Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.

Their record label describes them rather laboriously as “a Baroque super-group of four superstar Baroque instrumentalists”, but the Retrospect Trio don’t need any fancy titles to prove their quality. Bringing together violinists Sophie Gent and Matthew Truscott (leader of the OAE) and Jonathan Manson on bass viol (principal cello of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) under the direction of young harpsichordist Matthew Halls, this ensemble is all about unshowy musicianship. Joined last night by soprano Julia Doyle they offered up some of the best Purcell London is likely to see this year – with performances from Mark Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia, not to mention Scholl, Jaroussky and Ensemble Artaserse still fresh in the ears, that’s saying something.

This is the second Sunday in a month that I've sat in the Wigmore Hall and been plunged into an evening of ferocious concentration from the very first bars. Mid-January saw violinist Leonidas Kavakos and his phenomenal pianist Enrico Pace carving out the grim memorial that is Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, ultimately softened by radiant Schubert. Last night Kavakos's peer Thomas Zehetmair accented the lead in late Beethoven, and since only Shostakovich's last quartet followed, this time there was to be no more human gilding of a very alien lily.

We are spoiled for choral choice in Britain. With the likes of The Sixteen, The King’s Singers, Polyphony and I Fagiolini just the start of the roster of talent, and an amateur choral scene of serious heft, the temptation is to look no further than the Channel for our choral kicks. Such is the growing presence of the Baltic nations however (and particularly Estonia, with its greatest musical champion, Arvo Pärt), that this rival tradition is increasingly making its presence felt. Greatest among a nation of choirs is unquestionably the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, who last night took us on a tour of their musical heritage.

According to the wit of either Dallapiccola or Stravinsky (history is divided), Vivaldi was responsible for writing not 600 concertos, but the same concerto 600 times. It’s a joke that has lingered stubbornly in the popular imagination. Had the concerto in question been one of the Four Seasons or indeed one from L’Estro Armonico I don’t think anyone would be objecting; it’s the workaday Vivaldi, those throwaway concertos composed with his eyes on his purse and his mind on his dinner that have so diluted his reputation. Doing their best to set the record straight, erstwhile Vivaldi champions La Serenissima last night presented a programme comprised solely of concertos.

No doubt about it, Leonidas Kavakos is one of the world's top 10 live-wire violinists. But here in London he seems to have sold himself a bit short recently with a less than great concerto repertoire (Korngold, Szymanowski's Second). Korngold furnished a springy intermezzo in last night's blockbuster recital, Szymanowski a ravishing second encore, but I went to hear two giddying masterpieces, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata and Schubert's Fantasy in C. If unknown quantity Enrico Pace could manage to play Richter to Kavakos's David Oistrakh, it might turn out to be awe-inspiring. He did, so it was.

Who was a greater composer of words: Schubert or Purcell? A toss-up, I think, after a revelatory concert at the Wigmore Hall by Les Talens Lyriques with the French soprano Sandrine Piau on Saturday. The sheer quality of the poetry Purcell set in his Harmonia Sacra, collections of “divine hymns and dialogues”, is both profound and emotionally direct: “Lord, what is man?”, “In the black, dismal dungeon of despair”, “Music, for a while”...