You may well ask whether theartsdesk hasn’t already exhausted all there is to say about Glyndebourne’s most celebrated Britten production of recent years. I gave it a more cautious welcome than most on its first airing, troubled a little by the literalism of Michael Grandage’s production and the defects in all three principal roles.

Her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, Mariame Clément grumbles in the Glyndebourne programme that Don Pasquale “poses no specific ‘conceptual’ challenge” to the opera director. Sighs of relief all round. Donizetti’s final comic masterpiece turns out to be “about” nothing but its own subtly nuanced retelling of the stock tale of the old buffer who plans to marry his ward, nephew’s sweetheart, or some such, but is outwitted by her with the help of a smart confederate.

Vladimir Jurowski deemed this the most challenging of any programme in the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival and proceeded to tell us precisely why. That his little preamble lasted almost twice as long as the first piece - Webern’s Variations for Orchestra Op.30 - was an indicator of just how scientific the thinking behind his programme was. Jurowski instinctively understands how and why works impact on each other in the way they do.

Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together.

The Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival has reached the American leg of its year-long tour through 20^th century music, and with it safe musical ground. In the second of three concerts with the LPO, American conductor Marin Alsop showcased the two equally appealing sides of America’s musical history: its cleanly-scrubbed, western classical face in Copland and Ives, and the grubbier, jazz-infused gestures of Joplin and Gershwin.

We’re still in the foothills of the Southbank Centre’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, but already the harmonic ground is becoming unsteady underfoot. Last weekend saw the gemütlichkeit of Johann Strauss give way to the brutality of Richard Strauss, exposed us to the moistly chromatic flesh of Salome that lies behind the seven veils, and showed just a hint of Schoenbergian ankle. So surely this weekend’s return to 1900 and Elgar’s choral-society-stalwart The Dream of Gerontius is something of a retreat?

With the cuts still to bite deep, it's enterprising business as usual for both of London’s biggest concert-hall complexes and their satellite orchestras in the newly announced season to come. I use the word "complex" carefully, because as from September, the Barbican Centre, which already has access to LSO St Luke's up the road, will also be using the 608-seater hall constructed as part of its neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court development.

This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20^th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.

Why so much of Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO on theartsdesk, you may ask, when other concerts pass unremarked? The answer is simple: quite apart from the immaculate preparation and the most elegant conducting style in the business, Jurowski programmes with an imagination matched by none of London’s other principal conductors – unless you like lots of Szymanowski served up by Gergiev with lumpy Brahms – and, more important, always finds connections.

Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)