The Conway Hall in London has hosted chamber music concerts since it was built in 1929, and for 40 years this included a composition prize, in abeyance since the late 1970s. This has now been revived by the hall’s enterprising director of music, pianist Simon Callaghan, to help young composers post-pandemic. Sunday night saw the final concert in which the shortlisted pieces were played and the winner announced.

First came the difficult decision: whether to experience performances by great musicians whose work I already knew in the second, Exmoor-based weekend of the Two Moors Festival, or to go for enticing programmes by others whom I’d never experienced live around Dartmoor.

A gem in Edinburgh International Festival’s classical music programming has always been the Queen’s Hall series. Hosting some of the finest chamber musicians on the international stage, that venue has seen countless incredible, more intimate performances over the years.

The heading may be a bit misleading. There were no vocalists at this year’s ingeniously adapted East Neuk Festival – live events held exclusively in the big space of the Bowhouse, St Monans, to a compulsorily limited audience – and the only rain was that which pelted down on the roof of the venue during the most intimate moments of Beethoven’s D major Quartet, Op.18 No.3, with the Castalian Quartet valiantly persisting.

Seven months might just about be enough time to have digested the deep and intense offerings of the Second Ragged Music Festival before moving on to more soul-shattering and transcendence in the third. That there hasn’t been a year between the two weekends - the October one came top of my "Best of 2020" choice - is due to the fact that renovation work has already started on the hugely atmospheric and treasurable Ragged School Museum in Mile End, and the next stage will entail a long lockdown.

The Polyphonic Concert Club is a collective of musicians – including Isata Kanneh-Mason and I Fagiolini – offering recorded chamber recitals released weekly through March and April. Like the festivals of Voces8 (I reviewed their Christmas series) they are aimed at a premium market: high-quality filmed content at a significant price, here £95 for the six concerts, not far off the cost of live tickets.

Some pianists would take the chance of a birthday celebration to pioneer a solitary epic. Not the ever-collegial, unshowy, some would even say visionary Steven Osborne.

There’s an atmosphere of tender restraint through most of the programme created by Ruby Hughes and Manchester Collective for Lakeside Arts at the University of Nottingham. It was streamed live yesterday afternoon, and, as is the way with most performances just now, was in an empty hall, with its slightly strange "empty" acoustic affecting the spoken word as the artists introduced their music.

Seated at the harpsichord, Maxim Emelyanychev introduces this concert in charmingly fractured English. “Hello from Queen’s Hall in Edimbourg, today with chamber group of musicians from Scottish Chamber Orchestra…” But he falters, the camera cuts away, and there follows a mumbled digression on whether the first piece is actually by Hasse, or maybe Richter.  

Sara Deborah Struntz-Timossi is an international award-winning violinist who has toured with early music ensembles like the European Union Baroque Orchestra, Dunedin Consort and The English Concert, as well as performing across Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. She is also Artistic Director of the Spirit of Music Festival that brings music right into her east Hampshire community.