Sunlit golden mean or slightly hazy middle-of-the-road? Conductor-director Iván Fischer's fully costumed and imagined concert of The Magic Flute - or perhaps it would better have been titled Die ZauberFlute given its intelligent mix of sung German and English dialogue taken by six excellent young British-based actors - was always going to be hard pressed to match the recent, hyper-communicative English National Opera/Complicite revival.

Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.

Dave Gorman was probably the first comic to have embraced technology in his stand-up. Albeit, in the early days, it was using 35mm slides, hand-drawn graphs and an overhead projector, but then latterly a computer and the ever-more influential Internet and social media. And so, as is a feature at all his shows, there's a large screen on stage when I see him at the Royal Festival Hall and when he says: “I've put it on a graph” there's a loud cheer of recognition from the audience.

The memories were flooding back last night. Daniel Barenboim's speech after the concert, lasting about a quarter of an hour, contained vivid recollections of his first appearance on that stage in 1956 as a 13-year-old (playing the Mozart A major Concerto with the RPO and Josef Krips). There was a welling-up of emotion as he summoned back memories of the RFH stage from his time living in London: “I remember Jacqueline...Barbirolli.” And a decade with the English Chamber Orchestra.

How, exactly, are you supposed to review a Keith Jarrett concert – solo, completely improvised, just one man and his Steinway, audience on all sides, ushers walking up and down the aisles bearing signs forbidding any record of the evening's music?

Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre is back for its third year with a raft of concerts and events, and for Friday night Senegal's Orchestra Baobab returned to the UK for the first time in three years, one of the great names of the post-independence African renaissance. They were joined by a young French-Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy (pictured below), who was coming to London for the first time with his debut album Ako.

One man and his piano can occasionally fulfil a role more satisfying than the finest orchestra in full sail. The last of Daniel Barenboim's four-recital traversal of Schubert's piano sonatas proved just such an occasion. Since the first concert last week, perhaps all the ingredients had settled in a five-way exchange, with artist, piano, audience, hall and music each coming to terms with all of the others and finding a new modus vivendi.

Personality is essential for Schubert’s piano sonatas. Listen to two recordings of the same one and you could easily think they are different works, such is the performer's input. Daniel Barenboim would therefore seem ideal. He’s a huge personality – he even has his own name emblazoned in large gold letters on the lid of his piano: a personality verging on a cult. But it’s not quite right for this music.

It’s not often that you arrive for a piano recital to see members of the audience on the stage, clustering around the instrument and taking photos of it. Those curious about the newly unveiled, straight-strung Barenboim-Maene concert grand (the name above the keyboard is simply BARENBOIM) were periodically ushered away from it; it was closed and reopened several times before it was time for the maestro himself to take control.

Frank Loesser seems to be known in Britain for one show and one show only, which seems a shame given that the composer-lyricist of Guys and Dolls has a CV that includes the ravishing The Most Happy Fella and his 1962 Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was last seen locally a decade ago at Chichester but remains unproduced in London since, well, whenever.