Poulenc’s La voix humaine comes close, but Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle has to be the perfect lockdown opera, this heady tale of two mismatched souls stuck in a confined space (admittedly an enormous one) alarmingly pertinent.

One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20^th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces.

The magnitude of challenges that the entire classical music industry is facing due to the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented. In the twinkling of an eye, cultural life became suspended. Many of us, mostly freelancers and entrepreneurs, smaller organizations, but even employees of large orchestras across the world are now dealing with stark financial and psychological pressure.

The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau noted of 1920s Berlin that "itimes of trouble, people seek a better life in culture". But what if that culture can no longer be accessed live?

There are encores and encores – most a friendly, minimal farewell gesture from the soloist; some a jolly, festive unwind after a particularly taxing piece. And then there’s the luxury free gift that Sir András Schiff bestowed on us during the second of two Barbican concerts with Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Mozart’s piano concertos often overflow with good humour, but you seldom expect to hear a hearty chuckle from the audience in the middle of a performance of one. Yet something close to a guffaw burst out around King’s Place when soloist Tom Poster, deep into the last-movement cadenza of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, suddenly quoted Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Poster had played the Gershwin before the interval of this typically smart, eclectic and thought-provoking programme from the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

Bartók: Complete String Quartets Quatuor Diotima (Näive)

When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.

A day devoted entirely to the life and work of György Ligeti celebrated this composer’s remarkable oeuvre through a sequence programme of film, talks and concerts of his music.

How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of 1975 in the outer London suburbs where she lived. The fate of the woman born, as Magda Nussbächer, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Romania in 1924 has shadowed earlier sequences of poems by Szirtes. They dramatised, and imagined, scenes from his family history. Not until now, more than four decades after his loss, has the vast emptiness she left behind resolved into a prose memoir.