This recital of love songs by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, devised by the pianist Helmut Deutsch and sung by the megastar duo of soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, looked on paper like the Lieder event of the year. In practice, it left a good deal to unpick.

One of the world’s top five orchestras – sorry, but I locate them all in continental Europe – played on the second night of its London visit to a half-empty Barbican Hall. Half-full, rather, attentive and ecstatic. As for the much-criticised venue, which I’ve always been able to live with, playing as fine as this shows that you don’t need a state-of-the-art auditorium to make the most beautiful sounds.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Funny to think that I approached 2022 bored in advance with all the glib celebrations of post-WWI international modernist breakthroughs that the centenary of Ulysses and co. heralded. Yet here we are, the year only a couple of months old, standing eagerly for a national anthem in a packed concert hall. It comes in the middle of a programme that delivers not just a fervent, but a nearly ecstatic, celebration of European cultural identities in all their Romantic passion and singularity.

Hindsight is everything. In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political intrigues have suddenly taken on a far more menacing face, disbelief has been pulverised by reality – and theatre has become actuality.

Had he never written a note of his own, George Walker would still have left a record of trailblazing achievements. Born in Washington DC in 1922, he studied piano at Oberlin College and the Curtis Institute (the conservatoire that notoriously rejected Nina Simone). He was taught by Rudolf Serkin and, in 1945, debuted as a soloist first at the New York Town Hall and then, playing Rachmaninov’s third concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.

The Barbican’s Postwar Modern covers the period after World War Two when artists were struggling to respond to the horrors that had engulfed Europe and find ways of recovering from the collective trauma.

After a too-much-too-soon debut disc, Lisa Davidsen has just rolled out the gold on CD with her great fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes in songs by their compatriot Grieg.

There's something really moving about standing in the centre of London Wall's Roman ruins and looking up at the city that has grown around it. Thinking about our past, present and future simultaneously. More than 2000 years have passed since the Romans created our city, and while much has changed there's still so much consistency in how our society exists, both the beauty and the flaws. As a civilisation, how far have things really shifted?

“Am I myself?” At the tangled centre of Shakespeare’s comedy of two pairs of identical twins, servant Dromio asks the question on which everything else hangs. The delivery is exasperated, the context bantering, but the words are the flimsy door onto an existential void this early play constantly threatens to tumble into.

How can we know ourselves if others do not? Is it enough to be ourselves, or must we also enact and perform those roles? What if society casts us in another?

“Take Jazz Seriously,” wrote Maurice Ravel after his American trip in 1928. This past week of the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival has seen that advice itself being taken seriously, with a bunching of projects and premieres. Jazz musicians have been welcomed in to work with London orchestras. The fruition of months of preparatory work has been on show.