Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of London's most atmospheric venue and the even more intangible visions of twins Timothy and Stephan Quay. Their film around Bartók's Solo Violin Sonata, though defying intellectual analysis and easy correspondence with the musical ideas, is pure choreographic poetry.

In case anybody had the bizarre notion that the Classical Brits was getting a trifle too classical, the 2011 version of the event was rebranded as the Classic Brit Awards. That would seem to open the door to almost anything - classic rock perhaps, or classic schmaltz (well, waltzmeister Andre Rieu did win Album of the Year). The night climaxed with Dame Shirley Bassey singing "Goldfinger", capping a tribute to the late John Barry, and sounding nowhere near as "classic" as she used to.

Its advertised centre of gravity, a concerto specially commissioned from affable whiz-kid Nico Muhly, turned out weightless, and not in a good way. Yet the programming of the Aurora Orchestra's latest adventure showed us why the Arts Council were right to fund this young and dynamic constellation. OK, so I'd have been happiest with a whole evening of Hindemith Kammermusik rather than one movement. But for the new generation of pick-and-mix onliners, the seven eclectic works on the bill couldn't have been more enticing, thanks to the iron fist of velvet-glove live stream presenter-conductor Nicholas Collon.

This week we’ve offbeat violin and viola duets played by a renowned husband-and-wife duo, Scarlatti keyboard sonatas played on piano, and a very Italian take on Shakespeare from one of the 20th century’s fieriest conductors.

Two hundred years ago society ladies snipped theirs and gave it the poet Byron. Indigent women cropped theirs and sold it for wigs. But never in the history of human hair has a woman put her tresses to such a unique use. A woman, unnamed, has donated her hair to the violinist David Garrett, and he has used it to string his bow.

Yehudi Menuhin's influence continues to reach out a hand to young instrumentalists. His Menuhin Violin Competition for young players under 22 is internationally known; last weekend in the Waterloo Chamber of Windsor Castle - a staggeringly picturesque setting - some exceptional violinists, violists and cellists sought the laurels at the Windsor Festival International String Competition, Britain's major professional prize for string players set up in Menuhin's honour three years ago.

It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.

In the later 19th century, violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was hailed as the most brilliant fiddler of his day, but today his name lives on via the great works that he helped to bring into the classical repertoire. Brahms dedicated his Violin Concerto to Joachim, while Bruch's First Violin Concerto was substantially revised by Joachim and became closely identified with him. Both the Schumann and Dvořák concertos were written for him, though Joachim never performed the latter.

The Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova gave birth in Moscow yesterday to a baby girl, the child of the celebrated violinist Vadim Repin. Weighing 3.1 kilograms, the baby is named Anna.

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.