With so many of the premieres and rediscoveries of the summer opera season coming from the bel canto repertoire, it’s lovely to see Garsington Opera striking out in a different direction. Following on from last year’s L'Incoronazione di Dario (and culminating aptly next year in L’Olimpiade), the company this year offer up that exotic rarity La verità in cimento – a middle-period Vivaldi opera, behind the veil of whose unfamiliar title are hiding a harem of flashing-eyed arias and seductive orchestral writing.

The Barbican committed a grave sin last night. It forgot that people matter more than art. That their responsibility to the families of those who Jack Unterweger (the subject of John Malkovich's music drama, The Infernal Comedy) murdered trumps any interest in the dramatic potential of Unterweger's bizarre life. However constraining to the autonomy of creativity this may be, these are the rules of common decency. A portrait of Ratko Mladić that did little to show the horror of his crimes and much to convey what a loveable rogue he was would be a disgrace.

It’s not often that a performance of Purcell’s King Arthur requires its entire cast of singers to strip down to very tight Union Jack boxer shorts. It’s not often either that the audience find themselves actively encouraged to talk over the music, yet both were unexpectedly and riotously true last night at the Spitalfields Festival. Pairing Baroque big-hitters The English Concert and I Fagiolini, there was nothing half-hearted about this semi-staging of Purcell’s semi-opera. It promised much and delivered more, and while those listening live on Radio 3 might have enjoyed better textural balance, they can’t have had nearly as much fun as the sell-out crowd sweltering away in Shoreditch Church.

Strange portents – the weather is always dry and baking hot this time of year in Fes. This time it was like winter, with lashing rain and thunder for the first few days of the Fes Festival. But then things are strange in general here; events are moving fast throughout the Maghreb. The first day I was there saw a demonstration of thousands in Rabat, and a smaller one in Fes. By the last day a new constitution had been posted online, with the King renouncing some of his powers. The energy in the city seems slightly giddy with expectation and a certain optimism.

Georg Friedrich Händel of Halle probably never came here. Other great men certainly did: long after the official foundation of Göttingen's Georg August University in 1734 - the year in which the composer wrote a masterpiece, Ariodante, in another spa town, Tunbridge Wells - would-be or successful students included Goethe, Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer and Bismarck. It's hardly a Baroque town, either, though its beauties are manifold.

A tall and exceptionally striking Valkyrie of a blonde, Alison Balsom (b 1978) is the polar antithesis of a hard-drinking, slightly tubby, very male trumpeter from central casting. For the photoshoots which fetch up on her CD sleeves, and public performances such as Last Night of the Proms in 2009 and this month’s Classic Brits, she pours herself elegantly into a series of dresses in the style of a hot young violinist kidnapped by the marketing department. But there is of course a great deal more to Balsom.

The Wigmore Hall was full to capacity last night, its crowd gathered to pay homage to a great musician at the end of his career, and to discover the talents of a great musician at the very beginning of his. While Alfred Deller might have been the pioneer, breaking ground and awakening audiences to new possibilities, it was in the hands of James Bowman that the countertenor voice was revealed as more than an oddity or novelty, a thing of uniquely expressive and vulnerable beauty. Sharing his farewell recital with young Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, Bowman offered us an evening which both gazed nostalgically back and looked ahead to the exciting future of early music.

This week we review Bellérophon, a rare Baroque opera from Lully which was exhumed by Christophe Rousset and performed for the first time last year, Debussy recorded live from the Barbican, and we answer the key question: how much is too much Percy Grainger? Would, for example, 19 discs be considered sufficient?

It’s Holy Wednesday in Cuenca, and going round the corner into Cathedral Square I’m surrounded by hordes of guys in multicoloured mufti who look like the Ku Klux Klan, with unnecessarily pointy hoods. Twenty of them are carrying a heavy float with a large statue of Jesus on it. In Cuenca things are fairly austere, compared to other places where there’s a lot of self-whipping, or where, if you have sin on your conscience, you may end up banging nails into your hands, as in Mexico. Still there are alternative amusements – the Copa Del Rey final of Real Madrid v Barcelona is blaring out of bars – and it’s the 50th edition of Cuenca’s Religious Music Festival.