One reason among many to be jolly about the classical music scene recently has been the bright future of Mozart conducting. Its greatest exponent, Sir Charles Mackerras, left us halfway through last year, but then came two Don Giovannis of precocious assurance from Jakub Hrůša at Glyndebourne and Robin Ticciati in Scotland. Yesterday evening's needs-must situation deprived us of a visit from the Aurora Orchestra's honorary patron, Sir Colin Davis - whose infection, we were glad to hear, was nothing serious - but I, for one, wanted to hear how this dazzling young ensemble's principal conductor and artistic director Nicholas Collon would fare in his master's shoes.

One reason among many to be jolly about the classical music scene recently has been the bright future of Mozart conducting. Its greatest exponent, Sir Charles Mackerras, left us halfway through last year, but then came two Don Giovannis of precocious assurance from Jakub Hrůša at Glyndebourne and Robin Ticciati in Scotland. Yesterday evening's needs-must situation deprived us of a visit from the Aurora Orchestra's honorary patron, Sir Colin Davis - whose infection, we were glad to hear, was nothing serious - but I, for one, wanted to hear how this dazzling young ensemble's principal conductor and artistic director Nicholas Collon would fare in his master's shoes.

Perhaps it was the effect of the elaborately mosaicked and marbled stage of the Wigmore Hall, but when a black-clad Thomas Zehetmair stepped out last night to occupy this space with just his violin and Bach for company, the image was incongruous. Even devotees of the hall will surely acknowledge the fussiness of its aesthetic appeal, the lingering visual excesses of a bygone age making it as unlikely a setting for Zehetmair’s deconstructed style as for the sharp architectural edges of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Yet host them it did, and in a characteristically uncompromising performance, Zehetmair managed to bring his comfortably sat audience along with him into an altogether less warm and secure place.

An entire evening of Schumann for two would usually cue singer and piano. Not that the majority of Lieder specialists, blessed as naughty Anna Russell once saw it "with tremendous artistry but no voice", could hold the spell for that long. Julia Fischer is one of the half-dozen violinists in the world with the greatest artistry, a golden "voice" and a habit of choosing partners like Martin Helmchen, very much on her level. The only trouble is that Schumann songs can capture a world in 90 minutes, while the three lateish sonatas run a more limited if quirky gamut.

Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.

It’s not often that a serious musician goes into the recording studio to play requests. But as the closest that classical music strays to The X Factor (unless you count Paul Potts), Nicola Benedetti has a different kind of relationship with audiences. At the age of 23, several years into a professional career which began at 17 with a hugely popular victory in the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition, Nicola Benedetti has released a CD which lacks an agenda or a slant. There’s no new work, no transcriptions or retrieving unknown bits and pieces from dusty archives.

The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well, old hat - like a man rapidly losing his edge.

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.

Eleven years is a long time when you're launching young talent on the world. Since 1999, BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists have gone forth and multiplied. All the "graduates" have outstanding careers, and among them some of the names which will be most familiar with music lovers include trumpeter Alison Balsom, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and three of the world's most successful string quartets (Belcea, Jerusalem and Pavel Haas).

"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?