It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.

Let's begin at the end. Isn't the nuns-to-the-scaffold scene which concludes Poulenc's ultimate testament of doubt and faith the deepest, most heart-wrenching finale in all opera? It even has the edge over Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier trio and duet, in that the singers often end up in tears as well as the audience. If my eyes were dry at the end of the Guildhall School's valiant staging, that's not because the production lacked the necessary clarity, imagination and motion, nor was it due to any dearth of good voices. But clearly something wasn't quite right.

Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.

Forked lightning glimpsed through an aeroplane window, a silken dancer spilling stars in a snow-filled sky, a dragon tattoo etched on a man’s back: we’ve grown to expect seductive alchemy of images from the work of Quebecois master of visual theatre Robert Lepage, and in his latest show he doesn’t disappoint.

It is probably a worrying sign when the computer games of your youth become the historical butt of a conceptual art joke. Digital artist Cory Arcangel, who appropriates video-game technology, repurposes and redesigns it, has installed 14 10-pin bowling computer games in the Barbican's Curve gallery, and if you remember the earliest, an Atari, you're almost certainly as obsolescent as it is.

As a world music critic one gets used to the stream of superlatives that generally arrive in the wake of whatever big new act is being plugged. World music promoters have a particularly hard job because they don’t just want to preach to the converted; they also want to try to get some new listeners to widen their musical horizons a little. So even before I’d heard a note of the Creole Choir of Cuba I knew that they’d gone down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival, that Jools Holland’s producer wanted them for Later..., and that they were booked to do various BBC radio sessions.

Joan Wasser, who operates under the name of Joan As Police Woman, has probably seen all sorts in her time, having played with Antony Hegarty and Rufus Wainwright and dated the late Jeff Buckley. But even she was thrown by an inappropriate comment from the stalls at the Barbican last night. "Show us your tits" is the sort of thing female comedians in working men’s clubs, not soulful, passionate musicians in concert halls, have to put up with.

As Mahler symphonies rain down from heaven - or flare up from hell, according to your viewpoint - in this second anniversary year, it's wise to choose carefully. But why earmark Jiří Bělohlávek's performance of the Sixth above the likes of Gergiev, Dudamel, Jurowski or Maazel? Because he's been working his way through the cycle with his BBC orchestra at the careful rate of one a year; because he knows what space to give, and what colours to draw; and above all, because he refuses to batter our hearts too fiercely too soon - crucial for the most insistent tragic chapter in Mahler's symphonic chronicle.

Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.