An all-British programme – with plenty of Italian flavours – opened to a sold-out Barbican Hall with the overture In the South (Alassio), composed by Elgar during a stay on the Italian Riviera. It isn’t one of his most memorable scores, but it still provides plenty of interest with typical Elgarian exuberance, an unexpected martial episode (imagining the Roman army), and a muted viola solo. It flits from scene to scene like a holiday scrapbook, and Antonio Pappano handled the fluid tempo and dynamic changes with aplomb.

As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).

There were, it seemed, enough trumpets to serve Gabriel throughout eternity - and, as fanfares go, this one was stretching a point and then some.

The first half of this concert was quite the family affair: Martinů’s Concerto for Two Pianos featuring the eternally youthful Katia and Marielle Labèque, with the latter’s husband Semyon Bychkov conducting.

You really think they’d have learned by now. Any operatic vow to sacrifice the next living creature you see in return for salvation will reliably end up with the luckless suppliant faced with their lover/son/spouse. For those who haven’t already learned this handy lesson from Mozart’s Idomeneo, there’s Handel’s Jephtha. Its skeletal (and frankly rather daft) plot matters little, however. It’s the scaffolding for some of the composer’s most glorious oratorio writing, which last night was given the full (and often equally glorious) Sixteen treatment.

Last night’s Mozart and Haydn concert at the Barbican was billed as Magdalena Kožená with Les Violons du Roy. In practice it actually turned out to be Les Violons du Roy with Magdalena Kožená, which (barring a few die-hard fans of the Czech mezzo) was surely preferable for all concerned.

Now this is what I call an orchestra showing off: you unleash four of your horns on the most insanely difficult yet joyous of sinfoniettas for accompanied horn quartet, Schumann’s Konzertstück, and later let the other four light the brightest of candles on the enormous, rainbow-dyed cake of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. How they battled it out between them for who did what I can't imagine, but both groups covered themselves with glory.

Although worlds away from festive mangers and mince pies, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s pre-Christmas offering spread good cheer aplenty thanks to an absorbing programme of Austro-German repertoire that explored the outer reaches of Romanticism without ever quite leaving its orbit. The about-to-be-born Second Viennese School would circle a different sun from the one at the centre of Edward Gardner’s sumptuous programme – a lure that would soon draw in both Berg and Webern (though never Richard Strauss), but not quite yet.

She has been called “Africa’s greatest diva” but as DJ Nihal giving the award of Artist of the Year at this year’s Songlines Awards to Angélique Kidjo pointed out the word “diva” is a loaded one, and makes you think of Mariah Carey’s backstage tantrums. Not that there’s aren’t African divas – the imperious Oumou Sangare, for one, but Kidjo is more known her down-to-earth pragmatism and idealism.

For seasonal fare that’s also profound, few pre-Christmas weekends in London can ever have been richer than this one. Hearts battered by John Adams’ nativity oratorio El Niño last night, one hoped for more soothing medicine this afternoon in the naïve and sentimental music of Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, first performed some 145 years earlier.