Let's face it, Robert "Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Wiene's 1926 film loosely based on Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 1911 "comedy for music" is a mostly inartistic ramble. Historically, though, it proves fascinating.

When you have 21 women to present in song, but only a couple among the 14 poets and none to represent them out of the 15 composers idolising or giving them a voice, you need two strong defenders of their sex at the helm. Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook are no shrinking violets – the soprano no longer a light lyric, the pianist supportive only in the best sense, full of flexible power and forceful middle-to-lower-range sonorities for the voice to coast above.

Matthias Goerne has an exceptional ability to sustain evenness and legato through a vocal line. His breath control and his tone production are things to be marvelled at. He is able to function at impossibly slow tempi, and to make an audience hold its collective breath in admiration. The problem comes when he performs a recital programme which sets out to prove that point. Again and again. All evening.

Hans Abrahamsen String Quartets No. 1-4 Arditti String Quartet (Winter & Winter)

Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40.

"The Show must go on". So say the posters dotted around Glasgow and Edinburgh for Scottish Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Except on Thursday, it didn’t. A fire at a nearby Glasgow nightclub which ravaged several city centre buildings caused the Theatre Royal to become so filled with smoke that the opening night’s performance had to be cancelled.

Rapture, ecstasy, ardour, and a few cheeky fumbles in the bushes – Louise Alder and James Baillieu’s Wigmore recital promised “Chants d’amour” and delivered amply, giving us love in all its bewildering, technicolour variety.

David McVicar may seem too gentle a soul for the lurid drama of Strauss's Salome, but his production, here returning to Covent Garden for a third revival, packs a punch. He gives us plenty of sex and violence – or at least nudity and blood – but finds the real drama in the personal interactions, the increasingly dysfunctional relationships that eventually doom all involved.

A legendary name and the chance to change the face of a cruel condition set the stakes high for what Prince Charles, in his programme preface for this Southbank spectacular, told us was called the Stop MS Jacqueline du Pré Tribute Concert.

They say that Wigmore Hall audiences know their Lieder singers, but last night's far from packed house dispelled that illusion; the hall has been full for much lesser artists than German soprano Anne Schwanewilms. No matter; she gave her usual masterclass, ineffably poised between tone-colour, phrasing and word-pointing.