It only takes a few great Lieder by Schumann and Liszt to show the kinds of songs Wagner didn’t, or couldn’t, write. Very well, so the rarities in this programme were whimsies he composed in his youth, but even the Wesendonck Lieder, sole voice-and-piano masterpieces of his maturity, don’t show much concern for the little details of humanity. Fortunately Janice Watson rose to great form to show us what, quite apart from the two "studies" for Tristan und Isolde, their opulent generalities are all about.

This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20^th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.

Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Classical albums are seldom biographical, but Insomnia turned out to be a much more personal journey than I first realised. In the summer of 2010, I was a prize winner in the Ernst Haefliger Competition in Bern, Switzerland. Part of the award was a debut recital in the Lucerne International Festival the following year. The festival theme for 2011 was “Nacht”. That’s it; one tiny word that encompasses so much.

There was a lovely narrative to last night's CBSO concert. The muggy oppressiveness of Britten's Four Sea Interludes (and Passacaglia) appeared somehow explained by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, then dissolved by the love letters that were the Strauss songs and then finally set free - psychologically and orchestrally - in Debussy's La Mer. Parallel to this, the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was being washed out to sea; his Mahler and Strauss songs were being lapped at from both directions by Debussy and Britten's portraits of the salty waters. 

Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside Anne Schwanewilms, the German soprano who shines in Strauss and should be an example to any singer for ease, charm and what to do with the hands in the exposed light of song recital.

The career of acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge (b 1964) has taken a somewhat unusual trajectory. He was reading for a PhD on witchcraft at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before he decided to turn his hobby of singing into his profession, despite not having any formal musical training – he has admitted that he probably picked up several bad habits singing along to records of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

The last time I saw Wolfgang Holzmair in concert (at last year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, delivering one of the finest live performances of Winterreise I have heard) the silence that followed the cycle lasted almost 30 seconds – an absolute age where a fidgety post-concert audience is concerned. Last night’s programme of Schumann saw Holzmair finish and pause, hands raised prayerfully, holding his listeners’ attention like so many butterflies within his cupped palms. The release that followed was ecstatic, a spontaneous homage to the musical and narrative mastery of this extraordinary singer.

In a world obsessed with the next big thing, I was surprised not to see a larger crowd at last night’s Samling Showcase. Since this masterclass programme for young professional singers started 14 years ago, alumni have included Jonathan Lemalu, Anna Grevelius, Christopher Maltman and Toby Spence – a roster that speaks for itself and for the finely honed ears at work within the organisation. Joined by patron and course director Sir Thomas Allen as well as pianist Malcolm Martineau, four of the current Samling Scholars took to the Wigmore stage last night to present themselves and a full programme of music to a curious public.