Complex, ambiguous late romantic works in concert programmes need something more direct to keep them company. Mozart and Richard Strauss make excellent bedfellows (and Strauss was an extraordinary Mozart interpreter): no wonder Vladimir Jurowski’s Saturday night pairing worked well. But Mahler and Poulenc? That wasn’t Simon Rattle’s original intention; but in campaigning for the BBC Singers by inviting them to follow his LSO Mahler 7, he hit upon a rare ideal.

One can only admire the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for its steadfast indifference to the laws of box office gravity. A little known contemporary guitar concerto allied to a relatively unpopular Mahler symphony would be a hard sell even in an Edinburgh Festival context. On a distinctly chilly April evening in Edinburgh, it fell to a small but vocal audience of camp followers to make up for the disappointing rows of empty seats in the admittedly cavernous Usher Hall. 

Nadia & Lili Boulanger: Les Heures Claires - The Complete Songs Lucile Richardot (mezzo), Stéphane Degout (baritone), Raquel Camarinha (soprano), Anne de Fornel (piano), Sarah Nemtanu (violin), Emmanuelle Bertrand (cello) (Harmonia Mundi)

This longest, wackiest and most riskily diverse of Third Symphonies became Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal property during his years as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. His successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, has (in)famously said he’s not interested in Mahler. Two of the orchestra’s most distinguished visitors, Jakub Hrůša and Paavo Järvi, certainly are, so after Hrůša’s blazing Second, hopes were high for Järvi’s Third.

Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.

Sibelius and Mahler so often figure as the irreconcilable chalk and cheese of turn-of-the-century orchestral writing that it can be a salutary experience to hear them together on one bill.

This greatest of symphonies starts with what’s plausibly described as arrhythmia of the heart, so it shouldn’t have been surprising to find my own racing as Vladimir Jurowski drove a line through the peaks, troughs and convalescences of its massive first movement. There were more shocks to the system throughout, but all of them came from an interpretation so staggeringly well prepared that every texture sounded newly conceived.

The elation in the queue was palpable as people stood laughing and chatting in the November cold waiting for the doors of the Jazz Café to open for the latest crowd-funded event organised by Through the Noise. This 13th Noisenight – which brings major classical soloists to nightclubs – was a chance to see Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Harry Baker at a key moment in Through the Noise’s history, the start of its first national tour.  

The Nash Ensemble’s concerts dedicated to “Beethoven and the Romantics” not only trace the flowering of the Romantic spirit in music from the Vienna of the 1800s through a continent and across the century. They also give a place at the top table for works by once-sidelined helpmeets of the movement’s giants: Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler.

What a fascinating work Mahler's Ninth Symphony is! Marvellous and astonishing as well, of course. But these qualities are, so to speak, written into the score (did Mahler ever compose anything not designed to astonish?).