The Japanese dance public is overwhelmingly female, so it’s not surprising that Pina Bausch’s paean to Saitama, Ten Chi, is so girly. The fourth in the series of “World Cities” that’s sold out London’s two great dance centres, the Barbican and Sadler’s Wells, this late Bausch (2004) is pregnant with wish-fulfilment, gorgeous young men doing sexy things like watching while women bathe or disrobe, while a vast, muscular whale’s tail plunges erotically into the earth and soft plucking music washes through the darkness.

“This is such fun”. Martin Horntveth, Jaga Jazzist’s drummer, can’t contain his excitement. Standing up behind his kit, he radiates joy. Considering that he and his band are Norwegian, typically not given to overstatement, what he describes as fun would be off the pleasure scale by non-Nordic standards. The meeting of Jaga Jazzist and The Britten Sinfonia was an unqualified success, one of those rare one-off concerts where band and their temporary collaborators seamlessly connect.

Many people will be having their first taste of the late Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre in this copious London retrospective of 10 of her “World City” productions; others will have bought into several of the series, possibly by now wondering how many hours they can take of her barbed view of men and women. For all of us, reading programme notes is beside the point; the background you need is what’s inside you, your memories, your songs, your susceptibilities.

What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing rhythms, in which the translucent, crystalline playing of the American found and told multiple stories.

Right, notebooks out everyone. Michael Tilson Thomas began this Berg/Mahler double-header with a lengthy analysis of what we were about to hear in the former’s Chamber Concerto. Whether it was informative or not (and it was), it was a bit of a spoiler. It was nice to know exactly which themes are attributed to which dedicatee, but you couldn’t help but feel the surprises in the work have been somewhat spiked by this little lecture. Still, selected LSO folk and the effective duo of Yefim Bronfman on piano and Gil Shaham on violin were on hand to try and surprise us anyway.

“You're a wasted face, you're a sad-eyed lie, you're a holocaust.” The devastation of Big Star’s “Holocaust” manifested the mood of the album it was recorded for, which was supposed to be the Memphis band’s third. Last night celebrated this classic musical evocation of fragmentation. Capturing that on stage was a tall order. Playing the songs along with a string section reading from sheet music could never be as spontaneous as the chaotic, booze-fuelled sessions that birthed what became Third.

The last night Haitink conducted at the Royal Opera House as musical director the staff wheeled on a moped as a leaving present. Ever since, his conducting has been inextricably linked to that mode of transport in my head. With Haitink, music-making has always seemed to be about getting from A to B in the most dependable, unfussy and often uninspiring way possible. For years, I haven't been able to see the point of him at all.

“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.

I half expected to hear someone on the platform call out “Is there a doctor in the house?” For Mariss Jansons, principal conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and esteemed beyond measure, didn’t look well during this concert, the second in the orchestra’s current Barbican residency. Drained from his exertions during Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, he left the platform weary and grey. The following interval was seriously extended.

Einstein on the Beach was meant to be one of the jewels in the crown for the Cultural Olympiad. The celebrated 1970s collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs - which Susan Sontag claimed to be one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the 20th century - was receiving its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre last night, thirty-six years after it was first created. And what we got was a technical shambles.