Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari has never quite been a one-work composer. No points for knowing the fizzy overture to his delightful 1909 pro-smoking comedy Il segreto di Susanna; quite a few more if you know the whole opera. Extra credit for being able to hum the once popular "Serenata" from I gioielli della Madonna: but move on to his major operas – L’amore medico, say, or I quatro rusteghi – and we’re definitely into specialist territory.

“Who says Mozart is not like Rossini?” remarked Juan Diego Flórez, about a quarter of an hour into his debut recital at Symphony Hall. “There are seven high Cs in this aria.” And with a flicker of notes from the pianist Vincenzo Scalera, he was off into "Vado incontro", from Mitridate by the 14-year old Mozart. He wasn’t joking, either.

Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.

Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.

Bruckner’s Third Symphony doesn’t so much begin as become audible. A steady heartbeat in the bass, oscillating violas lit from within by clarinets, and in the middle, slowly pulling clear of the texture, the proud, sombre trumpet motif to which Wagner himself agreed to attach his name.

Edward Gardner gives the downbeat, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra bursts into Verdi’s great opening guffaw. Enter stage left Graham Clark, as Dr Caius. Enter stage right Ambrogio Maestri, as Falstaff. And before a note has been sung, the audience is laughing. I know that in the post-Dumpygate era we’re not supposed to discuss a singer’s physical appearance. It’s just that everything about Maestri – his stature, his gait, his rolling eyes, his genial manner and his big rubbery smile – suggests that he was born to play the Fat Knight. He simply is Falstaff.

Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay.

It’s not that there’s anything lacking in the writing quality on Ms Mvula’s second album (or third if you include her powerful orchestral revisiting of Sing To The Moon), it’s just that its overall effect becomes a little wearying after a while. It’s the production that’s the problem. The wall of voices that partly constitutes this Birmingham lass's signature sound is for much of the time so awash with reverb that the ear longs to escape the cavernous space being artificially simulated.

I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.

“Our Shakespeare” is the name of the CBSO’s current season. They're making the same point that Ben Elton makes slightly less subtly in Upstart Crow: that Shakespeare was basically a Brummie. And by implication, that four centuries of musical Bardolatory, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Verdi’s Falstaff, is all on some level Made in Birmingham. Falstaff, conducted by Edward Gardner, is coming next month; the usual Shakespearean warhorses (Prokofiev, Walton, Tchaikovsky) have already been despatched.