A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.

The Southbank’s artistic director Jude Kelly was out in force at this penultimate weekend of The Rest is Noise festival, delivering little triumphalist, Ryan Air-like fanfares, reminding us how pioneering they had been to programme composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Philip Glass - composers who no one had ever heard of before they'd bravely decided to put them on.

On Wednesday I will strap on a guitar and take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the opening night of this year's Alchemy Festival. I am the musical director and happy accompanist to a line-up of spectacularly talented musicians, all with roots in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. As I write, visas are being stamped and air tickets finalised for 11 musicians flying in from India and Pakistan. I am part of the London contingent: Susheela Raman (pictured below right), whose concert this is, is a Tamil Londoner.

The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert - a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier - took a while to draw attention from the farthest reaches of this unfriendly recital space.

At the beginning of last night's show, Herbie Hancock looked like he was going to perform with the dignity and serenity befitting a 72-year-old with some 50 years playing experience. The improvisation that launched from a base of Wayne Shorter's “Footprints” was elegant, charming, tasteful and often very beautiful. The synthetic instrumental loops that he triggered via a couple of iPads mounted on his grand piano as backing were unobtrusive to begin with and had a delightfully loose groove.

Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.

Diamanda Galas is a woman who once wrote a book called Sh*t of God and whose avant-garde screeching on subjects like AIDS and schizophrenia frequently takes gothic into an area where it could scare bats. Her CV includes stints as a research scientist, prostitute and drug addict. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t normally seen in context. But then there aren’t many line-ups quite like Antony Hegerty’s 2012 Meltdown, where for a month dissident singers rub shoulders with twilight artists.

There comes a point in almost every great soprano’s career when she tells the world that Tosca, the Marschallin or Isolde be damned: what she wanted to sing all along was The Great American Songbook. This announcement tends to be made - how shall I put this? - later rather than sooner. In Jessye Norman’s defence, in 1987, just five years after her landmark, ultra-luscious recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, she recorded a disc of Gershwin, Richard Rodgers et al.

Low don’t really look as though they’re given to ostentatious display. With their black shirts, polished footwear and sensible haircuts, they could be waiting staff in a formal restaurant. One with a lot of dark wood and banquettes. The Hendrix-like squall that preceded last night’s set opener “Nothing But Heart” quickly subsided. These flashes are enough to show how intensely Low’s hidden fires burn.

The Southbank Centre has announced that musician/visual artist Antony  will be curating the 19th Meltdown Festival this August. The avant-garde performer and lead singer with Mercury Award-winning Antony and the Johnsons follows in the footsteps of previous directors including Jarvis Cocker, Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Ornette Coleman, David Bowie and, most recently, Ray Davies.