it seemed emblematic that pianist Steven Osborne and the Heath Quartet were never to meet in a concert of two halves. After all, didn’t Tippett’s music split and splinter into a thousand, often iridescent atoms after his second opera, King Priam? Its satellite piece, the Second Piano Sonata, seems to sit restlessly, and quite deliberately, on the fault line.

Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.