About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture could probably have been spotted from the balcony. A motionless, virtually breathless audience is a rarity even at the Proms, where quality of listening is venerated; still, to hold around 6000 people quite so rapt with attention is an extraordinary skill in orchestra and conductor.

Mahler’s Six^th Symphony is dominated by the doleful clang of cowbells. They are an other-worldly intrusion into an otherwise familiar musical scene – unless you happen to be in Verbier, that is, in which case they are just another everyday part of the aural landscape.

No man is a prophet in his own land – except possibly the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski. In the UK he shot to fame upon winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001 and at home he has become a national hero, his efforts rebooting the country’s classical music scene and inspiring the building of a new full-scale concert hall in Skopje – even though he is still a mere 35. He is also celebrated there as a popular songwriter. That, though, is a strand he left outside the Wigmore Hall, offering a programme that contained as much dark introspection as it did extroversion.

A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it.

Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony.

Brahms: The Symphonies, Orchestral works Gewandhausorchester /Riccardo Chailly (Decca)