Mary Chapin Carpenter lives these days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she sits at the kitchen table in her farmhouse and writes songs. “I have a couple of cats and dogs and I’m the hermit who lives down the road,” she explained to a capacity audience at the Barbican as she returned alone, just her and a guitar, for a final encore of “I Have a Need for Solitude”.

Insistence was the name of the LA Phil's first game in its short but ambitious three-day Barbican residency - insistence honed to a perfect sheen and focus, but wearing, for this listener at least, some way in to the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony played in the second half.

In the 27 years since he first conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Sir Simon Rattle has steadily integrated its moodswings and high contrasts into a reading of a piece which now feels more than ever like the work of a man engaged in a form of symphonic stock-taking – before, in the Tenth, setting out on bold new paths.

Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the composer and puritanically regarded as the end of the line by supposed Mahlerians. Not Simon Rattle.

With the eyes of musical fashion turned relentlessly on the calculating stage works of chilly alchemist George Benjamin, hopes ran high for a brighter spark in a new opera by his contemporary Mark-Anthony Turnage.

When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart.

It was the work with which Handel conquered London, the Italian opera that finally wooed a suspicious English audience to the charms of Dr Johnson’s “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Three hundred years later, neither Rinaldo nor London’s audience has changed much.

Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice.

“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects.

One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? No spoilers here, but this new production at Guildhall School (a very different one from that staged in 2011) sticks to a tone which is calm, and humane.