“Sero sed serio”: so runs the Salisbury family motto on the carved coat-of-arms in the lavishly panelled and painted Marble Hall of Hatfield House. “Late, but in earnest”. The first adjective certainly doesn’t apply to any member of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, five of whom performed in the Hall for one of the centrepiece events of the 13th Hatfield House Music Festival.

We vividly remember the image of Martin Lovett, the cellist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet, bursting out laughing. He tells his favourite true travel story.

 After boarding a plane, the Amadeus Quartet has taken its seats and Martin is just about to strap his cello into the seat next to him when a fellow traveller approaches him. Oh no, marvels the inquisitive man, there's a whole string quartet on board. "How many are there in a string quartet?" comes the sudden question. Martin answers spontaneously and with deep conviction: "Five!".

“Saint-Saëns: The Renaissance Man” proclaimed the big screen at the first remarkable programme I attended within the 2024 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival. The same epithet could be applied to this year’s curator, Steven Isserlis, so remarkable a cellist that one forgets until coming face to face with his other talents what a unique speaker and programmer he is.

Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/her/their generation”. From my side, I’m allowed to use it occasionally: surely Timothy Ridout is the finest viola-player of his generation, and last night he struck sparks off four other artists at the top of their game: violinists Maria Włoszczowska and Tim Crawford, fellow viola-player Ting-Ru Lai and cellist Tim Posner

All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign for ever and ever. Those very words as set by Handel in his “Hallelujah” Chorus were treated fugally by Mendelssohn in the coruscating finale of his Octet, and as part of her own homage in the Partita for String Octet, Sally Beamish approached them very differently. Her ethereal fugue deserves immortality, too.

Towards the end of his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann deploys a cogent expression: “chasing history, before it disappears”.

Continuing the relationship with choreographer Örjan Andersson – who choreographed their landmark project Goldberg Variations – Scottish Ensemble gave the first of their latest movement-inspired performance, Impulse: Music in Motion in Glasgow on Friday evening.

It was chance that the National Concert Hall’s weekend of quartet events featuring responses to war and refugees should coincide with the second anniversary of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine. By late Saturday morning thousands of Ukrainians and friends had processed beneath our windows on Merrion Square with the usual array of flags and heartfelt banners; at 2.30pm we were listening to a Syrian poet’s words about devastation and displacement as set to music by Jonathan Dove.

Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made a lot of sense to programme it alongside the first piano quartets of those other composers. A “supergroup” of brilliant young soloists came together as an ensemble as tight as any that plays together every day, and made a committed case for each piece.

Sometimes all the stars align in musical performance. There’s no soprano more alive to the expression of musical joy and rapture than Louise Alder, no composer more levitational in his strange later adventures than Fauré, no instrumentalists strings better than pianist Joseph Middleton, the Doric String Quartet and double-bass player Laurène Durantel at being supernatural companions throughout his song-cycle La bonne chanson.