To compose a masterpiece in your teens is rare enough; to choose the most elaborate form in chamber music, an octet for eight strings, ensures a peculiar kind of immortality. George Enescu, a still-underestimated genius described by protege Yehudi Menuhin as "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician...I have ever experienced", thought in complicated and unique ways at 19, leaving to posterity a difficult and elusive work.

The Chineke! Orchestra has won golden opinions for its ground-breaking work and musical achievement, and Manchester caught up to the extent of a visit from the eight-person Chineke! Ensemble to the Royal Northern College of Music.

To demonstrate what makes chamber masterpieces tick and then to play them, brilliantly, is a sequence which ought to happen more often. Perhaps too many musicians think their eloquence is confined to their instruments. Not violinist Simon Blendis and pianist William Howard of the Schubert Ensemble.

Two works whose whole significance depends on (unspoken) sacred texts made a stimulating combination for a concert in Manchester Cathedral’s sacred space. Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross – usually heard in its string quartet version – is an instrumental version of Christ's words from the Gospels’ descriptions of the Passion.

The opening of a new concert hall offers two options for opinionizing: the venue itself – or the performances in it? Review the acoustics – or the music? It has to be a mixture of the two, in the end. Chetham’s School of Music, in Manchester, has just celebrated (and seen opened by HRH Prince Edward) its £8.7m Stoller Hall – a state-of-the-art, 482-seat performance venue in the heart of Manchester, right next to Victoria Station.

Revelations in the classical year never stop coming. Even the week before Christmas yielded two performances as good as you're going to get: the sheer effervescence and light-flourishing of Lucy Crowe in ecstatic Bach and Mozart with La Nuova Musica, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Haydn's C major Cello Concerto. So any sifting of 2016's musical riches needs to put the truly one-off packages at the top of the list.

John Adams, let's face it, was the reason many of us came to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Their performances and recordings as dedicatees of his labyrinthine First String Quartet and Absolute Jest, in which the four players function as soloist with orchestra, led to high hopes for the UK premiere of a second quartet. As it turned out, the yield was smaller beer than expected. What really hit home, for those of us who don't spend as much time as we should with the first and most varied quartet canon in the literature, was an early Haydn masterpiece.

"Total immersion", the term used for the BBC Symphony's one-composer days, takes on a whole new meaning in the Thames Tunnel Shaft now transformed – but fortunately not subject to makeover – under the mantle of Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum. All the more so with the pioneering Modulus Quartet, who presented the mostly consonant music of six collaborative composers with the main lights out, shifting colours on the performing space and films either to accompany three of the works or to let the creators speak in short, unpretentious introductions.

More than just a great and serious pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes is a Mensch. His special gift in recent years has been to bring young musicians just establishing their careers together with star players like himself in beautiful and/or interesting places. I feel privileged to have heard him and his juniors in a programme of rare Sibelius melodramas in Bergen, Kurtág and Liszt in the main room of Grieg's humble home at Troldhaugen, and two shared recitals linked to the revelatory exhibition of little-known Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

All the best festivals develop organically, with a guiding hand from the best directors. When I first came to the East Neuk Festival two years ago, on its 10th anniversary, it was already a special case, thriving on the spirit of place and including an all-day Schubertiad from top international artists, many of whom were returning because they loved this special peninsula of the Fife coast so much.