Not a lot of swooning goes on at the Wigmore Hall. Nor does it seem the kind of institution to endorse rapturous wailing, beating of the breast, or the throwing of either flowers or underwear. All of which leaves one with the problem of how to respond appropriately to a concert such as last night’s by Richard Egarr and countertenor Iestyn Davies. Decorous applause doesn’t quite seem to cut it when faced with such a joyous abundance of talent, and I’d have endured any amount of plague and/or restrictive corsetry for an authentic 18th-century atmosphere in which to experience this ecstatic evening of music.

Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will change the musical landscape of Britain forever.

The egos and rivalries of the great castrati – of Senesino, Carestini, Farinelli – are legendary. Too few arias, too unheroic a role, or just too little virtuosity (Handel’s beautiful “Verdi prati” was almost lost to us when Senesino rejected its simplicity) were all cause enough for a tantrum. How times have changed. Collaborating for their new Purcell project, superstar countertenors Andreas Scholl and Philippe Jaroussky are trading jealousy for duets, and proving that you really can never have too much of a good thing.

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”...

Visits from the pick of Europe’s Baroque orchestras – Concerto Köln, Europa Galante, Le Concert d’Astree, Les Musiciens du Louvre – are a blissfully frequent occurrence in London, an alternative and supplement to our own ever-growing roster of period talent. A tour by a North American ensemble is, by contrast, something of a rarity, and I can’t have been alone last night in hearing the much-lauded Apollo's Fire (otherwise known as the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra) live for the first time. “Hearing”, however, rather fails to encompass the visually charged, minutely stage-managed musical theatrics on display from Jeannette Sorrell and her irrepressible team of musicians.

We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for three great Baroque tenors (no prizes for guessing what the title of the album is – do you think EMI would pass up an opportunity like that?), and by the end appeared a little more comfortable than at what was a rather tentative start.

There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.

There’s something about Handel opera that provokes even the most stolid of directors to flights of fancy. If it’s not water tanks, balls rolling across the stage or a set constructed largely of pot plants, it’s a chorus of dancing sheep. The broad-shouldered solidity of Handel’s structures can carry a lot of experimentation, and if David Alden’s Baroque, Orientalist fantasy of a Radamisto in no way overpowers its material, it says more about the quality of the music than the delicacy of Alden’s own creation. Big, colourful and allusive, the production is a muddle, but strangely bewitching for all that.